“You mean, interrogate her?”
“I mean have a discussion about our findings. Maybe she can tell us something that will help us.”
“I like that idea,” Cecelia said, surprising me, “can I be involved in the discussion?”
“Of course,” I replied, “you’re the Director of Security. I’ll get something set up.”
“Will you have law enforcement there if she confesses or implicates herself?” Cecelia asked, and I shook my head despite the fact she couldn’t see me.
“If she confesses,” I promised Cecelia, “I’ll personally tackle her and keep her from running away until the cops show up. Or you can do it, if you prefer.”
“I can live with that,” Cecelia answered, “I’ll call you at seven.”
Never one for goodbyes, Cecelia hung up on me, leaving me alone with my thoughts.
12
Zoey
I felt like I’d been hit by a semi-truck. When I woke up in the morning after drinking almost an entire bottle of stale red wine that had been sitting in the back of my refrigerator, the first thing I did was throw up. The second thing I did was cry. Rinse and repeat.
The wine must have been farther along to vinegar than I’d realized. It had tasted pretty bad, but I powered through. At the time, I just wanted to stop feeling so terrible about myself. It’s one thing to have someone you like reject you. But it’s another thing entirely to have someone you have an enormous physical and intellectual attraction to reject you right after kissing you and taking off your shirt. We’d been getting along so well that night. I still didn’t know what I’d done wrong to make him leave.
As much as I wanted to spend the entire day sitting around and feeling sorry for myself, there was still work to be done. Angelica’s article was due to my boss in three days and I hadn’t even started working on it. I sat down in front of my laptop and stared at my notes despondently.
After about an hour, my despondent staring was interrupted by a Skype call from my boss. I threw a shirt on and answered, making sure the camera was angled only on my upper half. My boss’s round face and big, platinum blonde bob popped into view.
“Hey Zoey!” her too-cheerful voice chimed through the tinny speakers of my ancient MacBook, “How’s your morning going? It’s a beautiful morning here in sunny L.A.”
My boss, Julieta Drake, was one of those horrible people who was always in a good mood. Even if the sky was falling down in giant chunks of firmament, she’d be smiling. She’d probably smile through witnessing a murder. She’d probably smile through committing a murder.
“I’m doing great,” I lied, plastering a big fake smile on my face and resisting the impulse to remind her that it was midafternoon on my side of the country, “working hard on the Angelica Hunt article right now. Yesterday was my full day visiting with her. She has such an interesting life!”
“Oh, that’s wonderful! I just wanted to check and make sure everything was going ok.”
This was something she never did. She wanted something.
“Yes, so far so good,” I answered.
“Great! Do you think you could do a couple more short Style section pieces and expand the main piece into a cover story? We’re a little light on content this week.”
My smile froze on my face. That meant at least three extra days of research with Angelica and possibly another two working to polish my turd of an article into a beautiful diamond fit to grace the racks of grocery stores nationwide. Our publication was an impulse buy for bored housewives and generally sat right next to the gum, mints, and TV Guide.
“Oh definitely,” I replied confidently, “when would you need it by?”
“Still Thursday for the feature obviously,” Julieta told me cheerfully, expecting me to do twice as much work in half the time, “you can do that, right? I know you’ve worked under tighter deadlines. I’ll need the Style shorts today and Wednesday.”
“Yes of course,” I answered, wishing the ground would just open up and swallow me, “will you send up a photographer?”
“Actually,” Julieta said, with a voice and expression that suggested that she was about to spring the fact that I’d just won the lottery on me, “you take amazing photos yourself. And you’ve got a camera, right? Why don’t you take the pictures yourself? I’ll send you the specifications. We can always Photoshop them if they need retouching.”
“How exciting! I’ve always wanted to be a credited photographer,” I lied, but at least it was resume boost.
“Yes, it’s really an opportunity to prove how versatile and useful you are to JuicyNews. Well, I sure look forward to reading your piece! Talk to you soon”
God, I hated Julieta. She always took as much as she could get. The moment I pushed back in the slightest, my next assignment would be that much more insipid, or worse, she would threaten to cut back on my retainer. She was my boss, sure, but it’s not like I actually drew a salary or got paid hourly by JuicyNews. That was something that happened in the old economy. No, I worked on a tiny monthly retainer that came out to just under twenty-three thousand dollars a year after taxes. With zero benefits or job security.
And I was lucky. So as much as I wanted to wallow in self-pity and eat a pint of Ben and Jerry’s for breakfast while wondering why Nathan hated me, I had to get to work. Angelica was America’s princess, and her subjects wanted news of her. I fired off a series of texts to Tara to arrange the cover photos with Angelica and then started writing.
Angelica Hunt Returns to Angelic Blonde
By Zoey Atkinson, JuicyNews Style Contributor
Angelica Hunt is blonde again!
After six months of rocking her rich reddish brunette hair and about two weeks of experimenting with hot pink, the famous heiress recently went back to her golden roots.
Hunt, 30, debuted her new look after teasing that a change-up was in the works when she posted an Instagram photo of her hot pink hair, captioning the photo “Gonna miss the pink!”
Ahead of little sister Clara Ellis’ engagement party on Saturday, she shared posts to Instagram with funny filters featuring doe’s ears and glasses with her blonde locks flowing.
“I’m back!” the Hunt Petroleum majority owner said in one video.
The Instagram star and beauty mogul made her first major hair color change at the start of New York Fashion Week last fall when she stepped out with a shockingly different deep auburn hue that she later confirmed was the real deal.
“I’ve been talking about going darker for a long time, and I’m so happy I did! I know initially a lot of people thought I was wearing a wig, but it’s my real hair,” Hunt confirmed. “My amazing stylist, Ricardo, dyed my hair and got it to the most perfect, autumnal auburn-brown color.”
“We had wanted to do this for at least a year. Ricardo felt it would be a great transition from the super-long, super-sleek hair that I wore after Albert died,” Hunt continued, alluding to her two whole months of wearing only black in honor of her late husband. “It was time to move on and get back to the dating scene. We wanted a whole new vibe and the auburn is such an iconic look- the modern version of Rita Hayworth.”
Over the months she rocked the look, Hunt never let her blonde roots grow in and didn’t hold back from sharing the struggles of maintaining her perfect red hair.
“Spent the last few days dying my roots (we do it in stages, so it doesn’t damage the hair),” Hunt wrote in a tweet in December. “OMG going on my third appointment in two months. This red is very high maintenance. Love you @Ricardo but getting over this.”
But two weeks ago, before heading on a girl’s trip to Toronto with frenemy Kim Kardashian West, Hunt decided to experiment with hot pink hair. “Ever since I did the Luis Vuitton shoot and wore a pink wig, I thought it would be fun to dye my hair pink,” she revealed in a blog post on her website, AngelicaHunt.com.
And when critics on the internet began accusing the star of just wearing a pink wig, Hunt fired right back.
“You gu
ys, if I see one more person say I’m wearing a wig and think that I’m lying, you are just… I just... I can’t even,” she said in a video posted to Instagram. “Like, why would I lie about wearing a wig?”
Hunt even pulled up at her roots in order to prove that her hair really was, in fact, connected to her scalp and not a wig.
“This is my hair. There is no wig. I dyed my hair guys,” she expressed while tugging at her hair, “It’s like, how is it such a crazy thought? F- outta here with that wig s-.”
13
Nathan
By the time I found the time to call Zoey, it was almost three p.m. One might think that a man who had piloted a space shuttle down from the international space station wouldn’t feel a lot of fear when talking to a woman, but I was scared shitless. She didn’t even answer, of course. I had to leave the world’s most awkward voicemail.
When she returned my call, it was six p.m.
“Nathan?” Her voice came through the phone tentatively, “did you call me?”
“Yes,” I answered, shutting my office door on the off chance any stray employee might hear this conversation and instantly lose all respect for their CEO, “I’m calling to apologize for myself last night. I behaved stupidly and probably hurt your feelings. I’m really sorry.”
“There’s nothing to apologize for,” Zoey said, clearly having regained her professional confidence now that she wasn’t standing topless in her home, “really. I wish you well, Nathan. It was great meeting you.”
She was ready to hang up.
“Wait,” I pleaded, feeling deeply conflicted for what I’d done and what I was about to do, “look, I need your help. The reason I was so weird last night… some really important data got stolen right before the launch and we’re having trouble figuring out what happened. It’s been messing with my head.” That, at least, was one-hundred percent true.
“I’m sorry Nathan, that must be really stressful. You don’t need to explain yourself though. I’m glad I got to see the launch. Good luck at the next one,” she said, giving me every possible out to end the conversation. She was being kinder than I deserved. Unless she was the person who stole my data. In which case she was crazy, brilliant, manipulative, and awful.
“No,” I pushed, “that’s what I’m trying to tell you. There may not be a next launch if we don’t figure out what happened. Do you think you’d be able to come down to Durant Astronautics and take a look at a few things? I think you might be able to help.”
“Me?” She asked, her voice containing both surprise and skepticism, “I don’t think I’d be very helpful. I’ve got no cybersecurity knowledge. It’s a good day when I don’t break my own computer.”
“Please?” I asked her, trying my best to avoid lying to her, “I really want to get your perspective on a few things. I think you might have insights that we lack. Would you be willing to come down here?”
The silence on the other end of the line was impossible to interpret. Part of me truly believed that if she were guilty, she’d refuse, just like she should have refused meeting me the night before. Why put herself at risk? If Zoey were really such a criminal, she’d have to be a very stupid criminal to seduce, go on a date with, and then again seduce the CEO of the company she was robbing.
Or maybe she was a brilliant one.
Cecelia agreed that it was unlikely she’d agree to simply help and had instead suggested that I make up some other reason to get her to visit me, but I wasn’t willing to do that. Despite my attempts to convince her otherwise, Cecelia was adamant that Zoey was using her body to throw me off the trail of her misdeeds. She said I’d revealed my weakness for women in a very public way already, and that it would be logical for someone to try to exploit that same weakness again. While I liked to believe I was smart enough to not make the same stupid mistake twice, I had already let Zoey seduce me, so maybe Cecelia wasn’t so far off the mark. I had no idea what to believe.
“Plus,” I added before I could control myself and lie, “I really want to see you again and make up for my bad behavior last night.”
“When do you want me to come?” She finally asked, and I felt at once victorious and terrible. Her voice sounded sweet and hopeful, and I knew if she was innocent she was definitely going to hate me once she got here. If she was guilty she’d probably hate me, too, but I wouldn’t feel nearly as bad.
“Whenever you can, honestly,” I answered, “I’ll work around your schedule.”
I couldn’t recall ever saying those words before. Working around other people’s schedules wasn’t something that CEO’s regularly did. People usually worked around my schedule. In fact, I never even thought about my schedule, since Paul seamlessly made sure my day worked from start to finish. I just followed along with the agenda he put together each day. He could probably schedule me to drive off a cliff and I’d be plummeting toward the ground before realizing that it was a mistake.
“Ok Nathan,” she said, and I could hear a smile in her voice, “I’ll come by in about two hours once I finish off what I’m working on for work. But please don’t be all weird this time, ok?”
“I’ll do my best,” I lied to her.
14
Zoey
“Thanks Tara,” I told her over the phone as I sat in the darkness of the Durant Astronautics parking lot, “I’ll be there tomorrow. I think getting an action shot of Angelica playing tennis is a brilliant idea.”
“Are you sure?” Tara’s replied in a timid voice, “we could always do a second shoot at the house if the pictures aren’t quite right.”
“Don’t worry,” I tried to reassure her, knowing it was pointless, “Angelica doesn’t have bad angles. The pictures will be great. Everything will be fine.”
“Ok,” she said after a long silence, “if you’re really sure.”
“I am! Thanks again, Tara. See you at eleven,” I finally hung up the phone and shook my head at the screen in frustration. Tara made my blood pressure rise almost as much as Angelica did. She was so beaten down and nervous that I almost wondered if she didn’t get some kind of weird masochistic thrill from it. The thought that someone could crave Angelica’s special brand of condescending cruelty was too dark for that moment, so I tried to banish it by fixing my hair.
I’m not sure why I agreed to meet Nathan tonight. He made me feel so terrible the last time I saw him, but I guess I just wanted closure. Only the silliest, most naïve corner of my heart believed that we’d actually make up or ever go on another date, but I wanted to understand why he was acting so strangely.
I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that part of me still hoped there would be a story behind all this weirdness that could rescue me from my fate at JuicyNews. Maybe I’d get an amazing scoop about the data theft that didn’t make it to any other source. Maybe if I was able to help, Nathan would give me an exclusive.
My feelings and motivations for meeting him this evening may not have been pure, but my interaction with Nathan tonight would be. I’d worn my plainest, most boring underwear and picked out a bland outfit: jeans, black T-shirt, ankle boots. I looked fine, but I wasn’t dressing up for him. I did that last night and look where it got me. I still felt nauseated from drinking all that vinegar wine.
I trudged through the parking lot to the front door in the dark, just praying that I wouldn’t regret agreeing to this.
“Ms. Atkinson,” a small, stern faced woman with boy-short hair, said to me the second I made it in the front door, “I’m Cecelia. I’ll take you up to Mr. Durant. Please follow me.”
She’d been standing right next to the front door. Had she been waiting for me? That was weird. I decided I didn’t want to know.
We walked down a bland hallway, rode up an elevator, and walked down several more hallways in perfect silence. Cecelia kind of gave me the creeps. She kept looking at me out of the corner of her eye when she thought my attention was elsewhere. Most secretaries and personal assistant types were warm and friendly. Not Cecelia.
“So, what do you do here, Cecelia?” I finally ventured as we made it to the top floor of the building and I was led to a windowless conference room. I was beginning to think she wasn’t part of the administrative staff.
“This and that,” she said evasively, smiling the world’s coldest smile, “one second and I’ll be right back with Mr. Durant.”
I wondered at the formality of this meeting but tried to banish any fear. He’d asked me for help. Maybe this was just Cecelia’s style.
But when Nathan and Cecelia walked in a second later, I was not reassured. Nathan was wearing a dark colored suit and tie and looked more formal and serious than I’d seen before. I smiled at him and he stared back at me straight-faced.
“Thanks for meeting with us, Zoey,” Nathan said, sitting down across from me.
“Sure,” I replied, more confused than ever, “what did you want to talk about? Like I said on the phone, I don’t know anything about cyber security.”
“That’s ok,” he said, “you still might be able to help us.”
He didn’t seem anything like he had the night before. There was no openness to him now. Maybe his business personality was just much more serious? I’m not sure I liked this version of Nathan. He was making me very nervous.
I nodded and shifted uncomfortably in my seat, not sure what to say.
“Could you tell us what route you took through the building yesterday on the way to my office?” Nathan asked, sliding a copy of the building floor plan toward me across the table.
I blinked.
“Why?” I asked him, “how will that help you figure out the cyber attack?”
“Could you just indulge me for a second?” Nathan asked, “I’ll tell you everything in a minute.”
I looked at the paper and back at Nathan and Cecelia who were both staring at me expectantly. I swallowed hard. Why did this feel so hostile? An answer had started swimming around on the edge of my mind, but I didn’t want to acknowledge it.
Kiss and Tell (Scions of Sin Book 2) Page 6
