The One I Love to Hate

by Amanda Weaver

  With a chuckle, Lina relented, sliding her arms into her coat and retrieving her purse from her desk drawer. “Okay, okay, I’m going.”

  “Good. Hassan, are you coming? And you, too, Zoe. This is an emergency. Lina needs a distraction.”

  Zoe scrambled out of her chair and grabbed her coat. “I am excellent at distractions. Ohh, let’s go back to the fancy mac and cheese place. You can’t be sad when you’re eating mac and cheese. Natalie? Grab your stuff! Early lunch!”

  Across the room, Natalie squealed in delight.

  “Wait, I’m the only dude,” Hassan protested. “Caleb, you have to come. And somebody find Griff.”

  Caleb stopped typing midsentence and swiveled around in his chair. “You don’t need to ask me twice to take an early lunch.”

  Lina spread her arms out for a hug. “You’re the best, Jess. Thanks.”

  “No problem,” Jess replied, folding her best friend in the world into a firm embrace. “What are best friends for?”

  * * *

  The long, rowdy group lunch did wonders to revive Lina’s spirits. She was actually laughing as they made their way through the newsroom.

  “Thanks for this, guys.” She dropped her purse on her desk and began unbuttoning her coat.

  “Anytime,” Zoe said. “We’ve gotta take care of each other, right?”

  “Here here! Solidarity!” Caleb said, raising his fist in the air. Caleb had had a couple of beers with lunch, so he was a bit more celebratory than the rest of them.

  Hassan grabbed his arm and tugged it down. “Easy, there, Norma Rae. Have a cup of coffee and a mint before you go back to work. You smell like a brewery.”

  Jess looked around at her fellow reporters, hardworking and supportive, every single one. Maybe her career wasn’t yet setting the world on fire, but she was so grateful to be working here.

  She touched Lina’s arm. “Are you going to be okay this afternoon?”

  Lina smiled. “Yeah, I’m good. Thanks again, Jess.”

  Isaiah appeared in the doorway of the newsroom, looking funereal. “Good, you guys are back. Mariel’s called an emergency staff meeting.”

  “I guess that’s not surprising,” Lina sighed.

  Jess followed her to the conference room, where the rest of the Daily Post’s reporters were rapidly assembling. Mariel, looking grim, sat at the head of the table.

  “Good afternoon, everyone,” Mariel said. There was a bit of rustling as people shifted in their seats, and one or two cleared throats, but no one said a thing. “So, Robin’s EPA story was just business. Multiple reporters are often chasing the same story. Dana’s MTA story might be reasonably chalked up to bad luck. But now, with Lina’s story on Assemblyman Stevens breaking on ClickNews’s site instead of ours, we officially have a problem. This was more than a source talking to more than one reporter. I’ve compared the story to Lina’s notes and much of it appears word-for-word.”

  Beside Jess, Lina sucked in a breath. Not bad luck. Not an unfortunate coincidence. Theft. This was so much worse than she’d thought. A pin dropping would have sounded like cannon fire in the brittle silence following Mariel’s words.

  “Now, it’s clear we’ve got a flow of information leaving the Daily Post newsroom and landing in ClickNews’s lap. Let’s start with tech. Griffin, is there any way they’re accessing our internal server?”

  Griffin leaned forward in his chair. “It wouldn’t be impossible to get past my security firewall, but it would be extremely difficult and eventually I’d find it. The payoff doesn’t seem worth the risk. I’ll run a full diagnostic, but I doubt I’m going to find anything.”

  Mariel shook her head wearily. “I don’t think so, either, but thank you for your diligence. I had to ask. All right. Moving on. If they didn’t break in and steal the information, that means someone’s giving it to them. And that someone has to be in this room.”

  Again, deafening silence met her pronouncement. But she was right. The internal server only allowed access with a password, and only the reporters in this room had passwords. It meant one of the Daily Post’s own reporters was giving their stories to the competition.

  Maybe she was guilty of being too idealistic sometimes, but Jess assumed everyone in this room had a minimum of ethical integrity. But someone—someone close to her—had betrayed them all.

  Which one of her colleagues had done this? Jess looked at everyone in the room with new eyes. Griffin? He was the one person in a position to cover up any weirdness on the server. Or Isaiah? He was so talented. Maybe he thought he deserved more compensation than the Daily Post could ever afford to pay him. Robin had more experience than anyone in the room, outside Mariel. Maybe she was tired of playing second to Isaiah? Marc? He was young and ambitious, and he’d been openly envious of Lina’s lead on this story. Dana? She had the baby at home and Jess had heard her complain about her tight finances more than once. Maybe someone was paying her for their stories and she leaked her own story to throw off suspicion—

  Ugh. Stop! She would not give in to this impulse to distrust everyone, not without proof. If anyone deserved her suspicion, it was ClickNews. They were the thieves.

  She had her own complicated opinions of Alex Drake, but never once would she have seriously considered him capable of something like this. It was possible he didn’t know. Maybe there was a staffer there who wanted to make themselves look good and didn’t have any scruples about how they accomplished it. But what if he knew?

  She thought about all the times she ran into him at Ému, bickering and sniping at each other while they got coffee together. Saturday night at the banquet, when, for just a second at the buffet table, he’d seemed genuine. Or the Twitter feud. Did he do that to distract her, to divert attention away from the Daily Post articles that kept showing up on his site? She scolded herself for her paranoia. Of course not. How could he have known she was on the other side of that Twitter account? Besides, she was the one who started it. He didn’t know about this. Suddenly, she very much needed to believe that.

  But he worked there, and not just as some flunkie. His father owned ClickNews. With a sick, sinking feeling of horror, she remembered sitting with him in the cafe and looking up to find Lauren standing over them. And Mariel seeing them together at the banquet. Shit. Suddenly a lot of innocuous encounters looked a lot more suspicious in the light of these latest revelations.

  Her association with Alex was entirely blameless, but that didn’t stop her from feeling this creeping prickle of guilt across her skin. Well, there was nothing she could do about the past, but she had full control of the future. From here on out, if she so much as caught a glimpse of Alex, she’d turn around and run in the opposite direction. Maybe he was entirely innocent, but that was a chance she couldn’t take.

  Chapter Sixteen

  If there was one thing worse than being guilted into doing a favor for a family friend, it was having that favor turn into an ambush, and right now, Alex Drake was definitely feeling ambushed.

  When his father asked him to meet Georgia Gates, the daughter of Michael Gates, owner of a network they were hoping to acquire, it had seemed innocent enough. The girl had just finished college and moved to the city to start an internship. She didn’t know anybody. Would he please meet her, give her a few tips on navigating the city, and make her feel welcomed? Remembering how isolated he’d felt in Chicago doing his own internship, Alex had agreed.

  But this was all starting to feel suspiciously like a date, and he was the only person who hadn’t known that.

  Georgia leaned forward on her elbows, her smile gleaming in the light from the votive candle. Her teeth were alarmingly white, and all exactly the same small size, like a row of Tic Tacs. “So, Alex, what made you suggest this place? Is it, like, the restaurant everybody’s talking about right now? Is it super hard to get into?”

  Her eyes darted eagerly around the
narrow Brooklyn eatery, as if hoping to spot a celebrity any second.

  “It’s close to your apartment, it fit your dietary requirements, and Yelp said the food was good,” he replied flatly, before looking down at his plate of organic farro with pan-wilted locally sourced winter greens and a beet root reduction. That second part was definitely up for debate.

  “Oh.” Georgia deflated slightly, which made him feel bad. She wasn’t awful. With her long, shiny blond hair and big blue eyes, she was attractive enough, in that highly groomed way, like a glossy doll. But her pointed questions about his father, his role in the company, and his life in New York set him on edge. He’d been subjected to this kind of interest from women way too many times in his life. She wasn’t here to get to know him—Alex. She was after the Son of Daniel Drake, and all that entailed.

  Georgia rallied fast shaking her hair back over her shoulders, making sure as she did so that her cleavage was visible. The skimpy little halter top she was wearing left her arms and back entirely exposed. It was December. She had to be freezing.

  “So, are you doing anything fun for Christmas?”

  “Just the—” But Georgia didn’t let him finish before charging on.

  “I’m going to Tulum in Mexico with my sorority sisters. It’s totally been discovered, so it’s a little over, if you know what I mean, but Stacia’s parents have a condo there, so—”

  Alex tuned out everything that came afterward. This was the other problem with Georgia. Even if she had been interested in learning about him, she was too busy trying to convince him of her own awesomeness to find anything out.

  He snagged the drinks menu, because there was no way he was getting through this night without alcohol. It was printed on artfully stained parchment, in old-fashioned typeset, the paper then pinned to a small plank of wood with fig leaf push pins. This place was Ému Coffee and Tea all over again, but with a liquor license. His eyes skated down the list of cocktails, all with fanciful names and even more fanciful ingredients. Muddled thyme, rosemary sprigs, fennel greens, lemon zest...he wanted a glass of scotch, not a damned garden salad.

  Georgia prattled on about which Mexican spas were the best ones, and how hard it was to find a decent place to get her highlights done in the city, as Alex morosely worked his way through a thoroughly unsatisfying plate of flavorless grains and blanched greens and willed the night to be over.

  He was filled with annoyance, but not really at Georgia. None of this was her fault. Right now, his irritation lay squarely with his father. Dan had known exactly what he was doing when he asked Alex for this “favor,” and it wasn’t the first time. Being Dan Drake’s son meant being part of his sales pitch, sent in to smile, charm, and glad-hand where Dan’s own powers of persuasion wouldn’t work. If Dan couldn’t sweet-talk the father, then Alex could sweet-talk the daughter. Except Alex wasn’t interested in sweet-talking anything other than a glass of good scotch and some red meat. Seemed he wasn’t going to get anything he wanted tonight.

  When Georgia paused to take a breath, Alex pointed at her plate. “Are you going to finish that?”

  She glanced at her barely touched salad. “I’m not really hungry.” Because, of course, she had to demonstrate to him that she subsisted on nothing more than air and CrossFit. Why had she insisted on eating at a vegan restaurant if she had no intention of eating? He’d kill for a cheeseburger right now.

  “Great. I mean, fine. I’ll get the check.”

  Georgia’s eyes widened in alarm. Guess she’d planned on this “date” lasting longer than the time it took him to down his entree. But really, this was all pointless. She seemed to know her way around the city just fine, and she’d casually mentioned going out with her fellow interns after work several times, so she wasn’t home pining away with loneliness. He’d been dragged into this by his father for one reason, and one reason only, and tonight, he refused to play ball.

  As he paid the check, Georgia fiddled with the zipper on her coat. “I’d invite you back to my apartment to hang out, but I have roommates, which is so stupid—”

  “It’s okay.” Gently, he herded her through the restaurant and out onto the sidewalk.

  “But we could go to your place.” She paused outside to look meaningfully at him. “If you wanted.”

  Damn. He’d really, really been hoping he could get out of here without having to flat-out reject her. He forced a polite smile as he buttoned his coat against the cold. “My place is really far away.”

  “I don’t mind!”

  “And I have an early morning tomorrow.”

  Georgia fixed him with her most seductive stare. “I’ll make sure you get enough sleep.”

  Okay, he was done here. “I don’t think so. Listen, it was nice to meet you, Georgia—”

  “But—”

  “Good luck with your internship.” He extended his hand to shake hers, and after a pause, she reluctantly took it.

  “Thanks for meeting me tonight. It was really nice of you.”

  She looked so deflated that he found himself regretting getting short with her. She wasn’t a bad person, she was just trying way too hard. “No problem.”

  Then he leaned in and kissed her good-night on the cheek, which was a mistake, because she immediately brightened, as if he’d just thrown her a bone. “So I’ll text you sometime!”

  “Um...” Get out of here, Drake. Just get out. “Sure. I’ll see you around.”

  “See you!” she chirped.

  He turned around and walked away before she could rope him in again. What a waste of an evening. He didn’t even get a decent dinner out of it, because he was still starving. He wasn’t familiar with this pocket of Brooklyn, but there had to be a place that served real food. At the very least, a proper drink.

  The block he’d been on had been peppered with trendy bars and restaurants, interspersed with newly built modern apartment buildings, but as he continued, the flavor of the neighborhood changed around him. There were a smattering of old-school Italian businesses, all closed for the night, looking like they’d been in business since the middle of the previous century. There was a baker, a cheese shop, a butcher—a real honest-to-God butcher shop, with ham hocks and salamis hanging from the ceiling and everything.

  Up ahead, across the street, a little bar inhabited the corner. The plate glass window in front cast a square of inviting golden light onto the sidewalk. A neon Michelob sign was the only decor. Not a chance of fennel greens in your drink in a place like that. He crossed the street and headed for the door.

  Chapter Seventeen

  He stepped inside and stopped in his tracks as his insides lurched.

  Jessica Romano was sitting at the bar.

  She had her laptop open in front of her as one hand idly turned a glass of beer in circles on the bar next to her. What the hell was Jess doing—

  As he stood frozen in utter confusion, she glanced back over her shoulder to see who’d come in. Her eyes went wide and her mouth dropped open as she registered his presence.

  “Alex?”

  “I was just... I came in to get... I didn’t realize...” He pointed helplessly at the mirror behind the bar, where Romano’s was painted in flaking gold paint. This was her family’s bar. He’d known they owned a bar in Carroll Gardens, but he hadn’t made the connection—or realized that’s where he was—until this very moment.

  Jess shifted uneasily on her stool. Right. This was her bar, her home turf, her safe space. It was the last place she’d want him invading.

  “I should go—” he began, just as she said, “You might as well come in.”

  They both stopped speaking and stared at each other.

  “You sure it’s okay?”

  She shrugged dismissively. “You want a drink. We serve drinks.”

  After another moment of hesitation, he cautiously crossed the room, unbuttoning his coat. He
hung it on the old-fashioned coatrack tucked into the corner, debating where to sit. Jess was sitting at the corner of the bar, her back to the front window. There were two open stools next to her. Or he could sit on the long side, facing the mirror on the wall, where he’d be too far away for conversation. It might be weird to sit next to her, but it would be even weirder to sit in her bar pretending she wasn’t there. He sat next to her.

  Eyeing him warily, Jess closed her laptop and pushed it to the side.

  “What brings you to my neck of the woods?”

  “I was having dinner with...” He did not want to discuss that awful dinner with Georgia. “With a friend at this place down the street. Trestle?”

  “Right,” she muttered. “One of the new places.”

  “Friend of yours, Jess?”

  The bartender had materialized in front of them, and now stood with her hands braced on the bar. She was tall and angular, with her long, dark brown hair caught up in a messy ponytail.

  Jess waved a hand between him and the bartender. “Alex, Gemma. Gemma, Alex. Alex is my stalker.”

  Alex shot her a scowl before instinctively swinging into charming mode, and extending a hand across the bar. “Hi, Gemma. Nice to meet you.”

  Cautiously, she took his hand and shook it in a firm grip, her dark brown eyes roving over him. She wasn’t at all swayed by the charm offensive or the smile. Jess never had been, either. A light bulb went off in his head. The familiarity of her exchange with Jessica, the similarity in their coloring, the same prickly defensiveness...this must be one of her sisters, which she confirmed in the next instant.

  “Same. I’m Jess’s sister. So you’re a friend of Jess’s?”

  “We’re not friends.”

  They’d said it in unison.

  Gemma’s eyes shifted between him and her sister. “Okay, not-my-sister’s-friend, what are you drinking?”