By a Thread: A Grumpy Boss Romantic Comedy

by Score, Lucy

  “It seems she is no longer interested in being featured on the May cover,” my mother said with a complete lack of the emotions I knew swirled beneath her implacable surface.

  “We’ve already started the first print run,” I said, gripping my glass.

  “After she threatened a lawsuit, the print run has been paused until we can explore our options,” Mom said.

  “This is bullshit. This is just another stupid publicity ploy.” I’d never told my mother about why I’d ended things with Elena. And she’d never asked. We didn’t tend to share things unless there was no other way around it. Like my father’s firing and their divorce.

  “She signed the releases. Legally, you can proceed,” Simone said.

  “I’m not inclined to put someone on my cover who doesn’t recognize what an honor it is to be there. Doing so would give her the prestige of the cover and the platform to complain about how big, bad Dalessandra Russo wouldn’t let her change her mind.”

  My mother twirled the emerald on her middle finger.

  “Did she give any indication that she was going to back out at the last second?” I asked. Something was niggling at me in the back of my head.

  “Not at all. In fact, she sent me a card with an excessive amount of exclamation points two days ago thanking me for the opportunity.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose. That niggling was getting harder and harder to ignore.

  I swore and sipped the tequila. Its smooth burn was a welcome relief from the tightness in my throat.

  “I’ll talk to her,” I said.

  My mother’s eyebrows winged up. “Wasn’t your parting a little… dramatic?”

  “Not for me,” I said, coolly.

  The two women shared a look.

  “I’ll talk to her,” I repeated. “In the meantime, start thinking about a Plan B. Who deserves that cover?” If I was right, no amount of talking was going to put Elena back on that cover.

  * * *

  She still lived in the same building. A swanky location with units that faced Central Park. The Label cover could have earned her a penthouse a few blocks north, and Elena knew it. The woman was calculating and focused. She wouldn’t have just walked away from the cover story she’d fucked her way into my bed two years ago to get.

  I lucked out and caught the door as a woman with two huge dogs with rhinestone leashes exited. I paused to give them dignified pats before taking the elevator to the fourth floor. It was a case of déjà vu, walking down the sunny, yellow hallway to 4C. The last time I’d been here, she’d answered the door in another man’s shirt.

  But it had barely mattered then, and it certainly didn’t matter now.

  I knocked.

  This time, she opened the door in a cloud of fragrance and her own clothes. Elena Ostrovsky was a beautiful woman, and she knew it. People had been telling her so since she was fourteen years old. She tended to get nervous if they went too long without reminding her.

  For an afternoon at home, her hair was done in thick, lustrous curls and swept to the side in a low tail. Her eyes were painted in coppers and bronzes. I’d never seen her without makeup. We’d never spent a full night together, and it was only now that I found that strange.

  “Dominic.” I didn’t like the way my name sounded from her lips. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

  “Are you?” I asked.

  “Come in,” she said, stepping away from the door and opening it wider. She was wearing red leather pants and an oversized, sheer black blouse, and gold studded stilettos. Just a quiet day around the house.

  “Am I interrupting?” It was half dig and half legitimate concern.

  “No, no! Of course not,” she insisted, either ignoring the insult or not remembering that it had been a very valid question last time.

  I didn’t know. Because I didn’t know her.

  I stepped inside. The furniture was different, I noted. Upgraded from my last visit. White couch. White chairs. One thing that was the same was the Wall of Elena. Framed headshots, magazine covers, shots from the runway and red carpets. Every picture had been cropped and edited so it was just her.

  When we were dating, I’d found it “interesting” when she’d added a photo of the two of us during New York Fashion Week and then cropped everything except my arm out of it. I thought of the box of Ally’s framed photos she’d brought home from her father’s things in the storage unit. Candids in mismatched frames of all the people she loved the most in life. Not a glamor shot to be found.

  “You can guess why I’m here,” I said, shoving my hands in my pockets.

  Elena gave me her prettiest pout. “You aren’t here because you miss me?”

  “No. The cover, Elena.”

  She pranced over to the low sofa and sat, crossing one knee over the other, stretching her arms over the back. Posing. “I don’t want to do it anymore.” But the lie didn’t quite reach her eyes.

  “Yes. You do. You’ve always wanted that cover. It’s why you started dating me.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Always with the same song and dance.” She reached for the pack of cigarettes she had on the table.

  “I guess that’s why you changed partners in the middle of the dance.”

  “Dominic, that was ages ago,” she said, lighting a skinny cigarette. “Let’s forget all that.” She patted the couch next to her.

  I ignored the invitation.

  I didn’t like being here. I didn’t like being around her. The stark contrasts between her and Ally, my past and my present, were dizzying.

  “The cover,” I repeated. “What’s your game?”

  She looked away again and brushed a hand over a furry pillow, fingers plucking at the ivory tufts. “I changed my mind,” she said, less emphatically.

  “You changed your mind, or someone changed your mind?”

  “What does it matter?”

  “We can still run your cover, your story. You signed the releases,” I warned her. “This isn’t going to look good for you, reneging on a deal with Dalessandra Russo.”

  She flinched then. Elena already had a reputation for being difficult. She showed up late, left early, and spent most shoots complaining. Her manager and her looks were the only things keeping her gainfully employed.

  “She won’t do anything about it,” she said, studying her nails. “She’ll let me out of it and play nice.”

  “That doesn’t sound like you, Elena. I remember you confessing that my mother was your idol when you were a teenage model doing car shows and catalog shoots. You know who that sounds like to me?”

  She gave a shrug as if she couldn’t care less, but those unnatural green eyes were watering.

  “My father,” I said.

  Her eyes darted to me, wide with surprise. “You know?”

  “I guessed. What did he promise you?”

  She slumped against the cushion. “The cover of Indulgence. I can’t do both.”

  “Why would you choose Indulgence over Label? They’re not even in the same league.”

  “It’s a good opportunity,” she parroted.

  “Says my father who landed a job with them, and now he’s poaching content from Label. I repeat, why are you doing this?”

  She worried her lower lip between her teeth hard enough that I was concerned the filler would leak out. “He has something of mine,” she said.

  “Christ.” I shoved my hand through my hair. “What?”

  “A tape,” she answered in a tiny voice.

  “What kind of tape?”

  “What kind of tape do you think? A sex tape.”

  I sighed. “Elena, come on. You know better than that.” I knew her manager personally, a no-nonsense woman who schooled her charges in all the ways the world could chew them up and spit them out if they weren’t very smart and very cynical.

  “I didn’t know. I didn’t know he made one.”

  “That’s illegal.”

  “I can’t prove it, and he knows it,” she said, fat tea
rs finally fighting their way past the jungle of lashes.

  “How did my father get the tape? Did someone sell it to him?” Maybe I could finally find a way to hang Paul Russo. Blackmailing family was one thing, but this was an entirely new low.

  She shook her head.

  “You don’t know?”

  She took a shuddery breath. “He made it.”

  66

  Dominic

  My mother was still in the office when I got back. She’d gathered the troops in her office. Linus, Irvin, and Shayla were joined by a handful of editors. There were cartons of Thai food and bottles of wine on every flat surface. People paced and slumped and threw out ideas while my mother twirled her reading glasses by the arm and shot them down one by one. Irvin was kicked back in a chair, his phone glued to his hand.

  “Mom? A minute.” I hooked my thumb over my shoulder, not wanting to air our dirty Russo laundry in front of everyone else.

  She picked up her tea and followed me into the hall.

  “Come on, people, focus,” Linus said, clapping his hands as we stepped out. “We have seventy-two hours to come up with a plan, shoot it, and write the goddamn story.”

  “Did you talk to Elena?” Mom asked.

  I nodded. “We have bigger problems than an egotistical model.”

  “What?”

  “More like who. Elena has committed to do the Indulgence May cover.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Their circulation is barely sixty percent of ours.”

  “She’s being blackmailed into it.”

  She closed her eyes and blew out a breath. “Paul.”

  “It seems he’s blackmailing her with a sex tape.”

  My mother’s eyes opened. “That’s rather low even for him.”

  “It gets worse. He has the tape because he made it.”

  “Made it as in…”

  “He had a year-long affair with Elena, which happened to overlap both your marriage to him and my relationship with her.”

  It had been my father’s shirt she’d been wearing when I showed up at her apartment two years ago.

  My mother looked down at the teacup in her hand for a long beat, then hurled it against the wall. Conversation in the room cut off. It looked as if we Russos were starting to have trouble controlling our tempers.

  “Is everyone okay?” Linus asked slowly, approaching with caution.

  Mom gave him the circle the wagons smile. “Everything is fine. Just dropped my tea. It’s time for something harder anyway.”

  “Mom.”

  She held up an index finger, effectively shushing me. Russos didn’t discuss things. We certainly didn’t admit to being betrayed. And we definitely didn’t show weakness.

  “Come inside, Dominic. We’ll figure out what direction we should go in.”

  On a sigh, I followed her inside and pulled out my phone.

  Me: It’s going to be a late night. I’m with my mother in an emergency strategy session over the May cover story.

  Ally: Elena? I am officially staying up for an update. I’ll put your dinner in the fridge and take Brownie for his walk. Let me know if you need anything.

  Maybe I should tell her. Secrets only seemed to fester.

  I grabbed a carton of drunken noodles and settled in with the rest of the team.

  An hour later, we were still nowhere near a solution.

  Linus sat up from where he reclined on the couch. “I’ve got it! Why don’t we put Ally on the cover? It seems her star is rising,” he joked.

  My mother relaxed with a laugh. “It was a striking photo,” she agreed.

  “What photo?” I demanded.

  “Christian James’s Instagram,” Linus said, fingers flying over his phone screen. “I can’t believe you didn’t see it yet.” He slid the phone to me.

  I felt my heart clumsily miss a beat as a chill settled in my chest. “What is this?” I asked, glaring at the photo.

  “You didn’t know about it?” my mother asked.

  “I had no idea,” I said, feeling the knife twist in me. Betrayal was the theme of the day. How many times could a man have his legs swept out from under him before he didn’t get back up?

  “I need to take care of something,” I said, abruptly rising.

  * * *

  “You look comfortable,” I said, my tone too bland for her to pick up on the anger I was choking on.

  Ally looked up from her cocoon on my couch and grinned. “Your fault for having such comfy furniture,” she teased. “Want to bring your dinner in here and snuggle while you fill me in on all the gossip?”

  This charade of affection turned my stomach.

  I tossed my phone in her lap.

  She picked it up, grinned. And that knife in my guts twisted again.

  “Wow. I don’t look half bad.”

  “Care to explain?” I asked, my tone was deceptively mild. I wanted her to lie to me so I could call her on it. Because there were only two reasons why she’d be in Christian James’s photo on a bed, in an unzipped dress staring at the camera as if it were a lover. As if it were me.

  “Well, I can’t explain all of it yet,” she said. “Because it’s a surprise. But this is what I was telling you about Wednesday at lunch. Faith and I went to his studio for that shoot.”

  “Are you fucking him or using me?” I asked, my throat raw.

  Ally blinked, and I watched the color slowly drain from her face.

  Good. I wanted her to hurt like I hurt.

  She took a breath and let it out. “You’re stressed and exhausted. I’m going to give you one free pass. But, Dom, you don’t get to make accusations like that,” she said quietly.

  “Oh, I don’t get to ask why you were in his bed, half-dressed? So which is it? Fucking him or fucking me over.”

  She unwound herself from the blanket and came to her feet. “Nothing happened,” she said icily. “Where is this even coming from?”

  “Insta-fucking-gram. That’s where. Seems you’re becoming quite popular.”

  “There is nothing going on between me and Christian. We’re friends. He did me a favor, and I did one for him.”

  “Was the favor posing half-naked on a bed or fucking him?”

  Ally wasn’t the kind of girl to bitch-slap someone. And thanks to my red tunnel vision, I didn’t even see her fist fly until it connected with my face.

  The new pain was a welcome relief from the wound inside me.

  “How dare you,” she hissed.

  I grabbed her wrist and hauled her against me.

  Her breath caught as our bodies collided, and I hated myself for going stone fucking hard against her. My dick had zero self-respect. I wasn’t so sure about the rest of me.

  “Why were you even alone with him in a room with a bed?” The idea of her and that charming, slimy son of a bitch on a bed together ripped me apart from the inside. Even if he was just taking pictures of her.

  “Do you realize how ridiculous this is? I wasn’t alone with him. And if you weren’t so busy trying to hang me for imagined crimes, you’d notice that was the same set for the video shoot the online content team set up last week. I was on set.”

  She was trying to tug her arm out of my grip, but her free hand was curled into my shirt, holding me against her. I felt a trickle of blood at the corner of my mouth, and my tongue darted out to taste it. Ally’s eyes followed the movement. Her lower lip trembled, and I wanted to sink my teeth into it. I wanted to kiss her until she hurt the way I hurt.

  Forget my parents—we were the fucked-up ones using a fight as foreplay.

  I let her go and took a deliberate step away.

  “Do you honestly believe I would cheat on you? That you mean so little to me that I’d be willing to throw it all away?” she asked.

  Thinking wasn’t really happening for me right now. I was too busy feeling a thousand different knife edges of emotions. But did I really believe Ally would have let someone else touch her when we were so… connected?

  “
No,” I rasped. Her shoulders relaxed for a moment. “But it certainly raised your profile.” I spat out the accusation, astounded that once again, I’d fallen for it. Only this time, it hurt. It really fucking hurt.

  “My profile? Have you lost your mind? I don’t have a profile! I’m Dominic Russo’s girlfriend, and I wore a nice dress in front of a couple of cameras once.”

  “You’ll have plenty of opportunities now, thanks to this little pseudo-celebrity stunt.”

  “I hope you were nicer to your model ex about her chosen profession,” Ally shot back.

  “Don’t ever mention her to me again,” I snapped. She’d pushed exactly the right button to remind me of what I’d wanted to forget.

  I felt sick and empty and like it wasn’t worth the effort to stand anymore. I leaned back against the wall and slid down it.

  I stared at the ceiling, picturing the room above us. My bed. Our bed.

  It’s where we started. Where we were at our best. The center of our fucking relationship. But that didn’t prepare me for this. I was shaking. Physically shaking.

  “Dom?” Her voice was more gentle than I deserved, and she was kneeling in front of me. She should have been kicking me, throwing things, not looking me in the eye.

  “He fucked her. While I was dating her.”

  “Who?”

  “My father,” I spat out. “We were never serious. Elena and me. She was using me for the attention. She’d tip off paparazzi when we were out. I found out, and when I went to confront her, she answered the door in another man’s shirt. He was still there, and I didn’t care enough to find out who.”

  “It was your dad?” Ally asked slowly.

  “He always loved to take things from me. Always a competition.”

  She laid a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “Your father is a sick bastard.”

  “You don’t know the half. He made a tape. A sex tape. That’s why she backed out of the issue. He threatened to release it. Her reputation would have taken a hit.” Meanwhile his legend would only grow. The sixty-eight-year-old man fucking models forty years his junior.