Revenge: The Complete Series (Erotic Rock Star Suspense Romance)

by Mimi Strong

  She nods. “Sounds about right.”

  “Should I come back up to this floor after I’m done shopping? To get approval or something?”

  “Stephanie won’t be back today. She’s on assignment now. Take the rest of the day off. Get a massage.”

  I let out a laugh. Pay to get a massage? I’m the girl who’s carrying a peanut butter sandwich in her bag because I can’t afford a cafeteria lunch.

  The gray-haired lady pushes the call button for the elevator.

  “Any more instructions?” I ask her.

  “When you get there, tell them you’re one of Stephanie’s girls. They know the budget, and they know what Stephanie likes.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Have fun!” she says. Then she turns around and hustles off in the opposite direction.

  I stare in disbelief at the card in my hand.

  And then I get on the elevator.

  I guess I’m buying some new clothes.

  How did I get myself into this?

  Technically, I didn’t.

  Technically, it was my best friend who sent in my resume.

  Even though it’s always been my dream to work in the music industry, I didn’t have the guts to go for it. That’s how chicken I am.

  I’d been applying for jobs that were at least in the same state. But my best friend gave me his old laptop, and he set up all my passwords. I didn’t know what he’d been doing until I got called for an interview.

  Now I’m on my way to some boutique with a corporate credit card, and I can’t even imagine what’s going to happen tomorrow.

  The worst part is, I can’t even talk to my best friend about any of this.

  He would be worried for me, and tell me to come home immediately.

  I can’t give up yet.

  I can’t give up on my dreams, or I’ll always wonder.

  The elevator doors open. I walk out of the building, into the bright sunshine, and start looking for the boutique.

  Chapter 13

  I wake up early Wednesday morning. There’s a flutter in my chest. I never understood about people having butterflies before today.

  My first big meeting is at nine. I’m definitely nervous.

  My hair won’t cooperate. I swear, even my hair is nervous. The right side has a stubborn curl, with my dark brown hair twirling up when I want it to go straight.

  My new clothes are beautiful. Almost too beautiful.

  I spent at least three hours at the clothing boutique yesterday. I’ve never spent that much money in one day, and I have to admit it was so much fun.

  The ladies working at the boutique made it easy for me. As soon as I said I was one of “Stephanie’s girls,” they dove into action.

  Now I have a new wardrobe, and most of it’s pink.

  I’m still wearing the plain white cotton underwear I moved here with, but everything else is new and luxurious.

  My black skirt is tight, from my knees to my waist. On top, I’m wearing a silk blouse. The blouse is hot pink, and makes my cheeks look flushed and healthy. Even without makeup, I look radiant.

  My roommate is asleep down the hall. I can hear snoring through her door. It’s not just her snoring this morning, but a guy, too. I was in my room when she brought him home last night. They were talking loud and kissing in the hallway. I peeked out for a minute and saw them. I was disgusted to discover it wasn’t Caleb, the guy who was here Sunday morning.

  I’m going to have to keep my bedroom door locked every night. I wish Amanda wasn’t so skanky. I want to like her as a friend, but bringing home all these guys is so wrong.

  Standing in the bathroom, I reach up to put mascara on my eyelashes. The look in my eyes surprises me. I look really nervous. My eyes are wide open with the whites showing all around my brown irises. I look like I’ve had about ten cups of coffee.

  Eye Candy.

  That job title.

  I’m nervous about being Eye Candy today.

  Sure, my official title is Talent Coordinator, but Morris Music didn’t pay for a whole new wardrobe just so I could make phone calls.

  I did some research last night on the internet, looking for clues. I didn’t find anything concrete, but I found some blogs that gave me ideas.

  When big companies send staff to conventions, they hire “Booth Babes” or “Booth Bimbos.” These are attractive young women who are hired based on their looks. Their job is to make customers feel comfortable. Or maybe to flirt with them and make them feel nervous, but the right kind of nervous.

  As Talent Coordinator/Eye Candy, my job in this morning’s meeting is to flirt with a musician. A musician named Brandon.

  “Brandon,” I say to the bathroom mirror.

  Just saying his name makes me feel sick. I glance over at the toilet in the room. Am I going to actually be sick? I wait for a minute. The feeling passes.

  I get back to my makeup. The ladies at the boutique yesterday gave me some tips about eye shadow. I do my best to give myself a smoky eye.

  At least my eye that got hit on the weekend is back to normal. It’s funny that I’m putting on eye shadow the color of a bruise.

  For the finishing touch, I put on the necklace Stephanie gave me.

  As I run my fingers over the beautiful key pendant, I wonder what kind of bonuses I could earn. How far do they want me to go?

  Maggie Clark said something about seduction. I’m pretty sure that means sex.

  I hold the key tight in my fist. No, I won’t have sex for money, no matter how much is offered.

  Even though money would make a huge difference for me and for Nan, there are some things I can’t allow myself to do.

  I can’t sell my soul.

  The timer on my phone beeps to remind me I need to leave the house.

  I walk down the hallway, past the sound of double snores in Amanda’s room.

  My other roommate, Riley, still hasn’t returned from her trip. Her bedroom door has been locked the whole time. She’s lucky she has her own bathroom and doesn’t have to share with Amanda, who leaves her dirty underwear on the floor.

  I run out the front door, lock up, and rush to the bus stop.

  Today, my luck runs out.

  The bus that was on time the previous two days doesn’t show up for ten minutes. When it does finally come, it’s full to capacity and the driver won’t let anyone else on.

  I’m left standing at the curb.

  After another ten minutes, I pull out my phone and look for the number of a taxi.

  I curse myself for not having a taxi number programmed into my phone. To be fair, though, I hadn’t been worried about showing up late to work in the basement archives.

  Another bus pulls up before I can call a taxi. I step on and cross my fingers that the driver can still get me to work on time.

  Nope.

  He stops at every bus stop, and he chats with people getting on and off.

  I want to strangle him, but he’s so nice.

  Finally, I get to my stop a block from work.

  I run as fast as I can in my new high heels. They’re hot pink, and they make my legs look amazing, but they’re not for running.

  Breathless, I get through security and into the elevator.

  It’s a slow ride up to the ninth floor to report to Stephanie. It’s ten minutes past nine. The meeting’s probably already started.

  The short woman with gray hair comes out of an office. She blinks up at me through her thick glasses.

  “You’re late,” she says.

  I open my mouth to apologize, but stop. Damn it! Am I supposed to apologize, or what? I’m so confused by all the rules here.

  The woman shoos me back into the elevator. “Never mind. Go up to ten, and hang a left. Go into the board room. Undo that top button on your blouse and nobody will mind that you’re late.”

  I undo the top button of my blouse, my hand shaking.

  The elevator takes me up.

  Ignoring the brown-haired receptionist
to the right, I go left and enter the glass-walled board room.

  There are about a dozen people sitting around a big, glass table. The room is very bright. The people are a mix of men and women, young and older.

  Where am I supposed to sit?

  I scan the faces of the women. Maggie Clark is here, looking at the open laptop in front of her. Her platinum blonde hair is round and puffy like a lion’s mane. She doesn’t even look up at me, but everyone else turns to stare.

  My heart sinks. Stephanie isn’t here. I’m on my own.

  “Jessica Lynn Rivera,” says a man. He pushes his chair back and stands.

  I blink at him, my heart pounding and trying to leap out of my chest.

  I thought I was here to flirt with some guy named Brandon.

  So, why am I looking into the dangerously dark brown eyes of Dylan Wolf?

  Chapter 14

  “Nice to see you again, Jessica,” Dylan says.

  “I like your earring.” He’s wearing a silver stud in one ear. I guess that’s my new thing—complimenting jewelry.

  “How’s the internship going?”

  “Great!” I give him the thumbs up sign.

  Everybody around the table looks at me funny. Yes, I’ve made quite the entrance. I wish the ground would open up and swallow me.

  Dylan clears his throat and sits back down in his chair.

  I tear my eyes away from him and look again for a seat.

  The vice president of Morris Music, Maggie Clark, flicks her attention up at me. Her eye twitches. She slides her chair to the side and points to a lone chair sitting in the corner. She snaps her fingers.

  I jolt into action. I grab the corner chair and squeeze myself in next to her. She’s wearing another leopard print suit, and her icy blue stare is freaking me out.

  It’s not just Maggie who’s staring. The other women around the glass board room table are looking at me like tigers might look at an injured gazelle. Crossing my arms, I try not to imagine these women ripping me to shreds.

  I glance down at my chest. Great. The tops of my breasts are visible. My pink blouse is probably setting off their Slut Detectors.

  Looking up again, I try to apologize with my eyes. Honestly, I wanted to get a job on the marketing floor. Or even do administration work. I didn’t want to be promoted to Meeting Slut, I swear!

  The guy on the other side of Maggie Clark starts talking.

  He says to Dylan, “We’ve got a thirty-nine point marketing strategy. The domestic market is key, but we won’t overlook international. Morris has serious contacts overseas. Preliminary testing shows a strong interest in you from Asia. We’d do different packaging, of course.”

  The guy keeps talking, spewing out numbers. I try to focus on what he’s saying, but I’m being distracted.

  Dylan Wolf is a powerful presence at the head of the long table. The way he keeps staring at me is more than distracting. With that gleam in his eyes, he’s practically kidnapping me.

  Oh, and what a pleasant escape that would be. If only Dylan would push back from the table, stand up, and actually kidnap me. Then I wouldn’t have to sit here in this low-cut pink blouse. I don’t even like pink.

  Looking around the table, I see that several people are typing on laptops. The ones who aren’t typing are taking notes on paper. I clasp my hands together on my lap.

  Why didn’t I think to bring something? They’d all laugh if they saw my laptop, held together with duct tape, but I could have brought a pen and paper.

  The meeting goes on for twenty minutes. There’s plenty of talk about numbers and research, but nobody says anything about music. Dylan has such an amazing voice, but they don’t talk about that. Why aren’t they talking about his incredible voice? Even when he talks, that grit is always there.

  He keeps looking over at me and giving me a playful look. Every time he does it, my mind goes blank. I almost put my hand up and comment on something, but he gives me a wink. My whole body tenses up. It’s just a wink. But that wink shoots through me from my head to my toes.

  The other people all type furiously on their laptops.

  I have nothing to do, so I just sit and fulfill my role as Eye Candy.

  The next time Dylan looks over at me, I lean forward on the glass table and shoot him a smile.

  His eyes go straight down from my face to my chest. I didn’t mean to, but leaning forward puts my cleavage on display. My bra is just a basic white cotton bra, but this shirt is tight and pushes everything up.

  Someone else is talking, but over top of that I hear Dylan say “Whoa.” He keeps looking at my chest and pretends to wipe the drool off his chin.

  Inside my head, I do a happy dance. I made him pretend to drool. My first day as Eye Candy is going very well.

  I think back to what Stephanie said yesterday about someone named Brandon. Maybe she just got confused. The name Brandon could sound like Dylan, I suppose.

  Next to me, Maggie Clark clears her throat. She sounds like a lioness growling a warning.

  Everyone stops talking and turns their attention to the vice president of the company. I don’t see the president in here, so she’s the highest ranking person here. Unless you count Dylan. I guess he’s important. They’re talking to him like he might be the next huge rock star.

  Maggie closes her laptop and presses both her hands flat on top of the lid. Her hands look older than her face. I wonder if she’s actually older than fifty. Maybe she got a facelift? Her hands are really wrinkled.

  “There’s just one huge problem,” Maggie Clark says.

  Everyone stares up at her with huge eyes. Except for Dylan. He’s still smiling at me. He reminds me of the boys who always sit at the back of a classroom and make jokes while the teacher’s talking. He doesn’t seem too interested in what Maggie has to say.

  “I know all about the Twitter and the Facebook and YouTube,” Maggie says.

  Someone across from me laughs. It’s always funny when an older person calls Twitter “the Twitter.”

  Maggie gives the woman who laughed a nasty look. The woman shuts right up.

  At the end of the table, Dylan lifts something up and gets my attention. He holds up a handwritten note: No blue shoes today?

  I press my lips together hard to keep from giggling.

  Other people complain about meetings, but I could sit in on meetings like this all day.

  Maggie keeps going. Her voice is deadly serious. “With social media, the fans can turn on you in a heartbeat. Dylan, if we take you on, we also take on your history.”

  His eyes pull away from me.

  With that gritty voice that sounds so good singing, he says, “I have no history.”

  “On the contrary,” Maggie says, getting a smug look. “Where should we start? If you become one of us, we are not just your label. We are your public relations. We are your reputation manager. Brandon, we are your family.”

  She called him Brandon.

  His brown eyes grow even darker. The temperature of the board room seems to drop about five degrees.

  Some of the people to my right whisper to each other. “Brandon? Who’s Brandon?”

  I’ve been quiet this whole meeting, but suddenly my voice finds me. I lock eyes with him.

  “You’re Brandon,” I say. “That’s why Dylan Wolf didn’t exist a month ago.”

  Maggie turns to me, her ice blue eyes crinkling at the corners. She’s smiling, but it’s not a happy smile. “That’s right, Jessica. He’s practically a newborn baby. But you know all about that, don’t you?”

  I shake my head. No, I didn’t know, but there’s no use in arguing. She didn’t believe me the first time she accused me of being part of a planned mugging stunt. She probably won’t believe me now.

  She turns back to Dylan. Even if his name really is Brandon, I can’t think of him as a Brandon. He looks like a Dylan. That gorgeous face and his eyes are burned into my brain as Dylan Wolf.

  “This is bullshit,” he says.


  “No, you’re the one who’s bullshit,” Maggie replies.

  “My past is nobody’s business.”

  “You can never escape your past. Nobody can. Your past is your destiny.”

  He slams his fist on the glass table. “This meeting is over.”

  The two guys who are sitting on either side of Dylan push their chairs back and stand up. They are the same guys who were hovering around him yesterday, when I saw him busking in the early morning. Why didn’t I recognize them when I first walked in? They’re big guys, like security guards.

  Maggie raises her voice. “Go ahead and walk out,” she says. “Walk out with your bad attitude and your secrets. I know all about you, Brandon. I know your type.”

  His voice is so calm it’s scary. “You don’t know fuck all about me, Maggie Clark.”

  “I know about the crash, and I know about Susan. What else is there? What else are you hiding? We need to know everything. We’re going to be your only friends. Your family. Let me show you one thing before you decide.”

  Dylan gestures for his two guys to sit down again. They do so reluctantly.

  Maggie flips open her laptop again and types for a few seconds. She closes the screen, but not all the way. She leans forward and pushes the laptop toward Dylan.

  The guy at his side grabs the laptop and hands it to him.

  Dylan opens the laptop while staring right at me.

  Instantly, I feel terrible. He thinks I was part of this attack. That I helped Maggie blindside him.

  I try to tell him with my eyes that I don’t know anything. I’m just a small-town girl who’s been an intern for three days. And I’m tarted up in a pink blouse. I couldn’t feel more ridiculous if I was sitting here in my underwear.

  His angry eyes turn down to the screen.

  The corner of his mouth ticks up. He closes the laptop.

  Everyone’s completely silent. I don’t know if they’re more worried about making a multi-million dollar deal, or of Dylan smashing his hand on the glass table again.

  I’m scared that he’s pissed at me, and we’ll never get to be friends. I don’t know if I can bear to hear his songs play on the radio and know he hates me.

  “Is that all you’ve got?” he asks Maggie.