by Ember Leigh
“What did you do that was so special? Did you write all those lame jokes you used to tell in New York?”
“I did more than you’ll ever do. All you know how to do is flash your tits and sleep with the boss.”
Paige turned, knocking her chair over, and stormed out of the restaurant.
Her time on the island had come to an abrupt end. She might have signed on to IBC, but she never signed up for belittlement and harassment from a no-name novice. Whatever the cost, she’d get herself out of this IBC contract and back to the continental US.
****
Josh recognized the fury in Paige’s face because it was exactly the look he’d gotten when he first met her. A look he’d come to respect, as well as fear. Which meant he had to intervene ASAP.
He rushed to her room once Bridgette had calmed down enough to go practice lines. Anxiety licked at his throat as he pounded on her door. Paige’s limit had a lot to do with her professional status being challenged—a trait he shared, reluctantly—and if he didn’t smooth this over, she’d be liable to leave on the next private jet to the main island.
The door swung open. Her green eyes burned a hole through him.
The sight of her stole his breath. Every single thing about her was sexy, from the color of her nail polish—taupe—to the angry crease in her brow. He wanted to pick her up at the hips and throw her to the bed. Give her a reason or two to stay on the island. At least for a couple more hours…
He blinked, realizing his time for speaking had come and gone. She kept her mouth a thin line, waiting as this encounter turned extremely awkward. He opened his mouth. “Listen.”
“As you can see, it’s all I’ve been doing.”
Josh cleared his throat, letting the snark slide. Why not cut to the chase? “Please try to forget that happened.”
“Why should I? I tried to make amends with her which, I might add, I shouldn’t have had to do, since I did nothing to her. She’s hated me from day one with no reason. I was nice, and she acted like a snooty bitch in return.”
Josh leaned against her door frame, studying the lush carpet. Another glimpse of her talking and he didn’t trust himself not to take her face in his hands and kiss her. That wouldn’t be a fan favorite, especially after the way she’d made it perfectly clear in the sauna yesterday she wanted nothing to do with him: not personally, not professionally, and least of all sexually.
“On her behalf, she’s a nice girl.” His head ached at the thought of going back to the set and facing her. “She can get bitchy. But who doesn’t?”
“If that was aimed at me, I’ll accept it. But I have reasons.”
“All right. But please, try to keep the peace.”
“Impossible. Between you and her, I’m ready to shoot myself.”
Josh was ready to wilt. It would never end. “I’m doing what I have to do. Can’t you see that? I don’t make all the decisions.”
She was silent. Maybe this was her way of calling a truce, in a very special Paige way. But no. She was closing the door in his face. He caught it in time and grabbed her wrist. Electricity shot between them. Surprise registered in her eyes. She felt it too.
“You know where you stand,” he said. “You know you’re better than her, and you always will be. But you have to give it a chance.”
“Why? So I can be bullied by her every day? So I can be told I don’t deserve what I worked for? Sorry, but I graduated from high school a long time ago. It’s one thing if you want to work with school girls, but I refuse to.”
He took a deep breath, hardly able to concentrate with her so near to him. Desire pulsed beneath his skin. “I’ll have a talk with her.”
“I think you need to do more than talk to her,” she hissed. “I think you need to punch her in the face. I would have done it today if there hadn’t been so many witnesses at lunch.”
Josh let out an unwitting snort of laughter. “You kill me.”
The tension between them lessened and Paige smiled. “Don’t laugh at me.”
“Please come back to the set.”
She hesitated. “Why?”
“If you do, I’ll talk to her. Right away.”
“Using your boss voice or your boy toy voice?”
Josh opened his mouth to speak but clamped it shut. What did she think was going on there, anyway? “That was rude.”
“But it’s a valid question,” she said.
“I’m not her boy toy,” he said. “I’m her coworker. That’s it.”
“You sure?” She eyed him closely; she cared about the dynamics between him and Bridgette.
“Why do you care?”
Paige hesitated then spat out, “I don’t. Goodbye.”
The door closed in his face.
****
Paige stood at the back of the room, arms crossed, practicing her look of detached boredom. Cast and crew had paused during filming to watch the final cut of their first episode, which had been submitted and voted on by the official test audience, to determine whether or not the show would be picked up for a season.
Eager murmurs rippled through the room. The energy was like an assembly in elementary school, school kids waiting for their first glimpse of the magician.
The opening theme music trickled from the speakers. Bridgette fidgeted near the front and reached for Josh’s hand. He took it for a moment then dropped it, dodging her fingers as they searched for his again.
The television screen burst to life with Josh and Bridgette, oozing cheer and good looks. His chiseled features mesmerized her even in pixelated form. He’ll cast a spell on every female in America. She licked her lips involuntarily. How lucky am I to be in the same room as him?
Her thoughts screeched to a halt. Lucky? Was she insane? She’d be lucky if she could get off this island. Lucky if Josh would mysteriously fall off a cliff…and take Bridgette with him. She’d do well to remember that, too.
Every time Josh appeared on the screen, her heart fluttered. There was no explanation. Except that she was losing her mind, and somewhere between New York City and Hawaii, she’d misplaced any ounce of sense she had in her body.
Bridgette’s performance had lost some of its stiffness, although Paige wasn’t sure how she’d managed it for the final cut. What the editors hadn’t been able to cut, however, was the giggling every five seconds, or the fact that Bridgette constantly proffered her two most notable assets.
IBC isn’t dumb. They know how to work the audience. Pick two people who cater to every teenager’s fantasy and you’ve got a winning show. Against these two bombshells, your dedication means nothing.
A sick knot formed in her stomach. Though Paige added to the show’s overall beauty, the two stars were Josh and Bridgette. Audiences would be hooked. Whether they loved to hate or hated to love them, everyone would have something to say about these new hosts and their spunky little Hawaii show.
A good show needed equal parts beauty and personality—a delicate recipe that was conducive to failure if the parts weren’t perfectly proportional. Wakin’ Up couldn’t possibly have covered it all. Not with Bridgette bogging it down.
But Wakin’ Up had something. Josh pulled through with the personality and the effortless hosting, not to mention he was a total babe who would have girls writing love letters to him for years. Bridgette contributed her perfect nose and ruby-red lips, and won an easy point with hosting—Josh set things up for her constantly so that her responses and jokes seemed easy, and very nearly witty.
Despite the hours of impatience and frustration spent on set watching the actual filming process, the show was mesmerizing. But the last surprise bomb was the worst: nowhere in the show did Bridgette’s personality show through. The snide grins and immature undercuts were entirely absent.
On screen, Bridgette was an angel. A beautiful, giggly, very nearly witty angel.
Paige had been so focused on comparing Bridgette to herself that she’d failed to notice the kernel of stardom in her.
Th
e phone rang, but she didn’t need to hear the news.
“The test audience loved it. We’ve been picked up for a year!”
****
Paige sat slumped in the sauna.
She needed to be alone. Needed to seethe. Needed to contemplate. Most importantly, she needed to replay the last week in her head to find out where she’d underestimated the show.
That evening’s debut broadcast left her feeling lower and more hopeless than ever. She needed something strong—whether a pair of arms or a shot of vodka, she didn’t care.
At the moment, neither was available.
Realizing that A New York Minute, however successful, was never going to crawl its way back into existence cast her into a strange melancholy. She’d been clinging to the hope all along, ever since Josh had announced its demise, like a mother unwilling to accept the news that her only child had been involved in a fatal car crash. Somewhere, the punch line had to be waiting. The fact that it was all just a bureaucratic misunderstanding and she’d be back to filming in New York next month.
While she’d been waiting for this relieving news, she’d spent her days counseling herself that Wakin’ Up would flop. With all the terrible circumstances and set-up, it had to flop.
Yet it had soared. Her first real work, her career passion, was still dead at the hands of IBC.
Just melt. Melt into the seat so you’ll never have to face Josh or Bridgette again.
When the melting didn’t happen, she went back to her room.
But once you get there, you will not cry. You will devise a Plan B. It will be far more spectacular than Plan A.
She could cry for hours. The crushing reality she’d put off dealing with had finally come to conquer her heart. Paige had never learned to deal with failure. She’d always been a naturally precocious and outspoken girl, the beloved only child of her supportive yet quiet parents. When she took off for college at only age seventeen, after graduating high school a full year early, she left with the promise that she’d achieve all her dreams and then some.
One success led to another. Soon interviews started rolling in, wondering why this middle-America young woman was achieving so much success so young. She had no traumatic past to report—mostly privilege and support, really—and owed it all to a chaotic and relentless inner drive that had existed since the time she was conceived. Her own mother used to joke that Paige arrived almost three months before her due date, simply so she could get the show on the road.
But Paige’s greatest enemy was herself. The only critical eye came from inside—she’d really been competing against herself her entire career, something that was much easier to ignore when she was riding the wave of success. But now, the unexpected legal turn with NYCBC and IBC left her scrambling to decipher who had failed and where.
Even though there was little she could have done to alter events, a part of her loved pointing the finger at herself, reveling in the fact that she’d fucked it up as part of her had always suspected. As if only she’d been better, this could have been avoided.
It was an infuriating mix of guilt and shame, sickness and insanity.
The elevator doors slid back to reveal the Lambert wing. She trudged toward her room, eyes on the ground, and inhaled sharply when her shoulder connected with something.
“Watch it, there.” Josh held up his hands in mock defense.
She forced her head upward. “I don’t want to talk right now.”
“I never said I did either.”
She continued toward her room, sensing him following her.
“You okay?”
“I don’t want to talk.”
“Can I come in with you?”
She stared at her door, boring a hole through the room numbers, willing herself to say no. “Why?”
“We need to talk.”
“That’s what I said I didn’t want to do.”
“I’m sorry. But it needs to be done.”
She opened her door and entered wordlessly, leaving Josh to decide whether or not to enter. As she plopped onto her bed, the door clicked shut.
His weight appeared at the end of the bed. A few moments of silence passed, the tension growing as each second dragged on. He cleared his throat and shifted position. Despite her psychological self-persecution from only moments ago, a palpitation of expectation erupted from between her legs—like somehow her clitoris could sense a penis was nearby.
“What’s wrong with you? This isn’t the Paige I know.”
“I said I didn’t want to talk. So your options are to leave or sit here and not talk to me.”
“Fine.”
He was quiet so long that Paige felt the need to speak up. “Why are you still here?”
“I’d rather be here with you. If not talking is how I get to be with you, fine.”
She sighed, his comment both warming her and sending her off balance. “You keep the best company, Josh Lambert. Ditzy blonde bombshells and washed out, depressive talk show has-beens.”
There was another silence between them. When Josh spoke up again, his voice was soft. “You’re not washed out, Paige. Far from it.”
“Thanks, but as far as I can tell, I’m contracted to work on a show as a second-bit background decoration. Just what I dreamt of all those years ago.”
Josh sighed. “I’m gonna work with you here.”
“What can you do? You can’t fire Bridgette. She’s contracted too. And you can’t fire me, because, well, I don’t know why.” She paused, a wild look coming into her eyes. “Josh, can you fire me?”
He laughed. “Um, no.”
“No, really, do it. Fire me.”
“Not a chance. I need you here.”
She scrambled to all fours, towel sliding away from her. She grabbed Josh by the shoulders, shaking him. “Please, Mr. Lambert, fire me. I’m a crappy employee. All I do is start fights and bitch at people. Fire me for unpleasant demeanor. Anything!”
Josh gave a strange smile and placed his hands over her wrists at his shoulders, lowering them to her sides. His gaze roamed her half-naked body, scorching over her hip and up to the curve of her breasts. “I’ll have HR consider it immediately.”
“Was it wrong that I touched you?” She crossed her arms over her chest, standing bent at the knees in front of him. Feistiness had taken over, stealthily replacing the malaise from earlier.
He maintained eye contact, but at the last second his gaze wandered below her neck. “Yes.” When his gaze returned to hers, his eyes were darker from the haze of lust. “It definitely lacked professionalism.”
“Fire me for that. Should I hit on you, like you did to me the other night? I’ll be totally unprofessional. I can touch you inappropriately.”
He raised a brow. “You can?”
Her breath caught in her throat. She hadn’t intended to take the conversation into a sexual zone, but maybe it should go there, anyway.
“I could.” She grinned at him. “I don’t need to sleep with the boss to get my way. Like some people.”
Paige flopped down onto the bed and turned away from him, aware that her ass was on full display to him.
Josh groaned. “You never quit, do you?”
She remained facing away from him. “Nope. I’ll believe it until the day I die. There’s no other way she could have gotten that job.”
“No, I mean with this.” The warmth of his hand smoothed over her hip, dangerously near to her ass cheek. Pinpricks of pleasure exploded between her legs.
“What do you want me to do? Hide it?” She snorted in disbelief. “You’re in my room, Mr. Lambert. My rules.”
His hand lingered on her skin, and she didn’t complain. “You rules in here, maybe,” he said. “But that’s okay.” His fingertips trailed down the curve of her ass, underneath the buttock, hovering over the area most crying out for attention. She squeezed her eyes shut as she relished the touch, loving it too much to make him stop and too stubborn to ask him to do more. A rush of moisture dampened the s
wimsuit bottom.
“Why don’t you tell me to keep my hands to myself?” His voice was softer, edged with sensuality. “You know, like I’m taking advantage of our working relationship, using my position to enjoy inappropriate groping.”
Her breath caught in her throat. He was baiting her to admit that she liked it. She never would. “Is this what you came in here to talk to me about? My ass?” She fought to keep her voice even.
“No.” He laughed and his hand was gone, leaving the skin feeling cold in its absence. “Not at all.”
She focused on the other side of the room, trying desperately to get her heart rate back to normal.
“Well? Spill it. I’m busy.”
“Are you?” He laughed again. “You look pretty unoccupied to me.”
She sighed and rolled over to face him. He was propped up on one arm on the bed, eyes waiting to greet hers. “I’m busy because this is my room, and I do what I want here. It’s my sanctuary. So either tell me something or leave me and my butt alone.”
He gazed at her, his face unreadable. “I think you’re gorgeous.”
A smile tugged at her lips. “Is that really what you came in here to tell me?”
He winced and covered his face with his hands. “No. God, I didn’t mean to say that. Shit.”
Her smile widened. His cool cover was officially blown. He was a teenager in front of her just then, pure discovered porno mags and cracking voices. “Oh, it was a lie then?”
“Not a lie,” he said, hands still covering his face. “Just…I didn’t mean to actually say it.”
She was quiet as she let his words sink into her. Part of her was extremely satisfied to hear it—maybe it meant he was similarly unable to convince his eyes to start obeying his logical mind, something she knew far too well because of him. The other part was confused, convinced this was a business ploy.
“I appreciate the compliment,” she said. “But what did you come in here to talk to me about? The show? Your amazing ratings? How I’m going to be stuck as your news anchor for the next thirty years?”
“None of that. I didn’t want to talk about any of it. I…I wanted to see you. That was it.”