by Tessa Blake
If the woman had had any pearls to clutch, she would have; instead, she pointed a tremulous finger. Lily turned listlessly around, but there was no cat to be seen and the question about work destroyed what little of her composure there was left.
“I’m terribly sorry, Mrs. LeFevre,” she choked out, “but I can’t really talk about this right now. If you’ll excuse me?”
And she fled to the stairwell, rather than risk being followed into the elevator. It was only fifteen floors to her apartment and the old woman wouldn’t be able to keep up with her on the stairs.
She somehow managed not to start crying until she hit the fourth floor.
When the doorbell rang, Lily was so immersed in her own misery she didn’t hear it. It must have been going on for a full minute before she finally became aware that, yes, it was her doorbell ringing, and she should probably answer it.
The clock above the television said it was 5:45, which meant she’d managed to spend the entire day wallowing in self-pity. Probably a trip to the unemployment office would have been smarter, she thought, but that just made her start to cry again. Did they even give you unemployment when you got fired for being a skank?
She supposed she’d find out tomorrow, since she was going to have to at least try.
She shuffled to the door, a wad of tissues in one hand, and opened it to find Miri on the other side, carrying a liquor store bag.
“I told you not to come over,” she said, sniffling.
“Yeah, like that was gonna happen.” Miri pushed her aside and stalked into the apartment. “Don’t tell your best friend you don’t need her when you just got canned. It doesn’t work that way and you know it.”
“But you had plans with Matthew—”
“And Matthew is a big boy who can handle a little disappointment and can cook himself dinner,” Miri said sternly, and set the bag on the counter. “Get me the blender. I brought booze and cake.”
Lily did as she was told, retrieving the blender from the high shelf in the bathroom cabinet. Miri gave her a little side-eye and Lily shrugged. “Creative storage. I live in a shoebox.”
Her apartment wasn’t bad, really. She had a huge closet in her bedroom—for that matter, she had a bedroom—and a nice set of built-ins in the living/dining area. But the kitchen had clearly not been a priority, and space was at a premium.
“It’s summer,” Miri said, dumping the ingredients onto the tiny counter. “We’ve got three months of frozen mudslides and margaritas ahead of us. Put the blender on the counter, and the mixer can go in the bathroom.”
“What if I want to make cookies?”
“Exactly how many cookies are you going to bake in the next two months?”
“Potentially quite a lot, now that I’ve got nothing else to do all day.” Lily felt tears welling up again. “Then after that, who knows, because I won’t be able to pay the rent.”
“Stop it,” Miri commanded. “Get me some ice cubes.”
Ice cubes she had in plenty, so she dumped a couple of trays into a bowl for Miri and tried to stop leaking as she watched her quickly and efficiently start measuring out Kahlua and Bailey’s. Matthew might be boring and a pothead, but he’d certainly taught Miri how to make drinks. “Miri, what am I going to do?”
“You’re going to put some chocolate syrup on the bottom of these,” Miri said, reaching into the cupboard over the sink and handing her two heavy tumblers, “and get the vodka out of the freezer. I’m gonna make us some creamy grownup Slush Puppies, then we’re going to go sit on the couch, binge-watch Buffy, and drink until we can’t feel our toes.”
Lily thought about arguing, but since the alternative was sitting alone crying about her job and wondering how she was going to pay the bills, it actually sounded like a fabulous plan.
Her toes went away after the third mudslide, but she drank another just to be sure. Somewhere along the way, Miri heated up a frozen pizza and they ate that plus an entire bag of salt-and-vinegar chips—and most of the cake, which was triple chocolate—but the food didn’t do a whole lot to soak up the alcohol. Miri matched her drink for drink; by ten o’clock, they were both truly and completely tanked.
“Do you want me to stay the night?” Miri asked, boozily.
“What? No.” Lily used the remote to switch off the TV and rolled her head to the left to look at Miri. Some time between mudslides three and four, her best friend had become two best friends—which was awesome, if you thought about it. “Matthew would hate that.”
“Matthew is, as I said, a big boy,” Miri said, then giggled. “And I mean that in every possible sense.”
Lily giggled, too. “Stop it!” she said, flapping her hand weakly to ward off the information. “I have to be able to look him in the face and talk to him, you know, and I can’t do that if I’m thinking about—”
“I can hardly think about anything else, sometimes,” Miri confessed, then laughed even harder.
“Tramp,” Lily said affectionately.
“Look who’s talking,” Miri said, then, immediately: “Oh my God, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean—”
Lily waved her concern away. “I know. And anyway, you’re kind of right. I mean, what the hell, Miri? When have I ever acted like that?”
Miri shrugged. “That guy— I don’t know. He’s … exceptionally hot, yeah. But it’s not like you’re a manatee, Lily. You’ve dated hot guys. What’s the deal with this one?”
“I don’t know,” she said, miserably.
Neither of them said anything for a minute, then Miri broke the silence.
“Listen … and this is just a thought, okay? But when I told Matthew what had happened, he said … well, he asked me if I kept a good eye on your drink.”
Lily looked at her, shook her head. “That’s crazy. No way.”
“Maybe,” Miri said. “Maybe it is. I just … you know, I can’t swear I had my eyes on your drink the whole time we were there. And yesterday— I mean, did he give you anything then?”
She thought about her bottle of water, how she’d wandered away and left it on the bar. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, he did, and yes, he had access to it when I wasn’t around.”
Miri shrugged again. “I can’t say. I mean, what do I know? But it’s something to think about. Because it wasn’t like you, that’s for sure. You were practically humping him on the dance floor, and then—”
Lily closed her eyes and held up a hand. “Yeah, I know.”
“Maybe I’m way off-base,” Miri said.
“And maybe you’re not.”
But she couldn’t think about it right now; she had to think about updating her resume and how to spin getting fired. She bundled Miri into a cab, with promises to call tomorrow as soon as she was done at the unemployment office, then drank an enormous glass of water in the hopes of staving off a hangover and tucked herself into bed.
But sleep wouldn’t come. She lay there, going over the events of the day in her mind until she wanted to scream from the sheer repetition. She’d already lived it once and revisited it a dozen times; did she really need to have it on repeat play when all she wanted was the sweet oblivion of sleep?
Her thoughts drifted to Gabriel, and Miri’s suggestion. That was crazy; that was a story that happened to people on TV. It wasn’t something that happened to people she knew. To her.
He could have done it. Miri was right about that. The timing was tight, but not impossible. Easier still if one of the bartenders was in on it.
Somehow, though, she couldn’t bring herself to believe it. A guy like Gabriel didn’t need to slip something in a girl’s drink to get some play; hadn’t she overheard him and the bartender talking about how he could have any girl he wanted?
And he’d wanted her.
When she finally did slip into sleep, he was waiting for her. And her dreams were very sweet indeed.
10
The ringing of her cell phone at 9:30 pulled Lily out of a shallow doze—the closest she’d gotten to sleep since h
er now-customary 4 a.m. catfight wakeup call, actually. So even though it wasn’t great, she was annoyed to have her sleep interrupted. What had she been thinking, anyway, setting an obnoxious, old-fashioned bell sound as her ringtone? Wasn’t it one of the marvels of modern technology that she could have some pleasant, wonderful sound waking her up? Instead … this.
She rolled over and groped on the bedside table, pulled the phone under the covers with her. “What?” she snarled. She was unemployed. She shouldn’t have to wake up, and she didn’t have to worry about offending anyone.
“Lily?” That voice. “It’s Gabriel Batiste.”
She almost hung up on him. He had some goddamned nerve. “What do you want?” she said instead, making sure her voice was no less snarly. “How did you get my number?”
There was a momentary pause. “I had hoped you’d be happier to hear from me.”
“Oh, really?” she said.
“Yes, really,” he replied, and his patient tone was kind of infuriating. “I know what happened yesterday was a little embarrassing—”
“It was a lot more than embarrassing,” she said, trying not to sound like she was going to cry—which she very much feared she was. “I got fired.”
There was another pause, longer this time. “You got fired?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Because of what happened?”
“Duh,” she said.
It was by no means the most eloquent response, but it got the point across.
He cleared his throat awkwardly. “That’s … unfortunate.”
“I confess, I’m stunned by your mastery of the fine art of understatement, Gabriel,” she said tartly, blinking furiously to keep the tears at bay. “It’s a disaster, is what it is.”
“Of course,” he said. “Of course it is.”
“I needed my job,” she said. “More important, I liked my job.”
Another pause, the longest one yet. Then he said, “You’ll have to find something else you like as well. Come to my office? I’m in midtown. How soon can you be here?”
“Why on earth should I come to your office?”
“So I can make you an offer you can’t refuse,” he said, sounding like someone who hadn’t taken complete leave of his senses, even though that was what he had to be, saying something like that to her, now.
“I just bet,” she said. “No, thanks.”
“Seriously, Lily. Come see me. I’ll make it worth your while.” She could hear the smile in his voice; for whatever reason, it made his request more compelling than it ought to have been, given the consequences last time she’d let him talk her into something.
Not that he’d had to talk much.
“I just bet,” she said again, but she wrote down the address when he gave it to her, then hung up, bemused. Why did he always get what he wanted from her?
Generally, any one building in midtown Manhattan looked much the same as the others, but the Batiste Building was different. It speared up into the sky a dozen floors higher than the buildings surrounding it, and the windows, rather than reflecting the light like mirrors, seemed to absorb it, giving them an almost tinted appearance that she knew was a trick of the light.
The woman at the reception desk on the first floor directed her to take the nearest elevator to the 40th floor sky lobby, where she switched to another elevator to get to the 60th floor. Everything was nice enough—pretty standard for a midtown office building, but nothing crazy luxurious.
And then she stepped off the elevator into the Batiste Enterprises offices.
Immediately, she was ankle-deep in plush navy-blue carpeting, which she imagined was an absolute bitch to keep clean—and it was clean, with not a speck of stray dust or dirt anywhere on the entire expanse of it.
There was an enormous mahogany desk situated in the center of the room, and the woman sitting at it looked up from her computer screen and gave Lily a quick once-over. She was gorgeous, with an asymmetrical bob and severe black bangs over intense, almond-shaped green eyes.
“Can I help you?” she asked coolly.
“Yeah,” Lily said, crossing to stand in front of her. “I guess I have an appointment with Gabriel.”
The woman tapped a few keys on the keyboard in front of her and frowned. “I’m sorry; Mr. Batiste doesn’t have anything scheduled—”
“He called me,” Lily interrupted, in no mood for any kind of runaround.
Before they had a chance to get into it, though, the door behind the desk opened and another young woman came out—equally as stunning as the first, but with long blond hair.
“Are you Ms. Randall?” she asked.
Lily nodded.
“It’s okay, Pamela,” the blonde said, “Gabriel sent me out to get her.”
The brunette nodded, and the blonde gestured that Lily should follow her.
The door opened into a long hallway; there were several doors on either side, all closed, and a glass wall at the end through which Lily could see another enormous desk, currently unmanned.
Once they were in the hallway, the blonde held out her hand and Lily shook it.
“I’m Renee,” she said, and her tone was warm and friendly. “Sorry for the trouble. Gabriel needed to make a call and didn’t have time to let Pamela know you were coming. He only just sent me a message to come see if you’d arrived.”
She led the way down the hall, passing all the doors without slowing, and pushed open a nearly-invisible door in the glass wall at the end. Crossing to the desk, she leaned over and pushed a button on the phone. “She’s here,” she said without preamble.
Gabriel’s voice replied, “Send her in, please.”
Renee pointed to the only other door in the room and took a seat behind the desk. Lily approached the door and pushed it open, feeling a little strange despite having been invited in. Every light fixture, every piece of furniture, was subtly opulent in a way that made her feel like a bit of a country bumpkin even though she’d been in some of the most expensive places in the city for her job.
Her job that she didn’t have anymore, thanks to Mr. Gabriel Batiste.
Okay, thanks to Mr. Gabriel Batiste and her own wayward, uncontrollable libido.
Unless Miri and Matthew were on to something, in which case her libido had very little to do with it.
Gabriel was standing in front of his desk rather than sitting behind it, looking delectable in a charcoal-gray suit that probably cost half a year's rent.
She shut the door behind her and just looked at him.
“Lily,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” she asked, warily, staying by the door rather than let him get near her again.
“For whatever part I played in this situation,” he said. “I’ve been trying to figure out if there was a way I could help you—”
“I’ll be fine,” she said. It skirted close enough to the edge of lying that she felt a little twinge of nausea. Damn it, she thought, I will be fine. Just because I don’t know how yet doesn’t make it untrue.
“I’m sure that, one way or another, you will,” he said. “But come, sit down. I have a proposal.”
He moved behind the desk, and she came forward and sat on the edge of a visitor’s chair. Once she was seated, he took his own seat and leaned back in his chair, looking at her appraisingly.
“Are you familiar with Luxury Lifestyles?” he asked her.
She nodded. Luxury Lifestyles was a magazine that consisted entirely of photoessays chronicling the lifestyles of the extraordinarily rich. From the Kardashians to the Saudi oil barons, if you had more money than you knew what to do with, the readers of Luxury Lifestyles wanted to know what you were doing with it. Word in the magazine world was they couldn’t get Gabriel Batiste to give them the time of day.
“They have been, for some time now, aggressively pursuing the chance to feature me in their magazine.” He smiled. “I have turned them down, every time.”
“You have a reputation for be
ing … private,” she said, choosing the word carefully.
“And I am,” he said. “For good reason.”
She wondered what that meant, but he didn’t elaborate. Maybe he just meant the usual: I’m richer than Midas and don’t want people bothering me.
“However, I feel terrible about what happened—about the part where you got in trouble for it, anyway.” He smiled, slow and lazy, and she thought about how those lips had felt on her skin, and flushed. “So I called their creative director, who has been calling me once a week for at least a year now, and told her I would be willing to let them do a feature on me … if I could pick the photographer.”
Lily shook her head a little, too stunned to say anything. Was he saying what she thought he was saying?
“And she was agreeable, provided she was allowed to approve the final shots. I told her you would be fine with that?”
She nodded dumbly.
“Well, then,” he said. “She suggested a sort of day-in-the-life photoessay. I told her I was flying to Vegas tonight, as there’s a Heavyweight Championship fight tomorrow that I’m supposed to attend. One of my subsidiaries is a corporate sponsor.”
She nodded again.
“Has the cat got your tongue, Lily?”
“I’m just not entirely sure I understand. You want me to do a photo shoot with you, in Vegas?”
“I want you to fly to Vegas with me tonight, and in the morning, you start shooting,” he said. “I assume you have your own cameras?”
“Of course.”
“Very well. She seemed to think it should quite literally be a day in my life, start with me in bed in the hotel and just shoot photos all day.”
“I’m not going to bed with you,” Lily blurted. “Not even to get a job with Luxury Lifestyles.”
He smiled. “Neither of those things is on the table,” he said. “I don’t believe they’re offering a position—and I think you should consider freelancing anyway, at least for a while. A job like this ought to pay your expenses for a month or so, I would think.”
“I don’t even know what—”
“She emailed me a copy of their standard pay scale and contract.” He handed Lily a sheet of paper; she almost needed resuscitation when she saw the amount printed on it. A month or so? she thought. Looks like somebody doesn’t have the faintest idea what things actually cost. Try six months.