When we got to our floor, we walked straight into the newsroom. The first rundown meeting was in ten minutes. She walked over to her desk with that damn notebook clutched to her chest.
“Humphry, join us in the conference room,” I heard myself say.
She perked, bit down a smile, then opened the notebook and scribbled something into it. Fast. Lord. She was so fucking thirsty for the job. I let Brianna dispose of the iPad in my palm and shooed her away.
“You’ll be taking notes, Judith, not making suggestions,” I said.
I was careful to treat her exactly as I would any other reporter in her position. I was already an insufferable prick, so I wasn’t particularly awful to her. But I was also fair, and after a week, she’d earned the right to sit, listen, and absorb.
She kept her eyes on her notebook. “A girl can dream.”
“Happy to fulfill your other fantasies.” Good thing Brianna had started working on her cardio and was already on the other side of the floor. We were almost alone, early, eager fuckers that we were.
“I actually have one you could help me with.”
“Unless it involves me tying you to a bed, I’m not really interested in hearing about it,” I said, setting fire to the entire conversation we’d had last week about my dancing on a red line. I sprinted through that fucker all the way to the finish line of sexual harassment. Not that I was harassing Jude, as evidenced by the enthusiasm with which she sucked my dick, but if she wanted ammo on me, I’d stupidly given her that.
“It actually involved me tying you to a bed.” She batted her lashes, and for an unknown reason, didn’t look annoying doing so.
Normally, I liked being the one doing the tying, but for Humphry, I could make an exception. She stepped toward me, her tongue sweeping over her lower lip.
“Then I’ll strap a ball gag to your mouth…”
I curved a brow, raking my eyes slowly over her body and undressing her item by item. She was high if she thought I’d put anything in my mouth that wasn’t a part of her body. By the time she was in front of me, she was stark naked in my head, her voice dripping honey and sex all over my fucking loafers.
“Then,” she whispered, her pillowy lips moving against my ear. “I’ll set the whole damn thing on fire, with you in it.”
I smiled. Judith Humphry was a massive pain in the ass. Not only was she a natural blond, shit-hot, and the owner of the best pair of lips in the tristate area (both pairs, if we’re perfectly honest), but she was also sharp as a razor—the opposite of my usual pushover flavor of the night.
“If you ever had the pleasure of getting in bed with me again…” I narrowed my cold eyes on hers. “You would be the one to catch fire, and we both know it.”
With that, I curled my finger, motioning her into the conference room. People had begun to trickle straight into it with their coffee cups and sleepy eyes. Judith obeyed, her catlike, limber walk telling me she knew I was looking.
James Townley opened the door for us before he walked in.
“Son.” He clapped my back.
“Call me that again if you want a one-way ticket to early retirement,” I muttered.
“Junior.” He winked at Judith.
“Mr. Numbers.” She saluted.
They shared a knowing smile. I punched him in the face. Internally, of course. My limits were few and far between, but they were there. Besides, James had just married the morning show’s latest weather girl—who was thirty, both in age and IQ points—in a Hamptons ceremony that made Harry and Meghan’s royal wedding look like a karaoke evening for a low-budget Jersey Shore bachelorette party. That thing got more news coverage than the North Korea threat. I shot James a don’t-fuck-with-me frown—just to make sure he knew that I knew he’d checked out Judith’s ass when she walked in—and he pretended not to notice me.
From that point forward, it was same old, same old. My staff presented me with their ideas for tonight’s show starting with Kate beside me—my right hand—then moving to the person next to her and so forth.
Kate (forty-something, happily married, and openly gay) suggested we start with the volcanic disaster in Maui. Jessica (twenty-something, single, and clingy as saggy balls) came up with new details about the EU crisis, and Steve, the newbie who was shaping up to be a little less useful than a bag of unwashed anuses, suggested we talk about the cheese crisis in Belgium. I braced my hands on the back of the chair I stood behind so I didn’t accidentally punch him from across the table.
“Junior?” Frankly, I did it because I didn’t want James and her to have something uniquely theirs—a pet name, a connection.
“Me?” She pointed at herself, looking up from her abused notebook.
I shot her a condescending glare and punctuated it with a raised eyebrow.
She tucked her hair behind her ears and cleared her throat. “Yes. Okay. Good thing I have Kipling.”
Kipling? Who the fuck is Kipling?
“So, there’s a YouTube blogger…”
“Next,” I barked.
This wasn’t Couture. I doubted our viewers wanted to hear about some chick showing people how to apply eyeliner for twenty minutes, unless she was dead and chopped into tiny pieces, spread across the five oceans.
“Wait,” she bit out, her teeth grinding together. “There’s a YouTube blogger with over two million viewers. He just posted a video telling people he hid a body part of someone close to him who passed away in the woods near his house. Whoever finds it will get ten grand in cash.”