RICKI

In the back of the limo I turned to Paul and asked, “Okay, how do I look?”

He eyed me critically, but then said, “Perfect. Going with that dark shade of lipstick really works. It’s strong like power red but without looking tarty. It’s sort of … classic.”

Trust Paul to get what I meant by a lipstick shade. Helena Meyers inspired me to wear it, actually. When I’d finally gotten around to having dinner at their house I’d noticed it. Over a five-course meal, I’d listened to her tell tales about her days as a war journalist, and watched her husband David dote on her. She’d worn a bold shade that was sexy but mature, poised, confident.

Everything I needed to be today. “Thanks, Paul.”

“Go get ’em, boss.”

“Right.” I stepped out of the car and gave a nod to the doorman, thinking crown on my head, crown on my head. He nodded back and tipped his hat. I marched across the luxurious hotel lobby like a noir heroine in a long panning shot. Then into the elevator and up to the conference floor where the CTC shareholders meeting was taking place.

Schmitt might have told me that no, I couldn’t address the shareholders, every time I had asked, but he couldn’t keep me from attending the meeting. After all, I was a shareholder, too.

I waited until the meeting was in session, though, before slipping in the back and then finding a seat in the darkened conference room. Everyone was looking at the slide presentation of the company’s profit and loss sheets up on the big projection screen at the front. The CFO, Jim Wong, was at the podium explaining the numbers. He had come to CTC from Silicon Valley, where he’d been involved in a couple of high-profile tech companies but had fallen in love with Hollywood. I suppose people do, from time to time. Seduced by the glitz.

Marlon Charles, the current head of PR, stood to the side of the dais, looking over some notes in his hands, clearly preparing to take the podium next.

Perfect. Marlon wouldn’t want to make a scene. I glided to the front along the wall, still not attracting much attention in the dim room, and tapped him on the arm.

“Oh, Ricki!” he whispered. “So glad you could join us.”

“Would it be all right if I take the mic for just a quick ‘thanks for being here’ after Jim wraps up?”

“Oh, of course! That would be terrific. I know you don’t like the spotlight, so thank you so much for offering. Here, I’ll introduce you.” He stepped up onto the dais.

“Any other questions, you can ask me later, or drop me an e-mail,” Jim was saying. “You have the complete spreadsheets in your handouts as well.”

Marlon took his place and leaned down to the mic. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to deviate slightly from the agenda. I know we’re due for a coffee break, but first, well, we have a special guest.”

Schmitt, sitting only a few feet away, suddenly looked up and saw me. He looked away, quickly, his mouth in an unpleasant downward curl, fuming. That’s right, I thought. You didn’t think I’d defy you this openly, this brazenly.

“May I introduce, Ms. Ricki Hamilton.”

I stepped carefully up onto the dais and then exchanged smiles and mutual arm-pats with Marlon as I took his place at the podium. I had no notes. I looked out over the sea of faces, most of them unfamiliar.

“Thank you. I won’t take up too much of your time today. I just wanted to come here to say thank you, really, for being a part of CTC. I know my grandfather wasn’t very hands-on with the company in the last years of his life, but this being the first shareholders meeting since his passing, I wanted to come and wave the family flag and tell you how proud I am that CTC continues to carry on the traditions that Cy espoused. What was it he used to say? You’re not a star unless you’re known ‘Coast-to-Coast’? We still do a great job finding new talent and building great careers, not just in movies but in subsidiary properties, too. The media world is changing fast, not only because technology keeps changing, but because the world itself keeps changing. I’m confident in the ability of the CTC management team to ride the waves of change and keep CTC on top. That’s it, really. I just wanted to say hi, and thanks.”

I smiled. They applauded much more enthusiastically than I thought they should. But people clap when they see something they like, and they liked me and what I’d said, even if I hadn’t said very much. Simple enough.

I stepped down and then people began getting out of their seats. Caterers had set out snacks and fruit and miniature sandwiches and I mingled throughout the short break, mostly accepting platitudes from people as they circulated.

Funny, while I was mingling, Schmitt and I never crossed paths. When it was time for the next session to start, I left.

And went to the ladies room where the nerves promptly hit. It was so odd. I hadn’t been nervous at all while making my little speech. For the past week I’d done nothing but think it over, practice it in my head, to the exclusion of almost anything else. I had psyched myself up so well, I guess, that I didn’t even remember to be nervous—not even when the PR head had said I didn’t like the spotlight. But now that it was over, I felt a little shaky. Whew. I did it.

Of course, now that it was over, all the messy emotional stuff about Dad and everyone else in my life that I had been shoving to the back burner kept trying to boil over. I took a deep breath and closed myself in the stall at the very end of the row, the one with the sink inside so I could lean on it. Since coming back from rehab, Dad had been veering between overly emotional and seeming regret over being emotional, so I could never tell whether he was going to run hot or cold at a given moment.

I tried not to take his cold moments personally. It’s hard to expose yourself emotionally, I would remind myself. He pulls back because he’s afraid. Gwen and I were both trying to remind him it was worth his while to let his feelings out.

And what about you, Ricki? What about when you let your feelings out? Maybe I was more like my father than I had realized previously.

If so, then I definitely wasn’t cut out for relationships, especially BDSM relationships, that relied on honesty and trust and terrifying things like that. Now that the speech to the shareholders was over, I could go back to trying to forget Axel.

You know how hard it is to forget someone like that? Someone you dream of, someone whose touch you can almost feel even when they’re not with you, someone whose voice you can almost hear, each time you think about them? Trying to forget inevitably meant thinking about him. The only way not to was to distract myself with work.

Speaking of which, it was time to go to my actual job. Riggs took me home and I drove myself in, arriving just in time for the weekly development meeting.

After my triumphant appearance at the shareholders meeting, being back on the bottom rung at Blue Star was a bit depressing. Especially when at that development meeting I got to hear Grant Randolph put forth the idea that Blue Star’s bottom line might be improved by “the occupation of the under-inhabited territory” he called “the female-centric market.”

He used different words than I had but he was making the basic argument I’d given Meyers and floated in meetings more than once now. But I’d gotten nowhere.

By the end of the meeting, it looked like Grant was getting his own development team. As if that weren’t bad enough, Meyers called me into his office shortly after the meeting ended.

I closed the door behind me and sat in the chair in front of his desk, trying to keep my temper under control. We glared at each other until he gave in.

“Obviously,” he said with a conciliatory nod, “it would appear Randolph picked up the ball and ran with it.”

“The ball you told me to drop,” I said.

“I know. Well, you were right, it was a sound idea, and the data is there to prove it, or at least to prove that it isn’t a stupid move to approve the pursuit of it, even if it ends up flopping.”

“Did you ask me here to tell me I was right?”

“Yes and no.” He had shaved and being clean-shaven made him look younger, if not any less world-weary. “Given your enthusiasm for the effort, Ricki, I believe you should join Grant’s team.”

“In what capacity?”

“I need you working directly under him.”

I didn’t bother to hide my skeptical look. “What do you mean by ‘under’?”

“I mean reporting directly to him from now on and providing executive support.”

That sounded like a living hell if ever I had heard of one. “In other words, you want me doing all the work to make sure this team succeeds while Grant gets all the credit.”

“May I remind you that he has seniority? He’s been here for years, Ricki, not months like you.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that this is monumentally unfair.”

“I’m being realistic. If we want this female-centric initiative to succeed, one, we do need a woman on the team and you’re the obvious choice for that, and two, Randolph has his strengths and his shortcomings and I know I need to pair him with someone who complements his shortcomings. He’s a better visionary than executive. He’s not detail-oriented.”

“That’s all a fancy way of saying what I already said: you want me doing the work while Grant gets the accolades.”

“This isn’t about accolades.” Meyers huffed impatiently. “Look, Ricki, I know it’s not a perfect situation, but you’d get to push your agenda in terms of which films get made. From a PR standpoint, actually, it’d be important that you, the female on the team, be the mouthpiece. If you want me to add a PR title to your nameplate, I will.” He dangled a carrot: “A title bump, even.”

A promotion, he meant. I was not tempted. “So now you want me to be the spokesperson, and work on project development, and crunch the numbers, and wipe Grant’s ass, but Grant will still be my boss?”

Meyers folded his arms. “Well, it would seem you inherited your grandfather’s steamroller of a mouth. May I remind you this isn’t the CTC shareholders meeting? You’re not in charge here, Ricki.”

“No, but maybe I should be. Meyers, you said you hired me because you wanted the best. Are you seriously telling me the reason you need the best is to compensate for the fact that Milton Randolph’s nephew is incompetent?”

He cleared his throat. “Incompetent is a strong word.”

I said nothing to retract it. “Yes, it is.”

We stared at each other then, in a standoff.

He gave in and spoke first. “Well, let’s give the idea some more thought before we commit to anything.”

“Well, here’s one more thing to think about: do this and you’ll have my resignation.”

He grimaced and shook his head. “Twenty-four years old, fresh MBA, and only on the payroll a few months? You can’t play that game with me, Ricki Hamilton. I know you’re bluffing.”

“Am I?”

He gave me another of those calculating looks, and said in a “gotcha” tone of voice: “I know about the provision in Cy’s will.”

I sat perfectly still for a moment. That meant that Schmitt had told him. And it made me wonder if he’d hired me because I was “the best” after all. I got to my feet. “Then maybe it’s best I resign right now, if the only reason you hired me was as a favor to a poor bereaved waif like myself.”

He looked shocked, staring up at me like I’d grown to eight feet tall. “You can’t quit. You’ll lose the inheritance.”

“I’ve read the will. It doesn’t say I have to work for Blue Star, or for you, just a company that’s not CTC for at least three years.”

Meyers’s face was red and he struggled a little to get to his feet, pressing his hands against the top of his desk. “You think you’ll get another job after this one if I tell people you were a diva who wasn’t a team player?”

“When I tell them that your idea of being a team player was playing Girl Friday to an incompetent boozehound who stole my ideas?” He was right: I did sound like my grandfather. “I think they’ll see my side of the story.”

He sat back down. “God, you’re a pain in the ass.”

“That’s why your wife likes me.” If I hadn’t had that dinner with him and Helena, would I have dared be so forward? However it had happened, I wasn’t scared of Meyers anymore. “So, you tell me. Am I walking out of here to write a resignation letter or not?”

“No, of course not.” He sighed heavily. “I’ll find someone else to wipe Grant Randolph’s ass.”

So I guess that was a kind of victory, even if I still felt I should’ve had Grant’s job.

I went back to my desk slightly less miffed than I had been going into the meeting with Meyers, but I had about had it for the day. Before I left the office, though, I dropped a friendly e-mail to the woman I’d met at the AWESM fundraiser, Mandy Tink, just to say “hi, how are things.” You never know when a contact like that might come in handy—for example, in a job search.

I made a quick exit from the building and while I waited for the AC to cool the car down a bit I texted Gwen. What a day.

Did you give Schmitt a kick in the balls? she wrote back.

Metaphorically, yes. But things at Blue Star are going downhill fast. Tell you when I get home. I wasn’t about to try to text her all the details about my argument with Meyers. How was your audition?

TERRIBLE, she replied in all caps to show me she was serious. Hey, can you pick up some Kraft Mac & Cheese on the way home? I really need comfort food right now and I know Mina means well but everything she has is organic whole wheat and artisanal cheese.

I laughed. Mina didn’t approve of us eating anything out of a box, but Gwen had gotten fond of a couple of things while she was in college: macaroni and cheese, ramen noodles, that sort of thing. You sure you don’t want ramen instead?

Arghhhhh. Get those too? Please? I thought I had some stashed but I don’t.

No worries. I can stop and get both.

They have the brand I like at the grocery store at the exit right closest to the house. Here.

She even texted me photos of what the packages looked like so I’d know exactly which ones to get. I pointed my car in the direction of home.

I didn’t go to the grocery store often, but it didn’t take me long to get the things Gwen wanted and to pick up some emergency chocolate for myself just in case. There was no line so I didn’t even have a chance to read the headlines on the tabloids at the checkout.

When I came out into the parking lot, I couldn’t remember for a moment where I’d parked. Then I realized a white panel van was just blocking my view of my car. A somewhat Mexican-looking guy, in a black tank top with his black hair slicked back, was opening the back door of the van. I wasn’t really paying attention to him but then I suddenly realized he looked a lot like the drummer of Axel’s band …

A second later someone put a bag over my head, shoved me into the back of the van, and shut the door. I heard the driver’s door slam and the engine start.