Chapter 1
Charlotte
Charlotte marched up the front steps of the downtown Manhattan office building. She held her head high, her chin sure and firm, her eyes glazed with false confidence. She’d just moved to New York City from her small, sleepy town in Ohio, and she was about to start her first “adult” gig as an intern at Mad Music Magazine—MMM—a writing position she’d coveted since she was a girl.
The rest of the interns huddled, quivering, in the far corner of the MMM offices, wearing similar black business jackets and standing unsteadily in heels. Redheads, blondes, a few quirky dudes wearing dark, thick glasses, all stood like deer in headlights, peering up at the woman who’d hired Charlotte.
Maggie. The intern-organizer.
The woman who’d half-bragged about her outrageous party days in her twenties, when she hadn’t thought for a moment about taking a job in any office like this. Not until Quentin McDonnell took over as editor, of course. That’s when Maggie knew the magazine was going to take a turn. That’s when she knew the street cred would shine. Of course, Quentin wasn’t who he was when Maggie had first known him. He was grown up. Older. Responsible. No longer the rock star he’d been before he’d become editor.
In the two years since Quentin McDonnell took over as editor of MMM, he’d virtually revamped the magazine, moving away from supporting top-tier labels and other “moneymakers” and giving it back to musicians and artists.
“Man, fuck those guys,” Quentin had been quoted as saying, ten years before. And he’d stuck by this statement, obviously.
Charlotte slipped in line beside a redhead named Pamela, gripping her notebook tightly against her breasts. Maggie took attendance with sharp jolts of her pen across a white sheet of paper, her eyes piercing.
Charlotte leaned quickly toward Pam. “Have you seen him yet?” Charlotte asked.
Pam shook her head, not allowing her eyes to sway from Maggie’s gaze. “Haven’t spotted him. Think he’s in his office. Had a meeting with a band this morning. The Morning Stars.”
“Shit. They’re huge,” Charlotte murmured, impressed. “Of course, he collaborated with them, back in the early ‘00s. That’s how he knows them.”
“Right,” Pam said, her eyes dancing, pretending she’d known this.
Charlotte had been studying Quentin McDonnell for several years, since she’d been a ragtag teenager and constant listener to his grunge band, Orpheus Arise. Back then, he’d been a drug-addled sex-addict, with long, black, scraggly hair, taut muscles, and wild, black eyes. He’d had those kissable, pink lips, hidden there against his dark black beard. He’d been anxious, destructive, dominant, going through every model, female rock star, and actress throughout the ‘00s. Charlotte had followed his every move, a kind of fan girl obsessing over his hot body and his clearly tormented mind.
“All right,” Maggie said, scratching the last mark on her attendance sheet. “Ladies. Gents. I’d like to take you into the office and show you your desks. Several of you are social media, and you’ll be working together, while the rest of you are hoping to become actual music journalists. Quite an aspiration. I’ve been there, myself. And look where I stand today.” She gave them a little smirk, obviously confident.
Charlotte’s stomach lurched—first-day nerves. Becoming a writer intern at a music magazine meant she was a badass writer, sure. But it didn’t necessarily mean she’d “make it” in the industry. You had to have balls. You had to have gumption. And, quite often, people from where she was from—small-town rural Ohio—just weren’t born with all that. They were born with shy sensibilities and too many bright, white teeth.
Maggie ushered the interns into a side room, saying she needed to take a pause and leave them for a few minutes. “Talk amongst yourselves, now. Make friends. Don’t be shy.” She gestured wildly, winked, and then scurried out into the larger office, tossing her hands back as she walked.
“Well, well,” said a particularly flamboyant, blond-haired intern who’d introduced himself as Randy, off to Charlotte’s side. “I know we’re all thinking the same thing. Where’s the man of the hour? Mr. Quentin McDonnell himself?”
The interns all tittered, eyeing the door. Randy continued, his voice rising. “I mean, we all got into music at around the time he was a fucking rock god. I certainly had my first little boy wet dreams about him, as a teenager. Oh, boy. Good days.”
“He’s even hotter now,” one of the interns piped up. “He doesn’t do drugs anymore. Hardly drinks, I hear. And takes good care of himself. He’s a hunk if I ever saw one. But he still exudes cool.”
“You saw him?” another girl asked.
“Sure. When I came in for my interview, he was having a meeting with Maggie. Maggie said something about sleeping with him, a long time ago. But I keep staring at her, wondering. She can’t have been any hotter back then.”
“Well, she’s his age. I don’t think it’s too far outside of reality,” another girl said, saucily. “Besides, I don’t think Quentin cared back then what his girls looked like. He was set on fucking them, regardless.”
“I wish he was still like that,” Randy said loudly, laughing. “I’d do anything to wake up in bed with him. The famous Quentin McDonnell.”
The group sighed collectively. Charlotte’s heart ached, knowing, now, that the other interns felt the same as she. But who was she kidding? It wasn’t as if Quentin would take notice of her. Perhaps if she’d been in her early twenties back when he’d been an addled, crazed rock star…
“Don’t even think about it,” Pam said, her voice tart. “There’s a strict no-fraternization policy. Didn’t any of you read the handbook before you came in? He’s got a daughter now. I think it’s frankly disgusting to speak of him this way.”
“So, you’re just here to work?” another girl asked, snorting loudly.
Several of the other interns joined in the laughter, taunting Pam. Pam lifted her chin, pointing her nose toward the door, and obviously praying for Maggie to save her.
Maggie reappeared in the main office with Quentin McDonnell himself beside her, speaking quietly on the other side of the glass.
Immediately, Charlotte’s throat clenched. She hunted for oxygen, her tongue tipped against the top of her mouth. God, I can’t even breathe. He was the most handsome man she’d seen in her life, taking the outrageous gruffness of his earlier years and marrying them with a sophisticated, editorial look, with horn-rimmed glasses and salt and pepper hair. His muscles were thick, curved beneath his immaculate gray suit, and his lips were just as kissable as they’d been ten years before—when he’d haunted Charlotte’s sexual dreams.
“Jesus Christ,” someone whispered. “A no-fraternization rule? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Suddenly, Maggie beckoned toward the team of interns, mouthing the words, “Lunch! Go to lunch!”
They hadn’t been at work for more than twenty minutes so this confused everyone.
“She must not have time for us right now,” someone joked as they filed from the intern office, bounding back toward the elevator. One by one, they passed both Maggie and Quentin bent over the spread of a future print of the magazine.
Charlotte hung back, allowing herself to be one of the last to pass by. Her gaze turned toward Quentin. Her hips shimmied from left to right, articulating her curves, her femininity. She knew what she was doing. It was automatic. Quentin looked up from his spread, making intense, immediate eye contact with Charlotte.
The tension around them flared up, and Charlotte panicked and dropped her notebook onto the ground. It smacked, bringing heads back toward the scene, as if they were watching a car crash. She knelt and retrieved it, her face burning, and felt the stern eyes of the rock-star-turned-editor on her ass.
He’d noticed her. Oh man, had he noticed her.
She lifted the notebook quickly, spinning back and hiding her ass, blinking wildly into his dark eyes. Her tongue searched for words of apology, words that would tell him that she was sorry for interrupting his meeting. But seconds ticked along, with both of them holding eye contact. Neither formed words.
Maggie took a dramatic step back, dropping her hands to her sides. “Didn’t I say interns go to lunch now?” she asked, obviously forgetting Charlotte’s name. Charlotte was still new, nameless, and unimportant. But she still held court for the editor. At least in that moment, he only had eyes for her.
“Wait a moment,” Quentin said firmly. His voice was provocative, dominant, powerful. Maggie pressed her lips together, clearly frightened. He continued to stare at Charlotte, his hard stare glossing over her frame.
In this moment, Charlotte felt like one of his groupies from ten years before, when he’d ransacked the bodies of teenage and twenty-something beauties all over the country. His penetrating gaze made her feel sexually charged.
Charlotte still didn’t speak. The tension mounted, with Maggie and Charlotte waiting, holding their tongues.
Finally, Quentin removed his horn-rimmed glasses, shaking his ear-length, salt and pepper hair. “Who on earth are you?” he finally asked, as if she should have told him already. As if, all along, he’d been waiting for her.
“Charlotte,” she answered, her voice a whisper. Why did she feel exactly five inches tall? She cleared her throat, strengthened her tone. “Charlotte Barracks. I’m an intern. First day.”
Silence hung between them, then, with Quentin towering over her, dominating her more and more by the second. One of the other interns, a man, piped up from behind them. “We’re all new interns,” he said, his voice taking on false confidence. He’d probably read somewhere that he was meant to make an impression on the first day.
But Quentin’s eyes didn’t waver from Charlotte’s face. Nobody else in the room existed. Not when Maggie began to introduce some of the interns whose names she remembered, trying to act excited, attempting to yank Quentin’s attention back to her. Not when the rock stars he’d been interviewing poked their heads from the side office, asking if they might grab a cup of coffee.
Instead, Quentin found words. “Where do you come from? You’re clearly not from around here.”
“New York, you mean?” Charlotte asked, wondering if he was poking fun at her. Was it so obvious that she wasn’t from the East Coast? Did her cheeks shine with Midwestern sun? “No. I’m from Ohio.”
“Oh-HI-oh,” he whispered, his voice gruff. “I have a few good stories from there. And some I even remember.”
The band, now stationed behind him, began to titter with laughter. Charlotte swallowed, remembering reading about the many orgies Quentin had had as a rock star. She’d read that article in the very magazine they were both now working for, something like a million years before. God, how times had changed. And, god, how she wanted him to splay her over a table and make love to her—or just fuck her like his ten-years-ago rock-star self would’ve.
“My experience was a bit more wholesome than that,” Charlotte finally answered, her voice catching in her throat.
“And now you think you’re going to make it in the big, wide world? First, this magazine, then eternity?” he asked, crossing his arms firmly across his chest. His eyes danced. He was no longer the fatherly, nice-guy-editor. He was now all hard edges and bright eyes and bad-boy arrogance.
“It’s been my dream to work here my entire life,” she answered.
“Well,” he said, scoffing slightly, raising the tension. “We’ll see how you do, then.”
He said it as if he expected her to fail. Sensing the mounting tension, Maggie burst between them, raising her magazine spreads like a curtain. “Quentin, we need your approval on this spread before we go to print. Can you just let the girl go to lunch with the others?”
She said it in a half-laugh, poking fun at his sexual nature. Charlotte took the opportunity to spin around, joining the pack of other interns in the corner. Her cheeks heated with embarrassment and panic. Randy’s eyebrows went high with pity. He wrapped his arm around her quivering shoulders and led her into the elevator.
“He made an example out of you,” he whispered in her ear. “Don’t worry about it. And don’t think about it a minute longer. You were hired because you’re a good writer. You were hired because you’re worthy. And he’s an arrogant bad boy. Everyone knows that, from way back. And just because I said that thing about wanting to wake up in his bed doesn’t mean I don’t know it wouldn’t be a horrible thing for my self-esteem. As it would be for you.” He winked.
The elevator began to close, creating a firm barrier between Charlotte and Quentin, who still stood talking to Maggie. Right before the elevator door closed, his eyes snapped back up toward Charlotte, and a chill jolted up and down her spine.
“Jesus. That was intense,” Charlotte murmured, swiping light beads of sweat from her hairline. She couldn’t snap the image of the sexy editor from her mind.
“Let’s get you something to eat,” Randy said, laughing. “You’ll shake this in no time flat.” The rest of the interns began to titter with light laughter and chit-chat, leaving Charlotte to her reverie.
She couldn’t have imagined such an explosive first encounter.
“Ah, girl. I see what you’re thinking about,” Randy said, laughing now as they scampered out on to the sidewalk. “But remember. There’s a no-fraternization rule. Not with your boss. You don’t want to fuck up your first internship.”
“Ha,” Charlotte said, shaking her head back. “I would never screw up this opportunity. It’s not like he even remembers me, anyway.”
Randy flipped on his sunglasses, cackling wildly. “That’s the spirit. I think you might just be grown up enough for New York, yet.”