I bookmarked the idea of hiring a tall, athletic, married assistant the minute Brianna threw in the towel. Which, judging by my track record, should be any week now. My assistants usually quit at the two-to three-month mark. Right around the time either of these grave realizations hit them:
I was an insufferable asshole.
I was not going to fuck them.
Brianna now hovered near the four-month threshold—a trooper if I ever saw one, or one masochistic lunatic.
“Fire them,” I snapped. “I don’t work with thieves.”
Unless they have an ass worthy of every rap song I’ve ever heard. Judith Humphry assaulted my mind. Then I let them keep their job.
Though that was bullshit, and I knew it. Miss Humphry didn’t work for me. Chances were, I wouldn’t see her for months on end. She worked on a different floor, in a different department. At any rate, I never screwed the same woman twice, and I would never touch an employee. She was officially as toxic as poison ivy, and after stealing from me, just about as tempting.
Brianna licked her lips, pushing her dull, brown curls behind her ears as she huddled beside me. I was dashing from the newsroom into my office. “Sir, that would be a challenge, seeing as, according to this spreadsheet—” She swiped the iPad screen in her hand. “You have officially blacklisted every single dry cleaner in Manhattan.”
I pried the device from her fingers, my eyes skimming the lines of red-stricken shops. Un-fucking-believable. Human nature was designed to take what it wanted, consequences be damned.
Again, I thought of little Miss Humphry. She had no business barging into my thoughts. I usually forgot my one-night stands before the cum on my cock dried up. Then again, she had stolen from me.
And I took something of hers.
The Smiths? Bloc Party? The Kinks? Babyshambles? Dirty Pretty Things? The girl knew her way around a record shop.
“Fire them,” I repeated.
“But, sir…” Brianna gasped, a rather dramatic response for the occasion.
I stopped in front of my office door. She did the same. Her face was so red I thought she was going to spontaneously combust. I hoped she wasn’t. I had a new Brioni dress shirt and apparently no honest dry cleaners within the city limits.
“You have no other option, unless you want to go back to one of the dry cleaners you’ve previously blacklisted,” she explained.
“False. There’s a third option.”
“There is?” She batted her eyelashes.
Not many of my female employees had the balls to do that. First, because I was the president’s son. Second, because I was just a tad more intimidating than Lucifer himself. And third, because I was, as my associate producer Kate labeled me once, “Devastatingly unavailable.” Which essentially meant I wasn’t distracted by a perky set of tits.
“You can be there to monitor them while they work on my items.”
“But…”
“You’re right. Can is a casual word. It is what’s going to happen.”
“Sir…”
“Clock starts now. Better run—they get busy around noon.” I tapped my Rolex, storming into my office and shutting the door with a thud.
An hour later, my lousy excuse for a father wandered into my office like a tourist in a gift store wondering what the fuck he’d like to break. Technically, I was supposed to meet him in his office. But if we were talking technicalities, he was supposed to act like a dad and not a skirt-chasing, social-climbing douchebag, so I called us even. He leaned his shoulder against the doorframe, his hands tucked inside his pockets.
“Je n’aime pas que l’on me fasse attendre.”
I don’t like to be kept waiting. Hard to believe this asshole was the president of an American broadcasting news channel. He still insisted on speaking French to anyone who would listen. My mother had stopped being one of those people a year ago, when my sister died. She’d promptly divorced him, moved to Florida, and found a new boy toy to play with. I visited her every few weekends to get away from the bullshit and nagging loneliness. Bonus points: Floridian pussy was tanner and not half as uptight as the New York variety. And it was so much easier to pull the tourist thing without people realizing I was a Laurent. The Laurents, Maman’s family—Mathias took her last name as a part of a draconian pre-nup—were royals in the upper-class crust of Manhattan. We kept our shit secretive and tight-lipped, and we were almost as scrutinized as the people we reported on.
“Chances are you’ll live,” I said in English, still typing on my laptop. Unfortunately.
“Look at me when I’m talking to you,” he barked.
I did.
I could tell my compliance startled him, because the great Mathias Laurent cleared his throat, walked over to the seat in front of mine, and collapsed into it like he’d been holding his breath for the past year. Which was pretty much what we’d all done since Camille died.
“We’re having an identity problem that causes ad space to tank.” He slapped the chrome desk between us.
“Let’s agree to disagree. I know exactly who I am: a newsman who’s grossed the highest network ratings every night for the past two years and the son of a philandering idiot. If you suffer from memory loss, I’d suggest ginkgo biloba, B-12 vitamins, and fatty acids.” I kept my eyes on the screen.