Passion on Park Avenue (Central Park Pact #1)(6)

“Au contraire,” Deena said, waggling her eyebrows. “I’m counting on them wanting to include your Italian diva of an assistant as an integral part of your success.”

“You know that they won’t let you play yourself, right? They’re angling for one of those ‘inspired by a true story’ directions, not a documentary.”

“Just wait until he meets me,” Deena said confidently. Then she frowned. “Wait, he’s not gay, is he? That’ll hurt my chances.”

“No idea.”

“Well, what does your gaydar tell you? It’s not as good as mine, but if he’s one of the obvious ones . . .”

“I don’t know because I haven’t met him.”

Deena’s mouth dropped open. “But the network’s been after you for weeks for this.”

Naomi shrugged. “I’ve been dodging.”

“But why? This is how legends are made, babe. You could be an actual Netflix binge-watch.”

Maybe. But the Naomi Powell story was hardly the fairy tale they were hoping for. Or maybe it was. It was just that the early stages had been a hell of a lot grittier than Cinderella. And the later stages had no Prince Charming in sight.

“I’ll call him back,” Naomi said firmly, reaching for the sticky note and letting Deena know the conversation was closed. For now.

“Last message,” Deena said, reading the final pink Post-it Note in her hand. “And it’s a weird one. Some lady called saying you’d been approved for an interview with the co-op board. I thought you already found your new place?”

Naomi frowned. “I did. I signed the lease for that condo in Tribeca last week. Did Ann indicate that there’d been some sort of issue?”

“Wasn’t Ann. This woman was Victoria, and the apartment she was talking about was Upper East Side, not Tribeca.”

Naomi wrinkled her nose. “Upper East Side?”

After her experience with Brayden, she wanted nothing to do with the haughty, old-money part of Manhattan.

Deena’s brown eyes scanned the note. “Yup. Building name is 517 Park Avenue?”

Naomi had been rotating slightly back and forth in her spinning chair, but she went still at the address. The familiar address. “What did you say?”

Naomi heard the sharp note in her tone, and Deena apparently did, too, because she gave Naomi a startled look. “You know it?”

Yeah, she knew it, all right.

And it was exactly that lurid part of her past that Dylan Day would just love to get his hands on.

And exactly the part that Naomi had spent a decade trying to forget.





WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 26

Naomi could have handled it over the phone, but in the end her curiosity got the best of her.

Which was stupid. She should have been packing up her office and her apartment, preparing for a double move. To say nothing of the fact that eventually she’d have to deal with the production company that wanted to turn her life into a prime-time special. And that wasn’t counting all the other stuff that came along with running your own billion-dollar company.

Instead?

Instead, Naomi quietly slipped out of the office at noon on Wednesday, and rather than grabbing her usual sushi lunch or favorite Ni?oise salad at her favorite Lower East Side bistro, she found herself heading uptown.

To an apartment building she hadn’t thought about in years.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true. She had tried not to think about it for years. She’d been mostly successful—except for the times when her mom’s relentless bitterness had gotten under Naomi’s skin, forcing her to remember.

Naomi paused outside the building and studied the facade of 517 Park Avenue. It looked . . . the same. Which was probably the point. Here on the Upper East Side, prewar architecture wasn’t considered old; it was dignified. The highest praise in this part of town.

And just like that, as though a cloud had passed over her, Naomi felt herself change. It was as though the Stella McCartney dress, the shoes and purse that independently cost more than the rent on her first apartment, disappeared.

As though she were no longer Naomi Powell, the hotshot “girl boss” who had taken corporate America by storm.

Instead, she was Naomi Fields. The bony nine-year-old girl in hand-me-down clothes who didn’t belong in this part of town and had been reminded of it every damn day.

Grinding her teeth against the memory, Naomi straightened her shoulders and marched up the steps, chin held high.

The foyer smelled familiar, but she ignored the familiarity as she announced herself to the doorman and was pointed toward the small office to the right that she’d always darted past as a girl. The gray-haired woman behind the old-fashioned secretary’s desk was somewhere between middle-aged and senior citizen and probably had been for a very long time.

She peered at Naomi over her glasses. “May I help you?”

“I’m Naomi Powell. I have an appointment?”

“Yes, of course,” the woman murmured, turning toward a pile of manila file folders to her right and handing the top one to Naomi.

“Your interview is scheduled at twelve thirty. Have a seat in the office to your left, and take a moment to review your file. We received it by mail, which is why it’s a bit wrinkled.”

The censure in the woman’s tone was clear, but Naomi ignored it. What she should have asked was why she even had a file in the first place, by mail or otherwise.