Dirty Headlines(14)
Judith Humphry.
She stood there, statuesque and holding a cardboard box to her chest, refusing to look petrified. With her sun-kissed hair and a dusting of freckles covering her button-like nose, she was the type of beautiful that suddenly sneaks up on you. The more you looked at her, the more you realized how striking she was. She looked like she belonged on a beach, running barefoot. Even in her size-too-big potato sack dress, she looked like freedom and tasted like a piece of the sky. I wanted to grab her and slam her over the desk, fucking her three ways to Sunday in front of my entire news crew.
Problem was, Judith also had a mouth. And it talked back. Always. It annoyed and delighted me in equal measure. Part of me wanted to screw her, the other to spank her. Those two didn’t necessarily contradict one another. But I wasn’t the type of asshole to sleep with an employee.
My father, however, didn’t seem to share my moral standards—or any morals, for that matter.
“We’ll make do without her,” I snapped. “Even after the intern cut.”
“She’ll make for pretty decoration in the newsroom.” He ignored me, sitting back and eyeing her. My father had an office over fifty floors up, on the sixtieth floor. However, he was here a lot, and he couldn’t exactly fire his own secretary and replace her with Judith. Mainly because he already had a reputation.
“She’s not a vase.” I refused to spare her another look.
My dad shrugged. “Both have holes.”
My eyelid ticked. Your face can have one, too, if you don’t shut the hell up.
I gathered the paperwork for the morning’s rundown and stood up. “Out of curiosity, are you moving her here because you want to fuck her or because you think I will?”
He’d obviously filled in the gaps yesterday when we’d made the Couture announcement. Mathias threw his hands sideways with a smile. “Why not both? This could go in so many interesting directions.”
“No. It won’t. You won’t touch her, and neither will I.”
“Because…?”
My father still hadn’t received the memo that he was well into his sixties, and that the only reason young women weren’t slapping him into unconsciousness was because he had more money than he could spend in six lifetimes and a name that was synonymous with power.
“Because she’s an employee.”
He raised an eyebrow, silently reminding me that when he set his eyes on a woman, he liked her small, dependent, and very much unemployed. If it was up to him, he would saunter over to Judith right now and whisk her to the same suite we’d shared at the Laurent Towers Hotel next door. If she proved to be good in the sack—which she would, I knew that, because I’d been balls deep in her not even a month ago—he would lock her in a golden cage and provide her with a luxurious life of imprisonment: an apartment, a private driver, a credit card with an outrageous cap—all to keep her happy and available until he got bored with her.
I pointed the stack of documents in his face. “Move her ass back to the fifth floor before the end of the day.”
He smirked. “May I remind you who is the boss around here?”
I pushed my door open, throwing him a glare soaked with repulsion. “The boss is the asshole who makes your show worth something, Father. You’re just the fucking purse.”
I ended up ignoring Judith for the rest of the day.
It wasn’t intentional, but satisfactory all the same. I didn’t even bother to show her to her desk. I wasn’t entirely sure what my father wanted her to do here, but I knew after the faceoff this morning I’d better keep her, or he’d find another way to sabotage my show.
She was probably a wannabe fashionista who thought working at Couture was an honor akin to receiving the Nobel Prize. I needed to get creative with giving her a task she could perform well that would still put some distance between us.
After lunching with James and his agent, I had to do a final rundown before the show. James was having a meltdown two floors below because the makeup artist didn’t have his shade of foundation and he was afraid he’d look like an Oompa Loompa, and an interviewee had been involved in a car accident on his way to the show.
Since Judith didn’t have a desk, a computer, or anyone to talk to, she sat on a chair by the door and wrote furiously in a thick notebook. I imagined her diary to be filled with her latest thoughts about Shawn Mendes and anal bleaching.
By the time I had a minute to spare, it was seven-thirty. Everyone had already left for the day. I grabbed a chair and plopped down next to her, folding my arms over my chest. She looked up from her notebook, uncrossing her legs and tucking her Chucked feet under her chair. She looked like a newswoman like I looked like a fucking clown. The mere acknowledgement of her existence here was spit in my precious time’s face.
“This wasn’t my idea,” I clarified, rubbing my face tiredly.
She broke into a smile—not fake, not calculated, and also not constructive to my twitching dick. “Good show.”
“I know.”
“But I thought your interview with Faceworld’s CEO could have gone differently.”
“Next time I’ll make sure he wears Hermes when he talks about the Russian hacker threats.”
“Or maybe next time make sure he’s not blowing smoke up your anchor’s ass, excuse my French.” If nothing else, her dig was kind of funny. “Seeing as your main competition ran a story tonight about how said CEO is now accused of being an avid user of Cotton Way, a darknet website where you can buy heroin and guns for competitive prices.” She handed me her phone.