The Price of Scandal (Bluewater Billionaires) - Lucy Score Page 0,77

going to be pleased that the fixer they hired is now spending a good amount of his time keeping you in bed.”

I winced. “It was supposed to be a ploy. Give them something shinier and sexier to talk about than a near-arrest. And we got carried away.”

Daisy clapped. “It’s about damn time Emily Stanton got carried away with something besides reams of data and business reports.”

I rolled my eyes. “I’m hoping that the ploy part of it deflects from all the rumors surrounding my little fainting spell.”

My friends shared a telling look. I could only imagine the headlines I was avoiding. Emily Stanton’s overdose. Emily Stanton’s secret baby. Or worse, the truth: Emily Stanton too weak to carry the mantle of the company she built.

But I didn’t need to waste my time worrying about public opinion. That’s what Derek was for. That and aggressive orgasming.

“So let me tell you about Derek’s shower guest and his unprepared ass,” I said, changing the subject before the mood could falter.

“You went up the butt on him?” Cam’s mouth formed a perfect O.

“I don’t care who you are. That’s hot,” Daisy said.

“Anal play can lead to a new level of vulnerability in relationships,” Luna added helpfully.

“Oh, it wasn’t me. It was Brutus.”

Lady Raquel breezed by and dropped another pitcher of Bloody Marys on the table. She gave a glittery wink.

The novelists next-door erupted into giggles over a sex scene gone bad.

Right now, everything was good. And I was going to do everything in my power to keep it that way.

32

Derek

My office on a Sunday looked much like my office on a Wednesday. I was going to have to re-institute required weekends off for the team.

It wasn’t that I was a whip-cracking, demanding boss. I’d simply hired people who cared very deeply about their jobs.

Which was why I was in the midst of a Chinese-takeout-fueled informal staff meeting on a Sunday afternoon.

Rowena pointed her chopsticks at one of the screens on the wall. Her feet, clad in scarred combat boots with magenta laces, were propped up on the metal top of the conference table. “Okay, screen one,” she said around a mouthful of pork lo mein. “These are Emily Stanton’s highest performing social media posts in the past month. Pre- and post-kerfuffle.”

We didn’t like the term “scandal.” Created by my very creative team, our rating scale of undesirable situations began at Oops and escalated to the top with WTF. WTF was reserved for Code Black, angry mob, nuclear fallout. Emily’s situation fit in at kerfuffle on the higher end of challenge but still winnable.

Rowena walked us through the data—no real surprises. A large swing of general attention. A significant uptick in negative perception. Trolls had crawled out of the woodwork to add their worthless two cents.

Even after all these years of “fixing,” it surprised me how many people took such vicious pleasure in eviscerating their fellow humans. Often for such infractions that included having the audacity to star in a movie, write a book, or—God forbid—not be a size eight or smaller. Were I a bigger person, I would feel pity for them. But I wasn’t. So I simply wished each one of them a scorching case of herpes and moved on with my day.

“So our beloved data whores coughed up this gem,” Rowena said, clicking to the next slide.

The data whores—or analysts, as they were called for human resource purposes—were Ancarla, a former CIA analyst, and Roger, a world champion gamer/semi-pro hacker, that I had enticed into the corporate world with generous bonuses and flexible schedules. Half the time they didn’t even come into the office, and when they did, one of them was invariably in pajama pants. Somehow, I’d ended up with both of them present on a Sunday.

Ancarla chomped on a stem of black licorice, dessert to her beef and broccoli, and then pointed it at the screen.

“You’ll see the spike in media mentions here the night of the kerfuffle. It’s stayed consistently high since. The smiley face line denotes our measurement of public positivity—likes, nice comments, wardrobe items selling out, etc. The barfing face line represents the trolls, the baddies, the ‘how dare you be a human’ judgies.”

Every time the vomiting faced negative line redrew itself, a fart noise sounded.

I was the only team member over the age of thirty, and sometimes they made me feel like I was over seventy.

“Stanton had a pretty sterling rep prior to this deal,” Roger said, picking up the thread. He had an open energy