He kisses me on the forehead. “Until next time, Tiger.”
25
Gabriel
Alexis fiddles nervously with the bow on her shirt. I watch her, amused by how cute she looks with her nose wrinkled, batting at the piece of silk like a curious feline. As though she feels my eyes on her, she pauses and looks up.
“What?” she says.
I smile. “Nothing.”
She frowns but misses her opportunity to retort when Laura knocks on the door and leads our guest into the office. Alexis wanted to do this interview alone, and I understand why. Victor Crawshank claims his article will focus on Alexis’ work in Bellucci Inc.’s charity division, so she doesn’t need me for that. However, I’ve met Crawshank before at a couple of PR events, and as far as I’m concerned, the man’s a snake. I told her not to take the interview, but since she insisted, I’ve decided to sit in on it just in case.
I wouldn’t be so worried if we hadn’t had a run of tricky interviews recently. With the murder investigation still ongoing, Alexis and I have been very much in the public eye. And that has made fighting a war that much harder.
Crawshank glides into the room on a cloud of expensive cologne. He’s in his forties and has silver streaking through his neatly combed hair. He wears a simple polo shirt and chinos, like he has just come off the golf course, and gives Alexis two air kisses before shaking my hand. I can tell she begrudges him for it.
“Thank you for seeing me,” Victor says, settling down on the chair opposite us.
“Thank you for coming,” Alexis says with an easy smile. “Would you like a drink?”
“Oh, just a black coffee for me,” he says in Laura’s direction. To us, he adds, “I’m fasting.”
“How nice,” Alexis says, that same smile still firmly lodged on her cheeks.
Victor pulls a notepad out of his satchel and fluffs his feathers. “I must say, when I heard I was going to get to sit down with both yourself and the CEO of the company, I felt like a very special boy.”
“I had a free afternoon, and it has been such a long time since we last spoke,” I reply congenially.
His green eyes flash with wicked amusement. “Too long.” He pulls out a pen. “Shall we get started?”
The interview is pretty standard at first. Victor asks a couple of questions about which charities we run, and which of them we just furnish donations to. Alexis impresses me with how knowledgeable she is. Considering she’s only been on the job for a few weeks, she can recite more facts and figures than I could and seems to know each of our charities inside and out.
Then Victor moves on to slightly more personal questions. He asks these between sips of his black coffee, setting the scene so that it seems like he and Alexis are just old friends gabbing on their lunch break. Where did she grow up? What was her family like? Why did she make the move from journalism to charity work?
Alexis answers these easily. She spent some of her childhood in Kansas, left when she was very young. She grew up amidst New York City’s skyscrapers and barely remembers Kansas at all. They were a loving family, and she misses her parents all the time. An opportunity arose to take on this new challenge, and she thought she could do more good by getting her hands stuck into it than just by writing about it.
And then Victor asks, with point-blank sincerity, “When you say an opportunity, do you mean the blatant nepotism you enjoyed following your tryst with Bellucci Inc.’s enigmatic CEO?”
My hand curls into a fist, and I picture myself tossing Victor through the plate-glass window. Alexis doesn’t answer straight away, and Victor blinks, takes a sip of his coffee, and continues staring at her.
I’m just about to announce the interview is over when Alexis laughs.
“Well, I wasn’t expecting that, Victor, but I suppose I should have been,” she says.
“Why’s that?”
“Because that’s how it looks, isn’t it? I mean, in reality, that’s what it is. I was put into this position because of my closeness to Gabriel, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t deserve it. I didn’t kick anyone out of the job. This position was created for me to consolidate the many loose threads of our charity work and to hone our efforts.” She continues to reel off facts and figures about what she has accomplished so far since