entire train ride to Midtown for my skin to return to its natural shade of oatmeal.
But my mind couldn’t process the afternoon as easily as my body could metabolize my adrenaline. As I wandered into the USA Times building, avoiding all possible eye contact, I replayed the exchange for the thirtieth time in as many minutes.
Thomas Bane wanted my help.
I would have laughed if I hadn’t been so astonished. Stupefied really.
I was starting to wonder why I’d agreed now that I was out of his blast radius. Maybe he’d fritzed my brain. Scrambled my frequency. It almost felt like warfare. Chemical warfare, and his primary weapon was pheromones.
I didn’t stand a chance.
The elevator was wall-to-wall people, from delivery guys to a pack of suits with briefcases, with me in the middle, tiny and pale and absolutely out of my element.
I muttered, “Excuse me,” weaving around people to exit once the doors opened, only slightly relieved to have open air. Because that open air buzzed with frenetic energy.
People zipped around the office, which hummed with the sounds of clicking keys and chatter, rustling papers and commotion. I thanked my lucky stars I hadn’t had to actually interview here. When my blog had gone viral, Janessa Hughes had reached out to invite me to blog for the paper as part of their Fiction Reviews column.
It was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. But Janessa had no idea I was a nervous mute in public.
It was a physiological response to a psychological hurdle I’d never overcome. Such was my curse as the colorlessly pale, eccentrically shy daughter of the Slap Chop fortune, who had grown up with a speech impediment. Not only was I an odd only child of inventors, and not only were we the wealthiest people in our provincial South Dakota town, but I couldn’t pronounce Ls or Rs.
I realize it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. When I was five, it was adorable. When I was ten, I was a pariah. And thanks to the cruelness of children, I’d spent my formative years crying in excess and escaping into books. I had a million friends there.
Even when my impediment had been corrected with years of speech therapy, I barely spoke. Which somehow made the bullying worse. I knew every word that rhymed with Amelia, and none of them were pleasant—pedophilia, necrophilia, achylia—the absence of gastric juices—plus a dozen other “philias” that were equally disturbing. Although, Popillia wasn’t the worst. But they were still a genus of beetle, and such was my lot in life.
Not exactly a happy place for a twelve-year-old girl. I was a ghost, pallid and silent, drifting through the halls in the hopes that no one would see me.
Sometimes, they didn’t. Sometimes, they did.
But I’d become a ghost girl through and through. And now, I had years of conditioning to break if I ever wanted my dream job.
Bag in hand, I made my way down the wide aisle bracketed with cubicles, heading for my editor’s office.
Janessa Hughes stood behind her desk, tall and beautiful. Her dark hair was loose and wavy, falling over the shoulders of her blazer. She looked comfortable there in her corner office, the floor-to-ceiling windows behind her looking out over the tip of Manhattan and the Atlantic beyond.
She was the epitome of power and control, everything about her lovely and severe. Her eyes sharpened when I passed through her open doorway, her lips lifting in a composed smile.
She waved me in, her gaze dropping to her phone. “Charles, don’t bullshit me. Can you get the story or not?”
“That’s what I’m trying to explain. There’s a hang-up. If I can’t get Senator Williams to meet, I can’t—”
“Then I guess you’d better figure out how to secure a meeting whether he wants it or not. I want the story on my desk Monday, Chuck. Otherwise, don’t bother coming in.”
Before he had a chance to respond, she disconnected the line with a cold press of a button.
When she smiled, it was warm and friendly and the exact opposite of the woman who had just hung up on poor Chuck.
“Amelia Hall,” she said amicably as she smoothed the rump of her pencil skirt and sat. “It’s nice to finally meet you in person. Please, have a seat.”
My heart galloped in my chest, and I was grateful she had given me an objective so I didn’t have to respond. I had a whole separate list of lines for this meeting, but as I sat, I found