“What do you mean, work with her?” Justin said, his voice strained, like he was willing himself to keep his tone civil. His fists were still tight in his lap.
“I mean that Ms. Page will be writing some stories for the in-house magazine about you and your dancing, and pitching the press on some non-brawl coverage. To try to shift the story back to what matters.”
Peter glanced over at Ivy and gave her an encouraging nod. She mustered another would-be confident smile for him, but it felt more like a grimace. Em had indeed been extremely displeased with her when she discovered that Ivy had ignored her advice and, in a haze of panic and cabernet sauvignon, accepted Peter’s job offer. All weekend long, Ivy had tried to convince herself it hadn’t been a mistake. She’d tried not to think about all those times she’d received press releases from marketing and PR reps in her inbox at theSun, how she’d scan them skeptically and think,You couldn’t pay me enough to do that job. But here she was. Peter had offered her a lifeline and, as it turned out, the salary he’d be paying her was enough to do this job and keep making rent.
“But she made this mess,” Justin said quietly, almost pleadingly. Ivy would have felt bad for him if he wasn’t looking at her like that, like she’d just drowned a puppy on live television.
“You made this mess,” Peter corrected. “And now you’re going to work with Ivy to clean it up.” Theor elsewas unspoken. But Ivy heard it, and she knew Justin did, too.
The moment Ivy stepped inside her apartment, she slipped off her heels with a groan and stood for a moment in the entryway, letting the tendons in her bare feet stretch out against the cool, hard floorboards. Em had been right. She didn’t like PR. Not if today was anything to go by.
Her first day at ANB hadn’t been entirely crappy. Her new colleagues—the ones who weren’t named Justin Winters, anyway—had been warm and welcoming. She’d interacted with most of the people in the marketing and publicity department before, but as opponents of sorts. It had been her job to get as much access and information as possible, and it had been Connie and Oliver’s job to give her as little access and information as possible, while still ensuring that she’d cover the company for the paper. Now they were teammates, and Connie had spent a lot of the morning helping her fill out a stack of paperwork, before showing her around the office and the parts of the studios they never showed to the press. Ivy had always enjoyed visiting the ANB studios, with its high warehouse ceilings and the water sloshing all around the wharves. As workplaces went, being right on the water beat being nine floors up in the towering, fluorescent-lit high-rise that housed theMorning Sun’s newsroom.
In the afternoon, Connie and Oliver had given her a bit of time to set up her office. Yes, wonder of wonder, miracle of miracles, she had anoffice. With four walls, and adoor. She could close it at any time and make a phone call, or eat an especially messy bowl of soup, and no one would be able to hear or see. Somewhere in her youth or childhood, she must have done something good.
It seemed more likely, though, that she’d be using her office door to muffle her shrieks of frustration. She’d been hired to work with one specific person, and that one specific person had made it very clear that he had no intention of workingwith her.
After Peter had ended their meeting, if it even counted as a meeting when one of the two other people present refused to speak to you, Justin had stalked out of the office. Ivy had scooped up her pen and pad and hurried after him.
“Justin!” Her heels snapped rapidly against the vinyl flooring as she chased him, but he kept walking like he couldn’t hear her. His long legs carried him down the hallway, past the physio room and almost to the men’s locker room, and she called out again. “Wait, please!”
He just kept walking. He was a few meters from the door to the locker room now and showed no signs of slowing down. She couldn’t very well follow him inside.
“I have some questions I need to ask you,” she called down the hallway, skittering a little in her heels as she tried to catch up to him. “I have some questions I need to ask you,” she repeated when she drew level with him.
He didn’t stop walking. “I have no answers for you,” he said shortly. “And I have rehearsal. Just make something up, like you always do.”
Ivy was so taken aback she broke her stride for a moment, then scrambled to catch up with him. God, he was fast, and he knew where he was going, while she was simply following along and trying to keep up.
Where was this animosity coming from? She was here to help him, after all. She’d walked away from journalism so she could be here, helping clean up the mess he’d made in that bar so that he could go to New York and dance at Lincoln Center. And he was treating her like she’d… well, like she’d punched him in the face.
“I don’t make things up,” she spluttered. He simply kept striding, eyes straight ahead, while she hurried alongside him, past the large framed posters advertising past seasons and past open studio doors. Some seemed empty, while piano musicfloated out of others, the sounds clashing and jangling discordantly around them as they sped down the hallway.
“Please, you wouldn’t know the truth if it danced on stage in front of you to a full symphony orchestra,” he all but growled.
What the hell was his problem? Peter had made himself clear back in his office: they had a job to do.Shehad a job to do. And she needed to do it well if she wanted to hold on to this position.
“Justin, you can’t just?—”
He stopped abruptly, and she nearly fell ass over tits trying to come to a stop herself. She righted herself and stared up at him. His stormy hazel eyes were avoiding hers, like he didn’t even want to acknowledge her existence. Seriously,whatwas his problem?
“I have rehearsal,” he said again, and then, cat-like, he slipped around her and through the door behind her. She spun and watched him, slightly stunned and a little out of breath. As she’d watched, he gave the pianist a friendly wave, then greeted the rehearsal director and his fellow dancers with a wide, warm smile. Ivy had stared. That smile was… well, as she’d already acknowledged, the man had a pretty face. And it was even more striking when he smiled like that. But if their interactions this morning were anything to go by, he wasn’t going to be offering her any warmth or any smiles any time soon.
Ivy trudged from the entryway into her living room and collapsed onto the couch, dropping her bag onto the floor and letting her head flop sideways. She was exhausted. She wanted to text Em and tell her she’d been right, that PR wasn’t for her, that she shouldn’t have rushed into this. But this was only the first day. Nothing was easy on the first day. Not ballet, not uni, not journalism. But they’d all gotten easier with time, and with work. So she’d give it some time. And even if Justin refused to work with her, she would find a way to get the job done.
Herstomach gurgled with hunger. She should get up, should make something for dinner. She always got cranky and miserable when her blood sugar dropped, and she shouldn’t just lie here, letting anxiety creep across her skin. What if she’d made a terrible mistake? What if she failed at this job, too? What if Justin refused to ever talk to her beyond insulting her, and Peter realized that she was no use to the company, and he let her go? He’d seemed to have confidence in her this morning, but then Justin had made it very clear that he wasn’t going to cooperate…
The guy seemed to really have it out for her. From the second he’d walked into Peter’s office, dislike and distrust had radiated off him. She could understand if he was a little angry that she’d written up the video of the fight, but news was news. She was just doing her job, and if she hadn’t done it, someone else would have. But he’d said something about one of her reviews, too. In the rush of paperwork and the fire-hose of first-day information—and her surprise at his attitude—she’d forgotten that he’d mentioned a review.
Frowning, she reached down and pulled her phone out of her bag, then pulled up the archive of her articles at theMorning Sun. There was her final byline, the story about the fight, with that lede she’d liked so much. It seemed to mock her now. She pulled up the search bar and typed in Justin’s name.
After a second, a few headlines popped up, reviews she’d written in recent years in which Justin’s name must have appeared. But he’d said… He’d said thefirstreview she’d written. She slid her thumb over the screen, going back in time until she found the first entry. The headline didn’t mince words.
AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL BALLET’S NEW STAR HAS SHINE, BUT LITTLE SUBSTANCE
Ivy hadn’t written that headline. Journalists rarely wrote their own heds; editors did that, with help from the audiencedevelopment team, whose job it was to figure out which headline would attract the most clicks. Still, it had appeared over her byline, and if she had objected to it, she could have asked Alan and the audience team if they could change it. Clearly, she hadn’t objected.
She clicked on the article and started to read. By the time she got to the second to last paragraph, she was wincing. She hadn’t pulled any punches. In her defense, she had said plenty of nice—and true—things about his feet. But she’d basically written them off as evidence that he was a vapid pretty boy with no depth or real talent.
