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“Welcome back, Grace,” Camille said, not bothering to look up as she pulled a half dozen electronic devices out of her oversized bag, tossing them onto the table.
“Thanks,” Grace murmured, not missing the way that everyone smiled at her in that too-careful way, as though she was likely to break at any second.
But as the meeting settled into its old, familiar rhythm, she started to relax a little.
She could do this. It was just like old times, except she was a little older, a little smarter.
In fact, it was better than old times, because Grace wasn’t ever going to let a guy get the drop on her again.
She half listened as Camille went around the table, asking for department updates. When Camille turned to the Love and Relationships section, Grace sat up a little straighter. She didn’t have any updates on her first day back, but she smiled and nodded at everything Riley and Julie said so that there could be no doubt that she was still a part of this crew. She even kept an approving smile pasted on her face as Emma spoke.
And then Camille dropped those dreaded magazine words that occasionally made the rounds at Stiletto but were almost never associated with the nearly flawless Love and Relationships department.
“… there have been some complaints.”
Wait. What? What?
Grace listened in dismay as her boss read letter after letter of complaint.
Riley held up a hand to stop their boss’s flow of words. “I’m sorry—did you just say that some readers think we’re naive?”
Oliver snickered. “As if you could ever be naive.”
Unperturbed, Riley gave him one of her sassy winks. Riley McKenna was anything but naive, at least in the ways of the bedroom. She managed to dazzle all manner of people, from homosexual men to heterosexual women. But her real talent was with heterosexual men, which was a good thing, seeing as she was Stiletto’s number one sex goddess. Riley didn’t just write about sex, she embodied it. Her long black hair had that perpetual just-rolled-out-of-bed look, and her bright blue eyes had a naughty, Marilyn Monroe kind of way about them. Most annoying of all? Riley McKenna could out-eat anyone Grace knew and still wore a size two.
All of which would make Grace hate her if Riley wasn’t just about the best damned friend she could imagine.
Of course, none of this was even remotely relevant to their boss right about now, as Camille was definitely less than pleased with her usual golden trio.
Or golden quad, Grace thought, with a quick glance at Emma.
“There’s just been increasing feedback that we’re not adequately tapped into the male perspective,” Camille said. “That we’re living in a female bubble.”
“Crazy, since this is a female magazine,” Julie muttered.
“Exactly,” Camille said, jabbing her finger on top of her notebook. “Just like Oxford is in a male bubble.”
Everyone exchanged a confused glance. What the hell did Oxford have to do with this? Grace was willing to bet most of them had never read it—she certainly hadn’t, beyond occasionally flipping through an issue Greg might have left on the coffee table.
Oxford was to men as Stiletto was to women—and seeing as how most everyone in the room was female, Oxford was about as familiar a reference as, say, jock strap. Only Oliver could pretend to relate, and even he made it clear to anyone who would listen that he preferred talking shoes over cars any day.
“I’ve had several meetings with Alex Cassidy over the past two weeks, and he’s been finding the same trend in letters from his readers,” Camille was saying. “Quite
simply, both Oxford and Stiletto are guilty of the same one-sided journalism.”
Grace lifted a hand to get Camille’s attention. “Who’s Alex Cassidy?”
“The new editor in chief of Oxford,” Emma Sinclair volunteered. Grace thought she heard something bitter in that tone, but a quick look at the other woman revealed nothing. Just a calm, nothing-fazes-me expression.
A quick glance around the table showed that Grace was the only one surprised by this news. What the hell had happened to Bill Heiner? He’d been Oxford’s editor in chief since before most people in this room were born. Being out of the loop sucked.
“Got it,” she said quietly.
But Camille apparently had bigger things to worry about than the fact that one of her most tenured columnists was out of the loop, because she was doing that weird hair-tugging thing that generally meant trouble for someone.
“So what’s the solution?” Julie asked. “You want one of us to grow a penis? Maybe throw in a couple token interviews with guys so we can get the man’s perspective and all that?”
“No, we need to address it more head-on than that,” Camille replied.
