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Janus took just a beat before answering. “She was our former publicist. The one we hope you’ll be replacing.”
3
…AND THEN I MEET THE OTHER ONE
I was still trying to process what I just heard. The twins had an affair with their last publicist. Both twins. At once.
My mind still spun. I tried to remember if I ever saw the woman around at any events I attended. But for the life of me I couldn’t recall what she looked like, or even her name.
“Who the fuck is this?”
My head jerked up at hearing Janus’s voice from across the room. Except it wasn’t Janus, obviously. He was still sitting right beside me.
Oh my God, oh my God, it was—
Leander Mavros. Movie star. Mogul. Rich and famous beyond all imagining.
I had assumed he wasn’t here. From rumors I’d heard, Janus sometimes acted as a body-double, so I’d figured Janus was taking the meeting for his brother.
I’d only just gotten my heart rate used to one Greek god taking up all the air in the room, and now there were two of them??
And why was Leander… staring at me like that?
He wasn’t staring at my boobs or anything rude—he was looking at my face, though his eyes did do a quick up and down scan, then he was back to squinting at me, a frozen, confused look on his features.
“Meet our new publicist,” Milo said at the same time Janus said, “Just someone we’re interviewing.”
Uh…
“No,” Leander said.
A single syllable.
Then turned as if he was going to go.
“Excuse me?” I said, embarrassed when it came out more like a squeak. And then I just got mad. Mad at how this meeting was going. Mad at my stupid, overheated cheeks that gave away my embarrassment for all to see. And mad that I’d been put in this position at all. For some godlike movie star to take one look down his nose at me and then dismiss me.
I hadn’t gotten where I was in this industry by letting important men walk all over me. I might rep teeny boppers, but I had to deal day in day out with the gatekeepers of the industry who were still annoyingly, overwhelmingly, and monochromatically male.
“Leander!” Milo had stood up outraged. “This is Hope Robins, an extremely talented publicist and fixer—”
But I put a hand out. I didn’t need anyone defending me.
“Start at the beginning,” I interrupted. “You said there’s a tape. Has it leaked yet? It’s likely just a matter of time so we need to start building multiple action plans for each scenario. We’ll have to be ready to change with the evolving situation. You’re men, so a sex tape won’t be as bad as if you were female, but the fact that both of you are in it together—”
I sucked in a breath, daring to glance at each of the three faces in the room. Milo looked eager, Janus seemed to be listening, Leander was brooding and bored-looking, so I finished quickly, “—obviously lends a salaciousness that could give this thing a longer news life-cycle than you might want. We don’t want an Armie Hammer fiasco on our hands.”
“It’s hardly fantasies of cannibalism!” Milo reacted, gesturing even more passionately with his hands than usual.
“And we didn’t hurt her,” Leander growled. “She was the one who came to us begging.”
“Is she saying differently?” I asked politely.
“Thankfully, no,” Milo said, sitting back down and running a hand through his hair. “You can see that plainly enough on the tape that she’s a… well, an enthusiastic participant. But when things were broken off, she didn’t take it well.”
“She was shit at her job,” Leander said, glass clinking as he poured himself a whiskey. “She thought fucking us meant she’d keep it even if she slacked off all the time, but that’s not how it works. It was explained repeatedly to her, so I hear.”
“Was there infidelity?” Then I paused. “I mean, did it even work like that?” I didn’t know how the rules of “situations” with more than one person worked.
“I assure you, Miss Robins,” Leander said, walking towards the window and looking out, glass in hand, “that unlike whatever tabloid image you have of us, we’re careful who we fuck. And we only do it one woman at a time.”
We?
Dear God, did that mean they always slept with women… together?
“What my brother’s trying to say,” Janus sounded irritated at his brother’s bluntness, “was that there was infidelity, but it wasn’t us. By the end, I found out Geena was sleeping with anything that moved. And she’d gone on from coke to meth. She was screwing up every booking.”
“She knew the rules and she broke them,” Milo reiterated.
Leander turned from the window, glaring at his brother and Milo. “If you two had told me what was going on sooner, maybe we could have stopped all this before it got out of hand. I’m not some piece of fine fucking china.”
