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“Television? National television?” he asked weakly. He stretched his neck like a turkey. “Ah … it would be a wonderful opportunity, wouldn’t it?”
She shrugged. She didn’t know if it was wonderful or not, but it was undeniably an opportunity. Of course, she had just talked herself into a corner; publicity was exactly what she didn’t want. She undoubtedly had a serious character defect, since she couldn’t bear to let Ashford deWynter get the best of her in anything.
“Maybe you should run the idea by the powers that be,” she suggested, getting to her feet. If she was lucky, someone in the upper echelons would veto the idea.
He was torn between excitement and a reluctance to let her know that he had to ask anyone at all—as if she didn’t know exactly what his position was and how much authority it entailed. He was in the middle of middle management, and that was as high as his cream was going to rise.
As soon as she got back to her desk, Jaine called a war council. Luna, Marci, and T.J. all agreed to meet for lunch in Marci’s office.
She explained the current status to Gina and spent the rest of the morning, with Gina’s aid, dodging calls.
At lunch the four of them, fortified with a selection of crackers and diet sodas, gathered in Marci’s office.
“I think we can declare the situation officially out of control,” Jaine said gloomily, and filled them in on Gina’s sister and the calls that had come in that morning from NBC and People magazine, just as Gina had predicted.
They all looked at T.J.
T.J. shrugged. “I don’t see any point in trying to put out the fire now. Galan knows. He didn’t come home last night.”
“Oh, honey,” Marci said sympathetically, reaching out to touch T.J.’s arm. “I’m so sorry.”
T.J.’s eyes looked bruised, as if she had spent the night crying, but she seemed calm. “I’m not,” she said. “This just brought things out in the open. He either loves me or he doesn’t. If he doesn’t, then he should get the hell out of my life and quit wasting my time.”
“Wow,” Luna said, blinking her lovely eyes at T.J. “You go, girl.”
“What about you?” Jaine asked Marci. “Any trouble with Brick?”
Marci gave her wry, seen-everything-tried-most-of-it grin. “There’s always trouble with Brick. Let’s just say he reacted in typical Brick fashion, with a lot of yelling and a lot of beer drinking. He was still asleep when I left this morning.”
They all looked at Luna.
“I haven’t heard from him,” she said, and grinned at Jaine. “You were right about all the measurement offers and jokes. I’m just telling all the guys that my vote was for twelve inches, but the rest of you wanted to downsize. That generally stops them cold.”
When they stopped laughing, Marci said, “Okay, my giving the local guys an interview didn’t do the trick. What the hell—whaddaya say we stop trying to unring the bell and have fun with this thing?”
“DeWynter is running the idea of free national publicity by the suits upstairs,” Jaine said.
“Like they won’t fall on this like a starving woman on a chocolate bar?” T.J. scoffed. “I’m with Marci. Let’s punch up the list and really have some fun with it; you know, add some items to it, expand on our discussions and explanations.”
David and Shelley were going to have cows, Jaine thought. Well, they probably needed the milk.
“What the hell,” she said.
“What the hell,” Luna seconded.
They looked at each other, grinned, and Marci whipped out her pen and pad. “We might as well get started, give them a story worth printing.”
T.J. gave a rueful shake of her head. “This will really bring the crazies out of the woodwork. Did any of you get any weird calls last night? Some guy—I think it was a guy, could have been a woman—whispered, ‘Which one are you?’ He wanted to know if I was Ms. A.”
Luna looked startled. “Oh, I got one of those. And a couple of hang-ups that I thought might be him again. But you’re right; the way he was whispering, you couldn’t really tell if it was a man or a woman.”
“I had about five hang-ups on my answering machine,” Jaine said. “I had the phone turned off.”
“I went out,” Marci said. “And Brick threw the answering machine against the wall, so I’m temporarily messageless. I’ll pick up a new one on the way home this afternoon.”
“So probably all four of us got calls from the same guy,” Jaine said, feeling a little uneasy and grateful that she had a cop living next door.
T.J. shrugged and grinned. “The price of fame,” she said.
