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“Well then,” I respond, moving towards her and offloading them in her arms, “have them for yourself.” I don’t wait to see how well she bears the weight before turning around to Hayley. “Is this why Ivy wanted to see me—to tell me I received flowers?”
Hayley gives me a disapproving look as she shakes her head. “No,” she says. “It’s something else, I think. She’s waiting for you. Go on.”
I dump my bag and jacket on my now bare desk and walk to Ivy’s office. I’m too incensed by Brandon’s stunt to worry about Ivy. The Stawarskis were always the most insufferable people on Planet Earth, but thisis next level. And right now, I’m itching to get to my laptop and…
“Good morning, Georgina.”
Shit. I actually walked into Ivy’s office without realizing it.
I give her a smile as I return her greeting. She looks the same as ever, a stylish fifty-year old woman dressed in a white linen pantsuit. Her face is indecipherable as she asks me to take a seat.
I sink into one of her large leather armchairs. “I’m sorry I’m so late,” I say, my thoughts about Brandon receding in the face of a meeting. “There was…”
“A commotion in the name of Mr. Stawarski,” Ivy says, a hint of a smile on her face. “They sure do know how to draw attention, no matter the situation.”
I’m not sure how to feel. Ivy didlike all of my articles about the Stawarskis. But she also seems impressed by his antics.
“I’m only a few years older than they are, and I still remember them as young men,” Ivy says. “The whole city was crooning over them. I swear, there were girls ready to kill their whole family for a date with them.”
I keep my smile on my face while my anger against Brandon mounts. Thisis why he’d sent those flowers. All he ever had to do to win a woman over was give her a crooked grin and a tiny bit of his attention. And then, he could move on to more important things.
I’m going to show him.
“I see,” I say, not wanting to discuss the Stawarskis any further.
“So…” Ivy starts, leaning back in her chair and looking at me. Now I am getting nervous. It’s unlikely I’m going to get fired, but this appears to be important. “I thought you ought to know first, seeing as you’re the reason the Stawarskis are so interested in us.”
My eyes narrow. “Interested?”
Ivy gives a slight nod. “I’m not certain anything will come out of this.” She pauses for a moment. “Correction: I’m not sure Mr. Stawarski wants anything to come out of this. But he hasput an offer out there, and I’m certain it has something to do with you.”
My confusion is mounting by the minute. “What offer?” I ask.
“He wants to buy the magazine.”
A jolt of shock courses through me. “What?”
“As I said, it’s not official, and I highly doubt that he wants the deal to go through. That’s why I haven’t told anyone yet. But, if it werea serious offer, the board would be tempted to consider it. It’s a generous one, and Wharton Media would retain complete control of the magazine…”
But I’ll have to stop writing my articles,I think, feeling hatred well up in me. The over-confident, self-assured ass. All he needed to do to shut me up was to throw a few dollars and buy the magazine. I begin to plan how to get back at him in my next article, maybe by hinting about the sale and what I know of it. But then, from everything Ivy said, she might cave to Brandon.
And then I’d really have to shut my mouth.
“You can’t sell,” I say abruptly, cutting her short in the middle of her sentence. I’m too harried to care. Another layer of hatred for Brandon washes over me. With a few sly moves, I was now the bothered, angry person, not him. “You can’t.”
Ivy leans towards me, her smile spreading to her eyes. “It’s not about whether or not Iwant to sell,” she says, sounding less like a boss and more like a favorite aunt. “It’s about whether or not Mr. Stawarski wants to buy.And I don’t think he does.”
I raise my brows, not daring to feel relieved. “How do you know that?”
She shrugs. “Because if Brandon Stawarski wanted our magazine, he’d have made an offer decades ago. This is merely for show.”
My nostrils flare. “So, what…he’s just trying to prove that he can buy it? To get me—us—to back down from writing about him?”
Ivy shakes her head. “Not quite,” she says. “But he’s playing a game. He’s made a supremely generous offer—one the board can’t turn down. You’ve been behind most of the articles against him. If he does buy the magazine, you’d have to stop writing about him or leave.”
“So, what do I have to do to get him to back down? Stop writing about him?”
“No,” she says, and I relax. “But there is one thing that will probably stop him from pushing this ridiculous offer forward.”
