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“You’re clever, Elsa. You’ll find some fluff that will keep them entertained.”
“Thank you for pointing out the obvious, for Iamclever, but I can’t market the first-ever interview with Hale Wheeler, which people are going to flip about, and change plans to tune into, then broadcast us staring at each other for an hour.”
He sounded annoyed when he asked, “This is going to last an hour?”
“Hale!” I snapped. “It’s your first-ever interview. It’s hardly going to be fifteen minutes.”
“Talk to me about Trail Blazer,” he suggested, referring to the non-profit he’d started with Judge Oakley.
“I plan to,” I retorted, jerking my head toward his phone. “As you could see with the five questions I have about it.”
“Stretch that out.”
I shook my head. “People want to know about you. Your hopes and dreams. What you’re looking for in a woman. Who are you dating? Do you like LA, or New York, or some other place best? What do you read? What’s your favorite movie? What do you enjoy doing when you aren’t working? What was it like growing up with Imogen Swan and Tom Pierce as close family friends? What was it like growing up with Corey Szabo as your father?”
“You are absolutely not asking me about my father.”
With the way he said that, the look on his face, and the manner in which his father left this world, it went against every journalistic instinct I possessed—and considering the fact my first interview was conducted with my dad about his accounting business when I was seven, there were many—I immediately backed down.
“Okay, Szabo is off-limits.”
“Genny and Tom, too. And Mika. And Duncan. And Chloe, Judge, Matt and Sasha.”
Mika was Tom’s new partner.
Duncan was Genny’s new husband.
The fact that the rock-solid marriage of Tom Pierce and Imogen Swan fell apart and left those two to find new love was some of the biggest celebrity news that had happened in this millennia.
And people would want to know about all of it.
“Hale!” I exclaimed in frustration.
He made to move out of the space, murmuring, “You can sort it.”
I caught him by grabbing his biceps. He had a suit on, but I couldn’t miss the steel under my fingers. It was so firm, and felt so surprisingly good, I was momentarily dazed by it.
And then I realized he’d stopped and was staring down at me.
“We need to work this out,” I told him. “It doesn’t have to be hard-hitting. You don’t have to bare all. And you have final approval of the broadcast, so there won’t be anything out there you’re not happy with. But you have to give me something. If you don’t, there’s no point in doing it.”
“And if I don’t, you’ll dig up whatever you can find and put it out there anyway.”
That felt like a slap across the face. So much so, I took my hand from him and stepped away.
He was watching me closely as he remarked, “It’s the business you’re in.”
“No, it isn’t,” I replied.
“So you didn’t sit down with my mother and let her spout lies about Genny and Tom on your show?”
They weren’t lies and we both knew it.
But I’d let him have that one.
“Your mother came to me.”
“Because no one else would let her talk smack about Gen and Tom like you did.”
