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“Stella fired you, Eden.” Mike studied the bulletin board she’d hung over the filing cabinet. Eden had filled it with pictures of her family: Her mom doing yoga on a retreat in Belize. Her dad teaching at the university. Her brothers doing stunts on their BMX bikes. Pops and Mimi celebrating their fiftieth on a nudist beach. Eden had used stickers to cover her grandparents’ most embarrassing parts, but Mike still did a double take before he continued. “I don’t care how you’ve fixed things up in here. You’re still working in a janitor’s closet while Stella hired someone else to do your job.”
Eden tried to keep her chin up, but it was getting harder and harder to do. The poor lighting in the closet had given her a headache. The filing cabinet was too low for her chair, and her back hurt from leaning forward. And the disinfectant smell had her eyes burning and her stomach churning. But she still wasn’t ready to admit defeat. “Once she reads my story on prostitution, she’s going to give me my job back.”
Mike released his breath. “I don’t care how great your story is, Stella’s not giving you your job back. Not when the college coed who took over your human interest stories is working for free.”
“What?” Eden felt her heart take a dip when Mike nodded.
“I guess she’s taking journalism classes at the university and needs the experience. So she offered to work for free.”
“So Stella fired me so she could fill my job with free labor?”
“Pretty much. And can you blame her? She’s trying to keep this newspaper afloat as more and more people are getting their news from the web. Hell, the way I see it, all of us are going to be out of jobs in a few years. Which is why I’m going back to school to get my teaching degree.”
“But I thought you loved reporting.”
“I do love it, Eden. I always will, but I love to eat more.” He studied her. “I’m not going to convince you to give this up, am I?” When she shook her head, he laughed. “Okay, I tell you what. You write your story, and I’ll give it a once-over and see if I can’t give you some helpful hints for how to make it more hard-hitting.”
“You’d do that for me?”
“Sure.” He shoved his hands in the front pockets of his pants and studied the floor for a few seconds before he continued. “So you want to go to dinner tonight? And don’t use work as an excuse. I know you’re off on Wednesdays.”
“Who’s going?”
He shrugged. “Just us. I was thinking of a date.”
Eden was surprised. She had no idea that Mike was interested in her. But now that she thought about it, he had stopped by her desk a lot and was constantly asking her to go to happy hour after work. She had just been too wrapped up in her stories to notice. Which made her feel guilty. Which, in turn, made her agree to something she really didn’t want to do.
“Okay.”
His face lit up. “Great. You want to go straight from here?”
“Actually, why don’t we meet somewhere? I’d like to get in a run before dinner.”
Since setting her goal, she had run only once with Madison and Chloe. And with the marathon only a month away, she didn’t need to be going on dates as much as training. But on the other hand, Mike was a nice guy. And she needed to start thinking about nice guys—instead of intense billionaires with weird sexual hang-ups.
It had been two days since she’d seen Nash Beaumont. Two days since the dinner with her grandparents. She had felt bad about his brother getting stoned on her grandparents’ magic brownies. And even worse that it cut short their evening together. Once Grayson and Pops had started singing “American Pie” for the third time, Nash had made their excuses and ushered his brother down the stairs. He hadn’t looked back. Not once. But when Eden was getting in her car, she felt like he watched her from the dark windows of his condo. Or maybe she just hoped that he was as infatuated with her as she was with him.
And she was infatuated. She wanted to blame it on the story. But her infatuation had gone beyond writing a story. Even when she wasn’t doing research, her mind was consumed with Nash. She pictured him working at his office wearing one of his sexy suits. She pictured him at his condo wearing the jeans and Henley T-shirt he’d worn to the bar. But mostly she pictured him on a bed lying next to her wearing nothing at all. Even worse, she pictured him with Chloe lying on a bed wearing nothing at all. That image had kept her up most of the night. Which was crazy. He wasn’t her boyfriend. He was her story. Something she needed to remember. And that being the case…
“I better get back to my research,” she said as she swiveled her chair around. “I’ll see you tonight.”
Since Eden now knew everything about Nash the owner of French Kiss, she’d decided to find out more about Nash the Southern boy from DuPont, Louisiana. Thinking that small towns would probably report everything in their local newspapers, she started her search there. She found an article about the Beaumonts striking it big when they inherited French Kiss and another about their charity efforts: Deacon’s summer camp for kids, Grayson’s art auction for cancer, and Nash’s generous donation to a teenage suicide hotline. She could understand the summer camp for kids because it was on land that Deacon already owned. And she could understand Grayson’s art auction because he was an artist and their mother had died of cancer. But she didn’t understand the teenage suicide hotline. Why would Nash choose that as his cause?
She figured out the years he would’ve been in high school and added those dates to her search. But all she found were numerous mentions of Nash in the sports section for running in a touchdown or winning a wrestling match. Taking off Nash’s name, she left the dates and added suicides. Only one article came up. An article about a seventeen-year-old girl who had taken an entire bottle of her mother’s sleeping pills. Melissa Anderson went to the same high school as Nash. So Eden put Melissa’s name with Nash’s and hit search.
A picture popped up of Nash in an ill-fitting tuxedo, standing behind a young girl in a peach formal. They were a perfect couple. Nash tall, dark, and handsome, and Melissa petite, blond, and pretty. They were both smiling, and for once, Nash’s looked like it came from happiness. His smiles now were sexy, charming, and practiced. This one was real and made Eden sad. Or maybe what made her sad was knowing the girl would be dead by the end of the year. What would prompt a beautiful young girl who looked like she had so much going for her to commit suicide? And was her death what had taken the happiness out of Nash’s smile?
“You aren’t going to make this easy, are you?”
Eden swiveled to find Stella standing in the doorway, peering over the rim of her red-framed glasses at the janitor’s closet. When her gaze returned to Eden, she did not look happy. She wasn’t mad exactly. She just seemed tired and exasperated.
“Hi, Stella.” Eden lifted a hesitant hand in greeting.
Stella took her glasses off and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “I’m assuming you haven’t even been looking for another job.”
She got up from her chair. “I’ve got a story, Stella.”
Stella placed her glasses back on and stared at her. “What you’ve got is a stubborn streak a mile wide.”
