There was nothing inappropriate or creepy about it—and certainly nothing that would be characterized as sexual harassment—he just seemed to like her.Reallylike her.
The worst part was that she liked him, too. He was a nice guy. Funny and smart, easy to talk to, and nice-looking in that bookish, Tom Hiddleston kind of way.
In other circumstances she might have returned his interest. But he was her boss, and she wouldn’t go there. Ever.
Women had it hard enough in this business without doing things that legitimately undermined their position. The newsroom might not be the old boy’s frat house it had been once, but there was still enough of that around not to want to feed into it. Being accused of sleeping her way to the top wasn’t going to happen.
She’d been ignoring her boss’s interest and subtle cues, desperation for this job making her hope it wasn’t there. But if Paulie had noticed, she couldn’t delude herself anymore that her credentials alone had gotten her this job. She may have been a rising hotshot reporter five years ago, but that was a long time ago.
Whatever Jameson’s reasons for hiring her, he had taken a chance on her and she was determined to make it pay off for both of them with top-notch work. It was the best way to shut up Paulie as well.
But that wasn’t all or even the most important part of what was driving her this time. It was finding out what happened to her brother, and the information she’d received tonight just might help her do that.
Anxious to delve in deeper to what was in that envelope, she was halfway to the stairwell before she realized someone was standing there.
She looked up to see Nancy, another member of the team, holding the door open. From the younger woman’s chagrined expression, Brittany didn’t need to ask whether she’d heard.
Nancy waited until Brittany was next to her to speak. “Don’t listen to Paulie. He’s still angry about his protégé leaving for the online job. He wasn’t going to like anyone who replaced him.”
Brittany smiled at her for trying, but they both knew there was more to it than that. “No, Paulie is right. I need to do better or I’m going to be out of a job.” Jameson had as good as told her as much. “But with my next article, I hope to do that.”
Nancy’s brows lifted in surprise. “You onto something?”
Brittany smiled at her friend, whose eyes looked bleary and red behind thick glasses. “I hope so.”
Nancy was a couple years younger than Brittany’s twenty-seven, and although she was technically her senior on the team, Brittany had been helping her out lately. Nancy had yet to make her mark in the investigative reporting world. Despite good stories and solid reporting, her articles hadn’t really connected with their audience.
She was a talented writer and probably would have found an appreciative audience twenty years earlier, but she didn’t know how to spin her stories so that they appealed to the modern forty-character social media reader. Even readers of traditional newspapers, whether in print or online, still needed to have their attention grabbed and held. It wasn’t tabloid reporting, as Paulie accused. It wasn’t the quality of the story or work, just the way it was presented.
Suddenly, something occurred to her. “You must be onto something, too. It’s late.”
Nancy shook her head. “I wish. Paulie asked me to stay and help him with some research. It was nothing, but it took longer than I expected. I was just leaving when I heard what he said about you and Jameson.” She blushed, hastily correcting herself. “I didn’t mean... No one thinks...”
Brittany could see the woman’s discomfort and tried to put an end to it, even as her words filled her with dismay. God, was that what everyone thought? “I know what you meant. Don’t worry about it. Besides, I have a hot date this weekend.”
“You do?”
The level of Nancy’s incredulity might have been embarrassing if it weren’t warranted. Brittany nodded andpulled out her phone to show her the picture on the app. “Cute, huh?”
Nancy let out a low whistle. “I’d say. But hockey? I didn’t think you were a sports fan.”
Brittany shrugged. “Not usually, but we’ll see. I just hope he has all his teeth.”
Nancy laughed and said good night.
At last Brittany hurried up the stairs, eager to get a good look at the fruit of a long and difficult night.
Two
Who knew relaxing could be so exhausting?
John kicked back on the brown plaid polyester sofa that would have looked right at home in a frat house from the sixties, popped a beer, and put his feet up on the coffee table. He grabbed the remote to turn on the TV and started to flip through the channels.
No one could ever call him a pessimist. Hope sprang eternal every time he sat down to watch TV. But the only sports he could find were soccer and a replay of an earlier track and field meet, which the Finns called “athletics.”
He would fucking kill for an A’s game. Hell, at this point he was so desperate, he’d even watch the Giants. He just couldn’t get behind soccer. He didn’t care how many people in the world loved it; watching grown men roll around on the ground in fake pain to try to get a penalty call was embarrassing. Give him a real sport like baseball, basketball, American football, rugby, or water polo any day of week.
Yep, little-known fact: water polo was considered the toughest sport in the world when taking together speed, endurance, strength, agility, skill level, and physicality,beating out Aussie rules football, boxing, and rugby. And that was after the mandatory deduction of man points for the weenie bikini.
