Crossing the Line

For a moment, she wished she hadn’t said that, even though it was the truth. Wolfe and Baron were not notorious, and there was a reason for that. Jamison had started this business with an eye for clients who traveled in influential circles but didn’t make a scene. Businessmen, politicians, the occasional socialite. Once Elise had come on board, Wolfe and Baron had begun to expand into the celebrity arena but still handled mostly theater actors, artists, classical musicians, not rock stars. Handling these three reality TV stars was totally new ground for them, but Elise had been adamant about taking them on.

Nellie Bower, Paxton France and Tommy Sanders were going to put Wolfe and Baron on the map.

And Caite intended to be part of that. She eyed Jamison now. “I can handle them.”

Jamison narrowed his eyes. “What makes you think so?”

“Because I’m good at what I do. I told you. Because I think outside the box. Because I’m young and hip.” She paused with a smile. “Because I’ve actually watched Treasure House, unlike you.”

“Piece-of-shit show.”

“Oh, it’s a shit show, all right, which is why it gets the ratings, and why those three are so popular right now.” Caite shrugged. “Look, it’s no Doctor Who, but there’ve been some decent episodes.”

“You watch Doctor Who?”

Should she be offended at his surprise? “Um, duh. Yes.”

“I used to love that show as a kid.”

“Well, here’s some news for you, Gramps—it’s been updated since then.”

He looked startled at first, then gave her a grudging laugh that sent a thrill all through her. A laugh from her curmudgeonly boss was as rare as icicles in a Texas July. “Some people have lives, Ms. Fox. Like we do things other than watch television.”

Somehow she doubted that he had much of a life. It was all work with him. Hours in the office, hours outside the office. She didn’t know much about his personal life, other than that he had no wife, no kids and seemingly no family. Maybe he’d sprung full-grown from a trumpet, like in that old Greek myth she could never remember—and that would make sense, because he sure had the body of a Greek god.

Hold it in, girl, she counseled herself. He’s your boss and a little too bossy for you even if he didn’t sign your paycheck.

“I have a life,” she said instead, like a challenge.

He took it. She’d known he would. It was in the glint of his eyes and lift of his chin and something in the way his breath shifted. She’d watched him go head-to-head with too many people not to know what sorts of things got him going, but had she deliberately chosen this tone of voice, those words? Caite thought that maybe she had.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah,” she said in a lower voice, meeting his eyes without looking away. “A rich, full life that includes time for television, along with lots of other...things.”

Jamison pinned her with his gaze, his teeth bared a little in a predatory smile. “And you think I don’t have a rich, full life? Why? Because I don’t rot my brain with shitty reality television shows?”

“No,” she said on a low breath. “Because you don’t make time for those other things.”

For a moment, she thought he’d reach across the table and take her by the chin. Or, oh, God, fist his fingers in her hair. But of course he didn’t, and wouldn’t, even if he was suddenly looking at her as though she were Little Red Riding Hood and he a different sort of wolf. Still, the look made Caite shift in her seat, squeezing her thighs together, watching him look her over.

“Like what other things?” Jamison asked.

“When’s the last time you went dancing, for example?”

He frowned. “I don’t like to dance.”

She laughed. “I’m not surprised.”

For a moment, it was his turn to look offended. “What makes you say that?”

“You’re not patient enough to be a good dancer.”

“The hell does that mean?” His frown didn’t break his face the way it would’ve on another man. It only emphasized his intense good looks. “Not patient enough?”

Caite shrugged. “It means that even though you’re athletic and in good shape, you don’t have the patience to learn any sort of coordinated dancing. And freestyle would annoy you, trying to keep up with someone who wasn’t zigging left when you wanted to go right. You’d need a partner who understood you better than you know yourself in order to keep up with you.”

His mouth opened as though he meant to speak, but Caite kept up before he could.

“You don’t like crowds with loud music, and though you like to drink, you don’t like being around people who are out-of-control drunk. That’s why you don’t like the new clients, isn’t it? At least part of it?”

“They’re disgusting,” Jamison muttered, cutting his gaze from hers. He wiped at his mouth with his fingertips before looking back at her. “You seem to think you know an awful lot about me.”

“Sorry if I overstepped,” she said, not sorry at all.

Jamison wet his lips with the tip of his tongue. “You really think you can handle those three?”

“Yes. I really do.” Confidence was everything; Caite had learned that a long time ago. She smiled at him, hoping to get at least the hint of a grin in return, but Jamison only stared at her steadily. For a long time.

He broke first, finally. “Fine. You’re on it.”

“Hooray!” Caite cried.

He looked taken aback, then shook his head and sighed. “Hooray.”

“C’mon. Say it like you mean it,” Caite said, standing and leaning over the table to put her hands flat on it so she could look him in the eyes. She only meant to tease him—Jamison Wolfe had long impressed her as the sort of man who needed to be teased now and then. But at the way his eyes narrowed and mouth thinned, Caite worried she’d gone a little too far.

Then, watching him watch her, she began to hope she had.

* * *

“I’ll be able to call in every day.” Elise, looking tired, plucked at the comforter with a surreptitious look toward the bedroom door, where Steph was likely hovering. She gave Jamison a small smile. “And I’ll have my laptop. I can handle some stuff from here.”

“You should just take it easy.” Jamison settled on the edge of the bed to pat her hand, then had a second thought and twined her fingers in his. He and Elise had been friends since high school and had spent more than a few nights tangled up in the same blankets. Never lovers, always friends, they’d shared probably every dark secret each had ever had. He knew better than anyone how unbreakable she was. And still, looking at her now, so pale and somehow shrunken despite the disconcertingly enormous mound of her belly under the blankets, all he could think about was how close he might be to losing her.

“She’ll be taking it easy.” Steph peeked around the doorway. “If I have to tie her to the bed, she’ll be taking it easy.”

“Kinky,” Elise murmured with a loving smile toward her wife that lit her eyes but didn’t do much to put color back in her cheeks.

“Too much information.” Jamison squeezed Elise’s fingers and stood. “I’m going to head back to the office. I’m glad you’re feeling better, and you take care of yourself. Stay in bed, do what the doctor tells you, you hear me?”

“Jamison, hang on. Stay a minute. Steph, baby, can you bring me some hot tea?” When the other woman had gone, Elise turned to him. “You and Caite have the new clients covered, yes?”

He hesitated, thinking about the conversation he’d had yesterday evening with the wily Ms. Fox. “She says she’s good to take them over.”

“You’re going to have to let her. We hired her for a reason, you know.”

“You’re the one who told me the triplets of destruction were going to be our name makers. And you want me to leave them in the hands of our junior office assistant?”

Elise laughed. Hard. “She’s a junior account manager, and she’s been taking on client work since a few months after she started. Caite has a good strong PR background, first of all. And social media savvy. Which is supposed to be our thing, you know. Remember?”

“I remember.” He’d always been much better at the background aspects of the business. Getting clients and keeping them. Negotiating. Not the day-to-day handling of them, or even of the office itself. That was Elise’s expertise, and now, he guessed, Caite’s.

Elise looked at him. “You can’t handle everything alone, Jamison. You’re going to have to let her do her job.”

“And if she totally screws up? What then?”

“She won’t.” Elise held up a hand to keep him from saying more. “But if she does, look...those crazy kids have their own mess already. It’s not like we could make anything worse for them. If anything, we should pray they screw up, big-time, and soon, so we can actually work to redeem them.”

“You’re good at that.” He laughed, thinking of a lot of the things with clients that had happened over the years. Press releases in the beginning, carefully crafted statements of apology. More recently, well-timed tweets or Connex updates.

“You need to relax.” She eyed him. “You don’t want to be the next one to end up in the hospital bed.”

For a moment, he thought about laughing off her concern, but then he shook his head. Elise had been there with him when his dad died, too young, of a stroke and heart attack brought on by a lifetime of unhealthy habits. “I take care of myself.”

“Sure. You run, you watch what you eat to the point where I wonder if you even like food. But you don’t take care of yourself, honey.” She paused. “I worry about you.”

“You shouldn’t.” Her words sent a flash of heat through him. Embarrassment more than comfort. They’d been friends for a long time, and she could look right inside him, down to his core, but that didn’t mean it ever felt easier to be seen that way. Jamison liked his walls high, strong and topped with iron spikes.

“Well, you can’t stop me. Now get out of here before Steph chases you out with a broom. Dinner next week?”

“Yeah. Here, I presume.” He grinned, ducking away from the pillow she tossed at him. “I’ll bring something good.”

“You’d better.” She sighed as the door creaked open and Steph appeared with a tray laden with tea and goodies. “Even though it looks like I’m going to be thoroughly spoiled as it is. Thank you, baby.”

He turned away as they kissed, another tickle of heat creeping up the back of his neck at the display of affection. It wasn’t that he was...jealous, he thought as he ducked out of the room and headed for his car. Relationships were more work than they were worth. He’d had a few girlfriends over the years, and every one of them had turned out to be jealous, greedy and, eventually, demanding. Even the ones who’d claimed they were only interested in something casual. Which said too much about his taste in women, he admitted as he drove back toward the office. Women were a lot of work, and he wasn’t the sort to be lonely, so why, then, did the memory of the sparkle in Elise’s eyes when she looked at her wife leave him with such an ashen taste in his mouth?

Chapter Three

Bobby, pushing his glasses up on his nose, looked up as Jamison got off the elevator. “Mr. Wolfe. You have several messages, and—”

As if on cue, Jamison’s phone trilled from his pocket. He noted the name of the caller and sent it to voice mail. He waved at Bobby dismissively and kept going. He had stuff to take care of first. Messages could wait.

“And Ms. Fox is in the conference room with the clients from Treasure House,” Bobby called after him.

Jamison stopped in his tracks, spinning on one heel. “Huh? They’re here?”

“In the conference room,” Bobby repeated, standing to point down the hall.

As if Jamison didn’t know where the conference room was.

Before Jamison could sneak into his office, the conference room door opened, and Caite poked her head out. Her face lit when she saw him; the grin that spread from ear to ear was bright and delighted. She gestured.

“Jamison! Hi. I’m glad you’re here. C’mon in and meet the Treasure House clients.”

It was the last thing he wanted to do, even though meeting all their new clients was something he always did. With an inward sigh and an outwardly neutral expression, he stalked down the hall. Caite squeezed his elbow as he pushed past her.

“Deep breath,” she murmured without losing a bit of her smile. “Their management is paying us triple the highest rate we’re currently charging, and we’ve already been mentioned on three of the top five gossip sites. The phone’s been ringing off the hook all day.”

He glanced at her. “Since when was it triple?”

“Since I had a little talk with their manager,” Caite said as her smile widened and she made a sweeping gesture to encompass the three people seated at the other end of the conference room table. “Jamison Wolfe, I’d like to introduce you to our newest members of the Wolfe and Baron family.”

Here we go, Jamison thought. The shit show has begun.

* * *

Nellie Bower and Paxton France had been vociferously denying any sort of romantic relationship, but watching them canoodle on the opposite side of the conference table, Caite knew the pair were shagging like 1970s rec room carpet. Tommy Sanders didn’t seem at all fazed by the way Nellie reached to pluck bits of imaginary lint off of Paxton’s broad shoulders, which meant he also knew the two were involved. Not that it would’ve been easy to ignore, since the three of them had been teamed up for the past two years, contractually obligated to be together both in and out of the house in which a multimillion-dollar prize was hidden. This was the show’s second season, and the stakes had risen from $3 to 5 million. If the three of them could last until the end of the season and sign on for another, the prize would rise to $7 million.

But it wasn’t Caite’s job to keep them together. Or break them up, for that matter. Her job was to spin the exploits of these three into something the public would eagerly consume, no matter how stupid they acted. Or how boring. Using her social media management skills, her task would be to keep them in the public eye without oversaturating the market, as well as make sure that everything they did met the corporate sponsors’ approval.

She loved it already.

“So. Guys,” she said, pinpointing her gaze on Nellie and Pax, who were ignoring her totally for a whispered conversation full of sibilance. Tommy, however, looked at her with the same deadpan stare he’d become famous for. “Let’s talk about this week’s schedule. You’re off from the house this weekend, right?”

The team got weekends free to leave the treasure house and live in the real world while the crew reset the booby traps and clues they’d have to fight and find in the next week’s filming. Pax bore a distinct set of fading bruises on his dark cheek that Caite had already seen covered in a blast of comments on the show’s Connex fan page, though Pax himself had been smart enough not to breach his contract by mentioning what had caused them in anything he’d said. That had only fueled the fire of commentary as fans tried to figure out what had happened, how close to dying he’d come, the extent of injuries they couldn’t see. It had been ratings genius, though Caite suspected it was mostly unplanned on his part. She was having a hard time believing Pax was smart enough to have planned that strategy.

“Yeah.” The answer finally came from Tommy, who gave his teammates a small roll of his eyes. “We got the weekend off. Gotta go back in Sunday night.”

“So tonight it’s parrrrty!” Nellie bounced in her seat and clapped her hands like a toddler promised a pony ride. Her long black hair, dyed beneath with blue and green stripes, flipped over her shoulders. “I’m’a get shit hammered!”

“There’s a shocker,” Tommy muttered.

From his seat, the formerly silent Jamison said, “Contractually, the three of you have to stay together at all times, right? During filming and not.”

“Yeah.” Pax nodded and sidled a tiny bit closer to Nellie, though it was obvious he was trying to make it look accidental. “All three of us. All the time. The Three Musketeers.”

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