“Because she was sneaky, underhanded—which aren’t actual flaws in a reporter—but add disloyal, toss in shaky ethics, and top it off with downright mean. She booted two interns just this past year, sent them both off in tears. Fired her last assistant and went out of her way to bad-mouth her to screw with her chances of getting another job.”
“I need those names.”
“You don’t seriously believe—”
“I need them. What else, who else?”
Taking a minute to settle, Nadine breathed out slow. “She went after my people—my admin, my researchers. Subtly and not-so, because they wouldn’t give her information on me. And she tried strong-arming me to get to you.”
Forgetting Trina, Eve swiveled in the chair to face Nadine directly. “When? How?”
As they sat face-to-face in front of the mirror, Nadine’s foxy green eyes met Eve’s.
“The first time? After you saved my life—the first time there, too. After you kept Morse, that prick, from killing me. She brought me a damn fruit basket, tried to play the concerned colleague, which was bullshit so thick she could have smothered in it.”
“You know your bullshit,” Trina said as she worked, earning a quick smile from Nadine.
“I definitely do. What she wanted was dish, and I could respect that to a point. I was, for her purpose, a story. But she wanted details about you and Roarke, wanted more access to you, into your home, into your personal lives, and I said no—not through me. She…”
Nadine rolled her fingers in the air. “We’ll say intimated she could spin the story of my experience, and what happened that night, to twist us all up. Maybe we all set Morse up, maybe you had a reason to want him taken down. I told her to fuck off and spin away. She didn’t like it.”
“Never occurred to you to mention it to me?”
Nadine sent Eve a stra
ight, heated stare. “I handle my own.”
“Okay. Did she come back on you?”
“No, and I shrugged it off. Until the book hit, and the vid deal. She pushed again, hard. Pointed out to me a handful of stories in the tabloids about my personal life, the speculation you and I banged each other or—”
“What?” Eve jerked sharply enough to have Trina mutter a curse. “You and me?”
“That rippled along for a few weeks.” The annoyance on Nadine’s face shifted to sheer humor. “Don’t you pay any attention?”
“Not to crap like that.” Eve wasn’t quite sure if she should be amused or embarrassed.
“Sometimes you made a Roarke sandwich,” Trina put in. “Yummy mmm-mmm.”
Throwing back her perfectly groomed head, Nadine laughed. “Hard to argue with the delicious potential of that one. It’s the bottom-feeder gossip that baits clicks, then dies, Dallas. It’s tabloid bait. Her point to me? She’d fed that bottom, and could keep doing so unless I cooperated.”
Maybe she didn’t pay any attention, but Eve got the system. “You told her to fuck off.”
“I did better. I let her listen to the recording I’d made of our conversation where she’d told me she’d violated Seventy-Five’s rules of conduct, where she’d threatened me, attempted to extort me, which opened her to both criminal and civil action.”
Abruptly, Nadine shoved up from the chair. “Who the hell did she think she was dealing with?” The heated question came with a wide-arm gesture for emphasis. “I told her—and kept the recording going—that if she continued, if I so much as heard a whisper of her continuing to smear my reputation, yours, Roarke’s, to abuse or pressure any of my staff—or anyone else I learned of—I’d take the recording straight to the top. And if she wasn’t terminated immediately, I’d give the station a choice—her or me. And just who did she think they’d stick with?”
“Why didn’t you go to the top then and there?”
“Maybe I should have,” Nadine admitted. “I didn’t like her. I sure as hell didn’t respect her. But … she had a place here, Dallas. She was part of Seventy-Five. Unless she gave me no choice, I didn’t want to make the station choose, or set her off on some vindictive spree. She backed off, so I didn’t have to.”
“You’ve still got the recording.”
“Of course I do.”
“I’m going to need that. Who else did she push or threaten or try to exploit?”
Nadine dropped into a chair again, lifted a hand, nearly raked it through her hair until she remembered her on-screen appearance.