The Boss (The Boss 1)

I had to tell Jake, and live with the consequences if Rudy found out.

Chapter Eleven

I didn’t get a chance to talk to Jake until Thursday. He’d been swamped fighting to keep all the lush photos that accompanied his Versailles story in the January issue. By Thursday morning, Neil and Rudy would have made their decisions, so I figured that either way, it was the right time to tell Jake about Rudy’s weirdness.

I found Jake in the conference room, looking down at glossy photos, their printed surfaces reflecting the light from the fluorescents. I couldn’t tell if he was thinking, or grieving.

“Hey... you.” I wasn’t great with telling people news I thought they didn’t want to hear. “How did it go?”

“I lost four pages.” He looked up with a humorless laugh. “Rudy Ainsworth thought they were redundant.”

I pretended to consider the four panels he had spread out in front of him. He’d brought up Rudy. That gave me enough of an opening. “Are you and Rudy not getting along?”

“Who can get along with that guy? He’s so jumped up his own ass and self-important.” Jake raked his hand through his hair.

I tried a different approach. “I can’t wait until I get into the beauty department. He hardly ever goes in there. Maybe that’s something you could do.”

“What, work in beauty?” he snorted derisively. “I think lip gloss and eye shadow are a little beneath me at this point.”

Wow, tell me what you really think, dick. I was beginning to wonder why I wanted to help him save his job. “Oh, but a lady mime in black leather and a powdered wig, that’s totally important journalism.”

Whatever point I’d been trying to make hadn’t penetrated even a little bit. My sentence was barely finished before he abruptly declared, “Neil Elwood is going to burn this place up like a dying star.” Jake snapped his fingers. “Poof, just like that, it’ll be gone.”

“I think stars take a lot longer to die than ‘poof’.” I had never seen him so petulant, so utterly unlikeable. He would have never dreamed of acting this way when Gabriella was running the show.

A good friend would have told him exactly why the photos should have been cut. They really were too similar, in that each one had some kind of fur accessory featured, and would speak to a modern perception of Soviet Russia rather than harkening back to French nobility. But I had a feeling he’d already been told this, and wouldn’t see my criticism as helpful. Instead, I told him, “Well, I think I’m going to just keep my head down. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and I would really like to avoid a grease stain.”

He smiled at that, but reluctantly. “You know, I shouldn’t be telling you this.” He picked up a photo and dropped it. “Don’t get too comfy. There are some... things in the works. I’m trusting you not to pass that along.”

Pass what along? Some vague pronouncements that were grandiose in their pretentiousness? I nodded solemnly. “Absolutely, I understand.”

Then I got the hell out of the conference room. Jake had always had his little oddities, like his sometimes embarrassingly passionate feelings about his own work, but it was the kind of stuff I had been able to overlook to remain friendly with him. Now, with Gabriella gone, he was behaving like a toddler throwing a tantrum. It was like... like Dr. Jakell and Mr. Hyde.

Oh, how I wished Holli were with me so we could high five over that pun.

I walked through reception, feeling all itchy and weird. I guess I had expected the entire meeting to go differently. I’d tried to be helpful, and instead I’d gotten insulted. The new job I’d start tomorrow was apparently beneath Jake. I was some lowly joke he deigned to speak to. Had our “friendship” always been like that?

Or was it because I was going from “assistant” to “assistant editor” that he suddenly had a problem with me? Maybe I wasn’t a threat if he thought of me as the chick who got coffee and dry cleaning. Now, I was moving into editing actual content for the magazine. Maybe he couldn’t handle the thought of being supportive of someone unless they weren’t competition.

You’re no longer tied to Gabriella’s hip. He can’t use you for anything, I reminded myself. Maybe my proximity to Gabriella had been the point of our friendship all along.

Distracted by my disappointment, I almost walked right through reception without spotting Deja sitting on the long, white sofa, her arm on the back, smiling brightly at... Holli?

“Hey!” I greeted her, trying to cover my surprise. Holli never just showed up at my work— Gabriella had expressly forbidden personal visits, and Holli had been very careful about that rule. On the rare occasion she’d had to come up to the main office for job-related reasons, she’d never said hello.