Page 3 of His Good Girl

“It’s not like that.”

“It is precisely like that. That was the guiltiest blush I’ve ever seen. That blush has illegal documents in a locked drawer.”

“He was my father’s best friend.”

“Blech.” She picked up her phone, tapped theatrically, and a second later my screen lit on the table.

Jules:

I snatched my phone up. “You’re sitting two feet away from me.”

“I needed the emoji to carry the full weight of my concern.”

“There’s nothing to be concerned about. I haven’t even seen him in person in, I don’t know, maybe eight months. It’s not a thing. It’s just…” I trailed off because I had no dignified end to thatsentence. Just what? Just that Callum Rowe had aged in some unfair masculine direction after forty, all broad shoulders and salt at the temples? Just that the last time I had seen him at a charity dinner, he had put his hand at the small of my back to guide me through a crowd, and my entire nervous system had behaved like an old fuse box in a thunderstorm?

Jules watched my face and slowly grinned. “Oh, this is terrible.”

“It’s not terrible because it’s not real.”

“It is real enough that you’re doing math in your head about whether you can ask him for a job without also wondering what his hands look like on a steering wheel.”

“Everyone notices hands.”

“Sure. Weak people notice hands. Perverts catalog them.”

“I hate you.”

“You love me because I tell you the truth. And the truth is, you’re being a pussy.”

My mouth fell wide open. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me. You are letting your pride cosplay as morality. You don’t want to ask him for help because then you might owe somebody something. You’d rather keep getting eaten alive by women like Marlena Cross who look like they eat interns for breakfast.”

“That is unfair.”

“It is accurate.”

“She probably cheated on the way up anyway,” I muttered, because I was petty and unemployed and the wine had found thesoft spot in my restraint. “Marlena. There’s no way that woman got where she is on talent alone. She’s blackmailing somebody. Or sleeping with somebody. Or sacrificing assistants under a full moon.”

Jules made a face and reached for her phone again.

Jules:blech

“I’m confiscating that,” I said.

“You’ll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands.”

I sat back and pressed my fingertips to my temples. The wine bar had started to fill around us, soft voices rising under the low brass light fixtures, the air smelling of garlic, rain, and perfume. Everyone else seemed to have arrived from a life that was moving in a straight line. Couples leaned into each other and women in blazers laughed over martinis. A man at the bar took a call and said, very seriously, “Push the meeting to Singapore,” as if the world were a chessboard and he had been born knowing how to move the pieces.

“I don’t even know what I’d say,” I admitted.

Jules’s expression shifted again, the teasing still there but gentler underneath. “You tell him the truth.”

“That my resume looks like a crime scene?”

“That you’ve had a rough couple of years. That you’re not asking for a handout. That you need a chance somewhere sane. That you’ll work hard.”

“Everyone says they’ll work hard.”