Page 20 of Pure Recklessness

ELLIE

Bloody hell.

This book was spicy.

I attempted to wrap my cardigan tighter around the paperback cover so that the other commuters on the packed Tube wouldn’t see what I was reading.

Mr Devlin had told me I needed to research the company thoroughly, so when Cheryl from the PR department offered me one of Sated’s novels, I thought reading it on the train home so I could mention it the next time I saw him would earn me some extra brownie points.

But I was barely ten pages in and the female main character was already on her knees in the bathroom of a very unsavoury drinking establishment, performing oral sex on a man she’d met all of five minutes ago.

I didn’t mean to sound judgemental and I knew this was fiction, but did people really do reckless things like that?

Surely, she’d catch something. If not from his penis, then from the sticky toilet floors.

Just thinking about it made me shudder.

I had to continue though. This was now part of my job.

When I turned the page and read that the female character had just allowed the stranger to ejaculate in her mouth, I clutched my chest with shock.

This was unlike anything I’d ever read before.

I could never imagine myself doing something like that.

It seemed so… wild and uninhibited.

Of course, it was her body and she could choose to do whatever she wanted, but this was all so alien to me.

This whole day had been a huge step out of my comfort zone.

After my meeting with Mr Devlin, Valerie had sent me to meet Cheryl who was the only person in the press office who’d made it into the office. Everyone else was sick.

As well as filling me in with all of the gossip from what she was now calling PoisonGate (the party everyone attended last night which subsequently wiped them out with horrific food poisoning), she briefed me on the help they needed.

The team were sending out special PR boxes to social media influencers or Bookstagrammers and BookTokers as she called them, to promote the forthcoming publication of a new dark romance novel.

They’d had various stickers printed with acronyms that’d made my cheeks heat with embarrassment. For example, if my memory was correct, one had GOYKATTDLAGG, which Cheryl explained meant, get on your knees and take this dick like a good girl.

Yikes.

And judging by what had happened so far in this book, blow jobs seemed to be popular in spicy novels.

Anyway, as well as the stickers, I added bookmarks and character art postcards to every box which also had my jaw hanging on the floor the first time I saw them. But by box number fifty, seeing the male main character’s head buried between the legs of the female main character, who was pinned against a shower wall, wasn’t as shocking.

Yep. Today had been a real eye opener.

Once I’d finished making the boxes, Cheryl had shown me where all the information was kept on Sated’s bestselling authors and books, then given me copies to take home.

Apparently, there was an in-house library in the building, but she had to leave, so couldn’t take me there.

Hopefully I’d be at Sated long enough to see it.

Just as I started reading again, a shrill ring from my phone made me jump, causing the book to fall from my hand and land on the floor.

As I went to pick it up, the woman sitting opposite me gave me a knowing smile. I frowned, then realised why. She’d seen the cover.

There was nothing overtly explicit about it, just a man in a suit, but judging by the way she was smirking, she was familiar with the content inside.