By a Thread: A Grumpy Boss Romantic Comedy

I waited until I’d been able to lock down on my emotions surrounding my father’s spontaneous little blackmail demand before doing what had to be done. It was late Friday, and my mother’s assistants had gone home for the night.

“Come in,” she called a beat after my perfunctory knock.

I found her on the couch, shoes kicked off under the glass coffee table, bare feet tucked under Simone’s leg next to her. They were drinking what smelled like very expensive tequila.

I had the distinct impression that I’d just interrupted something.

“Dominic, darling. Come join us,” my mother said wearily. “Help yourself to a glass.” I knew that look. And I knew what always caused that look. Or more specifically who.

Simone gave me a sympathetic smile. A warning that this was indeed bad.

“What did that bastard do now?” I asked, taking a glass from the well-stocked bar cart my mother kept in the corner.

Simone took my glass and poured generously. “Not him this time,” she said.

“I just got off the phone with Elena’s attorney,” Mom said.

Incredulous, I frowned. “Why?”

“It seems she is no longer interested in being featured on the May cover,” my mother said with a complete lack of the emotions I knew swirled beneath her implacable surface.

“We’ve already started the first print run,” I said, gripping my glass.

“After she threatened a lawsuit, the print run has been paused until we can explore our options,” Mom said.

“This is bullshit. This is just another stupid publicity ploy.” I’d never told my mother about why I’d ended things with Elena. And she’d never asked. We didn’t tend to share things unless there was no other way around it. Like my father’s firing and their divorce.

“She signed the releases. Legally, you can proceed,” Simone said.

“I’m not inclined to put someone on my cover who doesn’t recognize what an honor it is to be there. Doing so would give her the prestige of the cover and the platform to complain about how big, bad Dalessandra Russo wouldn’t let her change her mind.”

My mother twirled the emerald on her middle finger.

“Did she give any indication that she was going to back out at the last second?” I asked. Something was niggling at me in the back of my head.

“Not at all. In fact, she sent me a card with an excessive amount of exclamation points two days ago thanking me for the opportunity.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. That niggling was getting harder and harder to ignore.

I swore and sipped the tequila. Its smooth burn was a welcome relief from the tightness in my throat.

“I’ll talk to her,” I said.

My mother’s eyebrows winged up. “Wasn’t your parting a little… dramatic?”

“Not for me,” I said, coolly.

The two women shared a look.

“I’ll talk to her,” I repeated. “In the meantime, start thinking about a Plan B. Who deserves that cover?” If I was right, no amount of talking was going to put Elena back on that cover.

She still lived in the same building. A swanky location with units that faced Central Park. The Label cover could have earned her a penthouse a few blocks north, and Elena knew it. The woman was calculating and focused. She wouldn’t have just walked away from the cover story she’d fucked her way into my bed two years ago to get.

I lucked out and caught the door as a woman with two huge dogs with rhinestone leashes exited. I paused to give them dignified pats before taking the elevator to the fourth floor. It was a case of déjà vu, walking down the sunny, yellow hallway to 4C. The last time I’d been here, she’d answered the door in another man’s shirt.

But it had barely mattered then, and it certainly didn’t matter now.

I knocked.

This time, she opened the door in a cloud of fragrance and her own clothes. Elena Ostrovsky was a beautiful woman, and she knew it. People had been telling her so since she was fourteen years old. She tended to get nervous if they went too long without reminding her.

For an afternoon at home, her hair was done in thick, lustrous curls and swept to the side in a low tail. Her eyes were painted in coppers and bronzes. I’d never seen her without makeup. We’d never spent a full night together, and it was only now that I found that strange.

“Dominic.” I didn’t like the way my name sounded from her lips. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

“Are you?” I asked.

“Come in,” she said, stepping away from the door and opening it wider. She was wearing red leather pants and an oversized, sheer black blouse, and gold studded stilettos. Just a quiet day around the house.

“Am I interrupting?” It was half dig and half legitimate concern.

“No, no! Of course not,” she insisted, either ignoring the insult or not remembering that it had been a very valid question last time.

I didn’t know. Because I didn’t know her.

I stepped inside. The furniture was different, I noted. Upgraded from my last visit. White couch. White chairs. One thing that was the same was the Wall of Elena. Framed headshots, magazine covers, shots from the runway and red carpets. Every picture had been cropped and edited so it was just her.

When we were dating, I’d found it “interesting” when she’d added a photo of the two of us during New York Fashion Week and then cropped everything except my arm out of it. I thought of the box of Ally’s framed photos she’d brought home from her father’s things in the storage unit. Candids in mismatched frames of all the people she loved the most in life. Not a glamor shot to be found.

“You can guess why I’m here,” I said, shoving my hands in my pockets.

Elena gave me her prettiest pout. “You aren’t here because you miss me?”

“No. The cover, Elena.”

She pranced over to the low sofa and sat, crossing one knee over the other, stretching her arms over the back. Posing. “I don’t want to do it anymore.” But the lie didn’t quite reach her eyes.

“Yes. You do. You’ve always wanted that cover. It’s why you started dating me.”

She rolled her eyes. “Always with the same song and dance.” She reached for the pack of cigarettes she had on the table.

“I guess that’s why you changed partners in the middle of the dance.”

“Dominic, that was ages ago,” she said, lighting a skinny cigarette. “Let’s forget all that.” She patted the couch next to her.

I ignored the invitation.

I didn’t like being here. I didn’t like being around her. The stark contrasts between her and Ally, my past and my present, were dizzying.

“The cover,” I repeated. “What’s your game?”

She looked away again and brushed a hand over a furry pillow, fingers plucking at the ivory tufts. “I changed my mind,” she said, less emphatically.

“You changed your mind, or someone changed your mind?”

“What does it matter?”

“We can still run your cover, your story. You signed the releases,” I warned her. “This isn’t going to look good for you, reneging on a deal with Dalessandra Russo.”

She flinched then. Elena already had a reputation for being difficult. She showed up late, left early, and spent most shoots complaining. Her manager and her looks were the only things keeping her gainfully employed.

“She won’t do anything about it,” she said, studying her nails. “She’ll let me out of it and play nice.”

“That doesn’t sound like you, Elena. I remember you confessing that my mother was your idol when you were a teenage model doing car shows and catalog shoots. You know who that sounds like to me?”

She gave a shrug as if she couldn’t care less, but those unnatural green eyes were watering.

“My father,” I said.

Her eyes darted to me, wide with surprise. “You know?”

“I guessed. What did he promise you?”

She slumped against the cushion. “The cover of Indulgence. I can’t do both.”

“Why would you choose Indulgence over Label? They’re not even in the same league.”

“It’s a good opportunity,” she parroted.

“Says my father who landed a job with them, and now he’s poaching content from Label. I repeat, why are you doing this?”

She worried her lower lip between her teeth hard enough that I was concerned the filler would leak out. “He has something of mine,” she said.

“Christ.” I shoved my hand through my hair. “What?”

“A tape,” she answered in a tiny voice.

“What kind of tape?”

“What kind of tape do you think? A sex tape.”

I sighed. “Elena, come on. You know better than that.” I knew her manager personally, a no-nonsense woman who schooled her charges in all the ways the world could chew them up and spit them out if they weren’t very smart and very cynical.

“I didn’t know. I didn’t know he made one.”

“That’s illegal.”

“I can’t prove it, and he knows it,” she said, fat tears finally fighting their way past the jungle of lashes.

“How did my father get the tape? Did someone sell it to him?” Maybe I could finally find a way to hang Paul Russo. Blackmailing family was one thing, but this was an entirely new low.

She shook her head.

“You don’t know?”

She took a shuddery breath. “He made it.”