Free The Home for Broken Hearts by Rowan Coleman

the sideboard instead.

CHAPTER
       
Five
    Matt Bolton blinked and pinched himself. He actually couldn’t believe his eyes. Here he was on his first day on the job at
Bang It!
, watching a photo shoot. A photo shoot with two glamorous models, who were getting much better acquainted with each other’s assets than they had been when they’d turned up a few minutes ago.
    “Life’s good, right?” Pete Grossman asked Matt. He was the features editor on the magazine and would be Matt’s immediate boss and mentor. Standing a good four inches shorter than Matt, Pete was nevertheless an attractive and well-built man in his midforties. Matt could see with his journalist’s eye that Pete would have been considered handsome once, and had probably been something of a pinup in his youth. A life of drinking and smoking, however, and at least two expensive ex-wives had taken their toll on him, his skin thickened and ruddy and his possibly dyed black hair thinning around the temples. Once, he’d been a cutting-edge young investigative journalist who battled on gamely in the middle of whatever war zone was most readily available. When he had bagged the job of the youngest-ever editor in chief of Britain’s bestselling tabloid in his thirties, his future had looked golden. Something had happened to change all of that, though. Matt had heard dark rumors that there had been some incident between Pete and a lesser member of the royal family that had compelled him to resign from his job and be gratefulfor whatever work he could find since. And that had been as a feature writer at
Bang It!
for the last two years.
    Pete had invited Matt along to the photo shoot as soon as he walked in through the office door that morning. He’d barely had time to park his suitcase under his desk before Pete had whisked him out of the office.
    “Mag rules,” Pete had explained on their way to the shoot. “We always get the rookies along to one of these as quickly as possible; stops them wasting time they could spend wondering exactly what goes on here. Truth is, it gets a bit dull after a while; you’ve seen one pair, you’ve seen them all—know what I mean?” Pete tossed his head back as he laughed. “No, of course you don’t, it’s the best job in the world! Play your cards right and I’ll get you in on the next casting. That’s when the models come in and we get them to strip in the office for us. Sometimes, if it’s a bloke’s birthday or some poor sucker’s stag night, we hold a casting for them when there isn’t even going to be a photo shoot. Brilliant, all these girls taking their clothes off for free, doing whatever we tell them without a clue that we’re just having a laugh and there is no job at the end of it. Brilliant. When’s your birthday?”
    “Tomorrow?” Matt joked. This was his dream job: London, women, national-magazine journalism. This was what he had been working for, a room full of topless girls and a minibar in the corner. Some people might think that Matt was a little shallow, but he didn’t care. Maybe this wasn’t the kind of reporting that he’d had in mind when he set out on his writing career, maybe he had envisioned himself writing hard news from the center of the Gaza Strip, but life, his life, had brought him to a photo shoot for
Bang It!
magazine, and as far as he could see, there was no way a red-blooded man would complain about that.
    Matt
had
been a little worried, as he entered the closed set in a photography studio in Ladbroke Grove, that he would lethimself down, that he’d drool, leer, lose the power of speech—or worse still, get an unwelcome hard-on, which would mean he’d have to cross his legs and stay seated until it abated.
    As soon as he was on the set, though, Matt realized that if he had done any of those things, he would have been the only one to care. The girls walked about in nothing but G-strings, laughing and talking as if they were fully dressed. The photographer took