Free TEMPTATION - A Bad Boy Romance by Gabi Moore

but sometimes having a lot to prove and nothing to lose is exactly the state of mind you need to write well.
    “Katie, come in here a sec, would you?”
    It was my boss Penelope Welsh, a severe pedant of a woman and dying supernova in the publishing world. She had used that notorious icy voice that could either mean I was about to be praised to heaven or threatened with my life. For Penelope, life was a dreadful bore, and she lived only for those moments of either sublime journalistic joy that made life worth living …or else eviscerating the newbie guts of baby writers like myself.
    It being only Tuesday, I hoped it was the former.
    “Your Tom Hood piece …walk me through this. What where you doing here exactly?”
    Her artsy metal earrings swung on either side of her head. She gestured to her computer screen like an unknown bug had landed there. This looked bad. As far as I could tell, Penelope asked people to “walk her through” things only so she could eviscerate them all the better. Shit.
    “Uh, yes, Tom Hood. I wanted to suggest that those nude photo leaks are kind of a new avenue for self promotion for him, that celebrities are looking for ways to manage their image by curating this completely fake online presence, except tha--”
    She raised a single bony finger to shut me up.
    “He didn’t like it,” she said, revealing a new cryptic streak that was unfamiliar to me.
    “ Who didn’t?”
    “Tom Hood didn’t,” she said, relishing how ridiculous this clearly sounded to me. Her earrings had stopped swinging. I opened my mouth to speak, but she raised the bony finger higher.
    “He called me, you know. For some stupid reason. He says you’ve been unflattering and he wants an apology.” She turned her face back to the screen with a quizzical look. “As far as I’m concerned you did the asshole a favor with this piece, but what do I know? He doesn’t seem like he wants to cause any trouble. So, will you do it?”
    “Do what?”
    “Oh, right. Will you meet with him? He wants an apology. And he says he wants to do a more formal interview and a larger piece on this nude photo scandal crap. I’m going to have to bump Mira’s piece this month and that’s going to burn her ass, but he wanted you specifically, and I’m not going to turn that down, so I said you would. You OK with that? We kind of need it this quarter.”
    It was barely 5 minutes past 7 and I had already been assigned the biggest story of my short and desperate career. It was a lot to take in.
    All at once, Tom Hood was real .
    I had written a mere line or two of snark about him and now he had appeared right in the middle of my boring Tuesday morning, like a demon summoned with some kind of spell.
    I was thrilled. I played it cool.
    “Sure,” I said, trying to sound casual about it.
    “Good. Just see what he wants. I don’t mind where you want to take it, honestly, but just keep Eddy in the loop, too, you’ll need some photos.”
    She handed me a Post-It note with a time and place scratched on it in tight, impatient handwriting.
    “ Tomorrow ?!” I said, horrified.
    “Yeah? You can’t do it? I can get Mira to try -”
    “No, I’ll do it,” I blurted.
    I turned quickly to leave her office before anything else happened, but as I was about to close the door she quipped, “Well, have you seen them?”
    “What?”
    “The nudes.”
    Ah, the nudes. Tom Hood had had his phone “hacked” and all his precious dick pics were now “leaked” all over the world, and it was shocking, simply shocking to him. Not only did this idiot have the gall to try this stunt, he actually believed people would fall for it. The photos were pure trash of course – grainy candid shots of him in various stages of undress, one with him completely naked, a pair of bikini-clad models in the background, him laughing with an obscenely large dick just hanging there…
    “No, of course I haven’t seen them, ew,” I said, crinkling my face up.
    “You