Love the One You're With (3 page)

And seriously, people thought she'd moved on already? It had only been just over four months since she'd learned Greg was having extracurricular time between his colleague's thighs. Surely she was entitled to a little time to heal before she started dating again?

Say, like … six months more. Six months of glorious single time. Six months of girls' wine nights and maybe training for a half marathon and figuring out how to be on her own.

It was a great plan. She was pretty sure of it. But only Julie and Riley knew that Grace's sabbatical from men was an actual premeditated agenda, and she wanted to keep it that way.

No need for anyone else to know just how deeply Greg's betrayal had cut. It was bad enough that her personal life was in upheaval. But in Grace's case, the very fabric of her career had also been ripped in half by Greg's admission.

Okay! I slept with her! But before you get up on your self-righteous high horse, take a good look in the mirror, because these things aren't one-sided
.

Yeah, that had stung.

But what had
really
burned her ass was that just two months prior, Grace had written the very popular “Ten Signs He's Cheating” article.

She'd thought it was just another in a long stream of her typical relationship articles: “How to Tolerate His Football Habit.” “You Want Sushi, He Wants Wings—How to Compromise.” Basically she told women how to make their relationship work, and they'd listened.

The cheating article had been a diverting challenge. Since she'd (wrongly) believed that she didn't have any personal experience in the area of infidelity, Grace had spent months interviewing women whose significant others had strayed. She'd recorded all the subtle signs, the little quirks. The lack of sex, the effusive compliments, the changed passwords …

By the time the story went to publication, Grace had thought herself an expert on picking up on infidelity.

She'd been wrong.

The worst part was, she hadn't even
thought
to
look
at her own life. Hadn't imagined it would ever happen to her.

But it had. And worst of all? Greg and Maureen's fling had been going on
the entire time
she'd been writing the article.

The woman whom other women looked to as a relationship beacon was a complete sham.

Grace
might
have been able to accept that Greg wasn't the man she'd thought he was. But accepting that she was ignorant about men in general?

Career suicide.

Hence the creation of Grace 2.0.

Her alter ego was everything Grace 1.0 hadn't been: wary, gritty, and smart. Grace 2.0 knew that men were lying snakes. And she was out to prove it personally and professionally.

“No, Grace doesn't have a new man, and you'll forget the thought even crossed your mind,” Riley was saying to Oliver in her scary
don't-make-me-lose-my-Irish-temper
voice.

Oliver wisely pretended fascination with his phone as though he'd never been eavesdropping in the first place.

The three of them had just settled around the conference table when Grace spotted the unfamiliar woman who'd entered the meeting room.

“Who's that?” Grace asked quietly. The woman was pretty in a natural, low-maintenance kind of way. Her shoulder-length hair was light brown and could have been mousy had it not been paired with gorgeous olive skin and wide, brown Bambi eyes.

Riley and Julie exchanged a nervous glance.

“That's Emma Sinclair,” Julie said, her voice too bright.

It took a second for the name to register.

Oh.
Oh
.

Emma Sinclair had been Grace's replacement on the Love and Relationships beat when she'd taken the month off.

The month that Grace had sorely needed, but which had hurt to ask for all the same.

When Grace had reluctantly told her boss that she needed some time away from the
office, Camille hadn't hesitated. The
Stiletto
editor in chief might be a total hard-ass, but she was also a bit of a man-hater thanks to a disastrous marriage of her own.

All it had taken was the word
cheat
, and Camille had practically booted Grace out the door with an order to “have some me time” and a suggestion for a local voodoo doll vendor.

And Grace was appreciative, she really was. And of
course
she'd expected that Camille would have to find someone to fill in while Grace was out.

She just hadn't quite been prepared for Camille to assign a backup who was quite so … qualified.

Grace had been envisioning one of the newish interns trailing around after Julie and Riley, maybe taking a few nervous story notes. Instead, Camille had hired Emma Sinclair from
Sassy. Sassy
was
Stiletto
's chief competitor in the women's magazine marketplace. And Emma Sinclair had been one of their top columnists.

During their weekly phone chats, Julie and Riley had sworn up and down that Emma wasn't a replacement. But from her friends' guilty expressions, it was obvious that Emma wasn't just someone they'd tolerated until Grace came back.

Emma had become a friend.

That's nice
, Grace told herself firmly. It would be
nice
to expand their little family. Maybe even get some fresh blood into the trio of the Love and Relationships section. Change things up a bit.

Then Riley laughed at something Emma said, and it didn't feel
nice
at all.

“Order, order,” Camille bellowed, storming into the conference room, wearing a bright green wrap dress.

Grace hid a small, relieved smile. At least some things hadn't changed. Camille still started her meetings like a power-tripping Supreme Court justice.

“Welcome back, Grace,” Camille said, not bothering to look up as she pulled a half dozen electronic devices out of her oversized bag, tossing them onto the table.

“Thanks,” Grace murmured, not missing the way that everyone smiled at her in that too-careful way, as though she was likely to break at any second.

But as the meeting settled into its old, familiar rhythm, she started to relax a little.

She could do this. It was just like old times, except she was a little older, a little smarter.

In fact, it was
better
than old times, because Grace wasn't ever going to let a guy get the
drop on her again.

She half listened as Camille went around the table, asking for department updates. When Camille turned to the Love and Relationships section, Grace sat up a little straighter. She didn't have any updates on her first day back, but she smiled and nodded at everything Riley and Julie said so that there could be no doubt that she was still a part of this crew. She even kept an approving smile pasted on her face as Emma spoke.

And then Camille dropped those dreaded magazine words that occasionally made the rounds at
Stiletto
but were almost never associated with the nearly flawless Love and Relationships department.

“…  there have been some complaints.”

Wait. What?
What?

Grace listened in dismay as her boss read letter after letter of complaint.

Riley held up a hand to stop their boss's flow of words. “I'm sorry—did you just say that some readers think we're
naive
?”

Oliver snickered. “As if
you
could ever be naive.”

Unperturbed, Riley gave him one of her sassy winks. Riley McKenna was
anything
but naive, at least in the ways of the bedroom. She managed to dazzle all manner of people, from homosexual men to heterosexual women. But her real talent was with heterosexual men, which was a good thing, seeing as she was
Stiletto
's number one sex goddess. Riley didn't just write about sex, she embodied it. Her long black hair had that perpetual just-rolled-out-of-bed look, and her bright blue eyes had a naughty, Marilyn Monroe kind of way about them. Most annoying of all? Riley McKenna could out-eat anyone Grace knew and still wore a size two.

All of which would make Grace hate her if Riley wasn't just about the best damned friend she could imagine.

Of course, none of this was even remotely relevant to their boss right about now, as Camille was
definitely
less than pleased with her usual golden trio.

Or golden
quad
, Grace thought, with a quick glance at Emma.

“There's just been increasing feedback that we're not adequately tapped into the male perspective,” Camille said. “That we're living in a female bubble.”

“Crazy, since this is a
female
magazine,” Julie muttered.

“Exactly,” Camille said, jabbing her finger on top of her notebook. “Just like
Oxford
is in a male bubble.”

Everyone exchanged a confused glance. What the hell did
Oxford
have to do with this? Grace was willing to bet most of them had never read it—
she
certainly hadn't, beyond occasionally flipping through an issue Greg might have left on the coffee table.

Oxford
was to men as
Stiletto
was to women—and seeing as how most everyone in the room was female,
Oxford
was about as familiar a reference as, say,
jock strap
. Only Oliver could pretend to relate, and even he made it clear to anyone who would listen that he preferred talking shoes over cars any day.

“I've had several meetings with Alex Cassidy over the past two weeks, and he's been finding the same trend in letters from his readers,” Camille was saying. “Quite simply, both
Oxford
and
Stiletto
are guilty of the same one-sided journalism.”

Grace lifted a hand to get Camille's attention. “Who's Alex Cassidy?”

“The new editor in chief of
Oxford
,” Emma Sinclair volunteered. Grace thought she heard something bitter in that tone, but a quick look at the other woman revealed nothing. Just a calm,
nothing-fazes-me
expression.

A quick glance around the table showed that Grace was the only one surprised by this news. What the hell had happened to Bill Heiner? He'd been
Oxford
's editor in chief since before most people in this room were born. Being out of the loop sucked.

“Got it,” she said quietly.

But Camille apparently had bigger things to worry about than the fact that one of her most tenured columnists was out of the loop, because she was doing that weird hair-tugging thing that generally meant trouble for someone.

“So what's the solution?” Julie asked. “You want one of us to grow a penis? Maybe throw in a couple token interviews with guys so we can get the man's perspective and all that?”

“No, we need to address it more head-on than that,” Camille replied.

More head-on than growing a penis?
Grace wondered.

“Alex and I have talked about this, and we want to be deliberate. To let the readers know that we're hearing their concerns. Apparently there are more crossover readers than we realized, and we can't have male readers hollering about how we misrepresent males. And
Oxford
doesn't want female readers lamenting about how
Oxford
's way off base.”

This was not sounding good.

“Which is why we'll be inserting a new special series of stories for the next three issues. A sort of his-and-hers approach to the Love and Relationships section of the magazines.”

“I'll do it!” Oliver said, his hand shooting in the air.

Camille gave him a look. “With all due respect, Mr. Harrington, aren't you the one always telling us you relate more to women than men?”

His brow furrowed. “Right. I was thinking I'd write the
her
perspective.”

God help them, he looked serious.

“Ollie, until you've had to suffer the indignity of running into an ex while buying Vagisil or asking a stranger for a tampon, I'm thinking maybe you don't quite have the proper intel or the proper parts for this,” Julie said kindly.

Oliver gave a shudder and raised his palms as though to say,
I'm out
.

Exactly
, Grace thought. Being a woman was messy business.

“So who's it going to be?” Camille asked, her eyes flitting among Julie, Riley, Grace, and Emma.

“How about a little more information?” Riley said, sitting back in her chair and playing with a long strand of shiny black hair. “Is this, like, an article swap? Our stuff goes in
Oxford
, and one of their monkey reporters gets a page in ours?”

“Sort of,” Camille said, tapping her nails against the table. “We'd be very transparent about what we're up to. Alex and I were thinking that we'd take one of my girls and one of his guys and send you on a couple of dates. Three, at the minimum. Each of you will write an account of what you're thinking. First impressions, assessment of the
other
person's first impressions. You'll analyze how the conversation went, what the other person's thinking … all without actually discussing the article itself.”

“Sounds very natural and non-awkward,” Grace whispered to Riley.

Camille spared her a brief glare before continuing. “
Stiletto
will more prominently feature the female perspective about the date, but with an inset on what the guy was thinking.
Oxford
will do the same in reverse.”

“What's the objective?” Emma asked. She had one of those slightly husky, soothing voices, like a jazz singer or a sexpot, with just a touch of southern.
Great. A sexy, smart, composed southern belle
.

“Now, here's the part I think you ladies will like,” Camille said. “Alex and I were thinking of making it a competition of sorts.”

“Go on …,” Riley said, tapping the tips of her fingers together like a cartoon villain.

“Well, the goal here is to show that both
Stiletto
and
Oxford
aim to provide an accurate representation of what goes on inside the other side's head. Women reading
Stiletto
want to know that the advice there is actually going to resonate with the guy in their life.
Oxford
is the same—what's the point of all their tacky ‘How to Please a Woman' sex advice if women don't agree?”