“Especially since it’s his fault.”
The last slipped out before she realized the implication. “Oh, jeez,” she murmured, covering her face with her hands as Terry murmured, “My, my, Mr. Kane. I gave you more credit than that.”
It was Neil who took pity on her. He tucked an arm around her waist and urged her forward. “Pay no attention to the two of them. They’re in television, you know. No class. No manners.”
“You’re telling me,” she retorted, scowling at her two tormentors.
Neil continued to soothe her with his sympathetically derisive analysis of their companions. Before she realized it, he had guided her down the street and straight to a table at a sidewalk café near Lincoln Center. Terry and Jason, apparently content to let Neil smooth over the troubled waters they’d stirred up, slid up to the table as quietly as the pair of snakes they were.
When Jason hitched his chair a little too close to hers, Callie shot him a venomous look. He rested his arm across the back of her seat, then tugged her menu over so he could share it. There was a cozy sort of intimacy to his behavior that truly irked her under the circumstances.
“Do you have any idea how furious I am with you?” she inquired curiously.
“About?”
“That little remark you made back there.”
“Just telling the truth.”
“Don’t you think the topic called for a little discretion?”
“What’s wrong? We’re among friends.”
“My friends,” she pointed out. “Why would you say something like that in front of anyone?”
He looked vaguely unsettled by her continued irritation. “Actually, it was a diversionary tactic.”
She stared at him blankly. “Diversionary? I don’t get it.”
“You will,” he said grimly.
“When?”
He glanced at the clusters of people seated around them, until he apparently found what he was seeking. “Now,” he said. “Over there.”
Callie followed the direction of his gaze and gasped as she saw a picture of the two of them kissing plastered across the front page of the Sunday edition of one of New York’s tabloids. The headline trumpeted the question Has Network Romeo Found His Juliet?
“Oh, my God,” she murmured, thunderstruck. That would certainly secure her a lot of respect the next time she went job hunting.
“It’s a really good picture,” Terry ventured.
Callie stared at him. “You’ve seen it?”
“I ran out and bought a copy as soon as Jason called this morning.”
“So this was a setup,” she said, glaring at the whole traitorous lot of them. She waved a finger under Jason’s nose. “You didn’t just bump into them into the hallway. You invited them along to protect you, didn’t you?”
“Actually, I was thinking more in terms of moral support for you,” he said.
“I’ll bet.”
“It’s true,” Terry said. “He thought it would be better for you to see it surrounded by your best friends, just in case you turned out not to be a publicity hound like most of the people in television.”
“We’re supposed to help you get over the shock,” Neil said, shooting a condemning look at Jason that made it clear whose fault he thought it was that she was in shock at all.
“It’s not so bad, really,” Terry tried to reassure her. “It’ll be forgotten by tomorrow. Remember that time the soap opera magazine reported I was having a steamy affair with my leading lady? No one even remembered her name a few weeks later.”
“That’s because you angled to have her fired for planting the rumor in the first place,” Callie reminded him.
Terry shrugged unrepentantly. “She couldn’t act worth beans, anyway.”
“What am I supposed to do?” Callie asked. “Send a letter to all the TGN stockholders and enclose a copy of the front page of the paper and suggest Jason be voted out of office?”
“An intriguing form of retribution,” Jason agreed, not looking the least bit panicked, probably because he owned a very large chunk of that stock himself. “Of course, I’ve long since convinced them that any time my name is mentioned, the network’s call letters are, as well. It’s good PR.”
“Sounds a little self-serving to me,” Callie contended. “It protects your butt since you seem like the kind of man who gets caught with his pants down relatively frequently.” She paused, then added, “Pun absolutely intended.”
“Maybe we should be thinking about a way to capitalize on this,” Jason suggested with just the faintest hint of caution in his voice as he watched Callie closely.
“I don’t think I like the sound of that,” she said.
“There’s bound to be a lot of fascination now that people have gotten a look at that picture,” Jason insisted, trying to sound as if the idea had just occurred to him. “It’s the perfect time to announce that you’re the new star of Within Our Reach. People will think we were just sealing the deal with a kiss.”
“Not that kiss,” Terry commented drily. “You link the deal and that kiss and you’ll be in court for sexual harassment.”
Callie gritted her teeth. “Forget the kiss. I am not the new star of anything. Why can’t you get that through your head?”
“Because I know what I’m doing,” Jason responded. “You’ll be spectacular.” He glanced toward Terry for support.
“You do have the kind of face the camera loves,” Terry concurred. He grabbed a paper someone had left behind on a neighboring chair. “Just look at this. You’re beautiful, darling.”
Despite herself, Callie found herself transfixed. It wasn’t so much that she looked glamorous and sophisticated that stunned her. It was the luminous expression on her face as Jason’s lips claimed hers. The photographer must have caught her before fascination had been transformed into irritation. She practically glowed. Jason appeared no less enchanted. No wonder the copywriters had jumped to all sorts of wild conclusions about their relationship.
“I don’t know,” she said, her certainty wavering for the first time. Would it be so terrible to take the job, especially considering what the amount of money mentioned in that contract would allow her to do to make her mother’s life easier?
“Trust me, darling. Would I lie to you?” Terry asked.
“In a heartbeat,” she asserted as her common sense reasserted itself. She could not allow herself to be manipulated into doing something that was totally alien to her talents and her personality. Not that closing huge stock deals didn’t occasionally require a bit of acting, but the audience was very limited.
“His motives are especially suspect when you might be the only thing between him and the unemployment line,” Neil contributed darkly.
Callie looked from Neil to Terry to Jason. “What does he mean? You aren’t holding his job hostage to make sure I take this role, are you? Not even you would stoop that low.”
“No, it’s not like that,” Jason said, though he didn’t look particularly wounded by the charge, which meant she probably had some part of it right.
“The show is in serious trouble, though,” he added. “The ratings are down.”
“They’re in the toilet,” Terry confirmed.
“The sponsors are threatening to bail on us. No sponsors, no show. That’s the nature of the business,” Jason said. “But the