a sizeable paunch—revealing a lifetime of reckless living.
“You know she’s Agnello’s tart, don’t you?” Bates demanded, and Alex just shrugged.
“She’s not yours, at any rate,” he said with deliberate mildness, and walked away with Bates still gasping behind him.
* * *
The next morning he headed to his office on Hudson Street, scanning the headlines on his smartphone as he took the elevator up to his penthouse office.
He stepped into the soaring room of glass and steel, glanced again at his phone as he powered up his computer, and wondered whether to call Chelsea now. He needed to think carefully about his next move, and yet he couldn’t deny he was looking forward to sparring with her again, craving the little buzz conversation with her had given him. There weren’t many women like Chelsea, he mused: ruthless, ambitious, and sexually confident.
Yes, she would definitely be a match for him in bed. And no matter what happened with Treffen, he decided, he was going to find a way to get her there.
But first he needed to think about Treffen. That little curl of anticipation he’d felt low in his belly now soured into a churning mix of regret and resolve.
Jason Treffen was lauded far and wide as an advocate for the downtrodden and oppressed, especially those who were women. He’d gained a reputation for mentoring smart, driven young women who’d gone to the Ivy League schools on scholarship—with no one knowing that he was actually coercing them into committing the most sordid of acts.
His gut roiled as he remembered what Austin, Jason’s son and one of Alex’s best friends, had discovered from Sarah’s sister Katy just before Christmas. All those years ago after Sarah’s death they’d assumed it had been a sadly simple case of sexual harassment. Then they’d learned the truth in all of its incredible horror when Katy had approached Austin with the information that Treffen hadn’t just been coming onto his young female employees, he’d been roping them into a high-end prostitution ring.
Sarah hadn’t just been harassed by Jason, she’d been forced into servicing his clients. The thought still had the power to bring bile to Alex’s throat. Since that night, the tenth anniversary of Sarah’s death, when Austin had lobbed that grenade into their usual desultory chat about work and women, they’d discovered more of the grim truth. Not only had Jason run a prostitution ring, he’d blackmailed the clients, men of power and position who got off on having a desperate and upwardly mobile young woman on her knees.
Austin had revealed the truth to his family, alienating his father from his wife and children. Together he and Hunter, along with Katy’s help, had begun the process of ousting Jason as partner in his law firm.
So far Treffen had managed to retain his public image. His separation from his wife had simply and sorrowfully been explained as being caused by stress from his high-powered job. Austin’s mother had been too ashamed to admit the truth.
Hunter was working on getting Treffen to step down from his law practice, but so far the man was clinging to his credentials. To his saintly reputation. Alex wouldn’t be satisfied, and neither would Austin or Hunter or now Katy Michaels, until Jason Treffen was completely and publicly ruined. Until the truth was known, and Sarah’s memory avenged.
And the perfect way to do that was on Chelsea’s live television show, watched by thirty million people.
Yet after talking to her last night, Alex wasn’t ready to trust Chelsea with the truth. I’m not interested in shock value.
What Treffen had done was the ultimate in shocking.
He just had to convince Chelsea of it—and of the need to take the man down.
Alex reached for his phone.
He dialed American Media Industries, Chelsea’s network, and within a few seconds was connected to her assistant, who told him that Chelsea was in a meeting and would call him back.
Alex wondered if she really was. Chelsea definitely seemed the type who would keep him waiting just because she could. His mouth thinned into a hard line. She might think she had all the control, but he looked forward to proving her wrong. To taking it away from her...both in bed and out of it.
Impatiently he drummed his fingers against the polished teak of his desk. He might look forward to stripping away Chelsea Maxwell’s arrogant certainties—as well as a few other things—but right now she was the one who was calling the shots. All he could do was get on with his work and wait for her to call.
Eight hours later he’d left his office and headed uptown to meet his friend Jaiven Rodriguez for a beer. He and Jaiven had known each since childhood in a Dominican-dominated neighborhood in the Bronx; while Alex had escaped on a scholarship to Walkerton Prep, an exclusive boarding school in Connecticut, Jaiven had stayed in the Bronx and had earned his way out by his sweat and his fists.
The first time Alex had come back from Connecticut, Jaiven had punched him in the face.
Alex still smiled to remember the belligerent look on his friend’s face, and his own slack-jawed shock at his split lip and swelling eye.
“If you’re going to turn into some preppy asshole,” Jaiven had said, “don’t bother coming back here.”
The words had gone deep. He’d been putting on airs, Alex had realized, without even being aware that he was doing it. Collar up on his polo shirt. Rolling his eyes when Jaiven had started talking about their old friends. Dropping names of rich, entitled boys who went to his school, boys who’d relished humiliating the half-Dominican scholarship kid from the Bronx, who wore secondhand uniforms and came to school not in a chauffeured Rolls but on the public bus. And he’d been pretending to Jaiven that they were his friends.
Even now he felt the burn of shame at how quickly he’d lost the sense of himself, even if he’d only been fourteen. How he’d wanted to fit in rather than claim who he was.
Never again. He never would forget his roots, never wanted to pretend he hadn’t worked hard and earned everything he had. It hadn’t been given to him on a silver platter, the way it had for just about everyone else at Walkerton, and then later, Harvard.
That had been what had initially drawn him to Sarah; they’d shared a freshman business class and he’d seen the same hungry ambition and hard-won hope in her that he’d felt in himself. They’d been best friends, even after Sarah had started dating Hunter, a football quarterback and, along with Austin and Zair, his freshman roommate. He’d had no time for what he saw as three over-privileged trust fund babies until Sarah had softened him, shown him that rich kids were real people, too. After college Zair had gone back to his home country in the Middle East, and he, Austin and Hunter, and Sarah, too, had been damn near inseparable until her death.
After she’d died he’d focused solely on work, on building a news network that promised honesty. He was known throughout the industry for telling it straight.
So maybe he should tell it straight to Chelsea.
He hesitated, let that thought roll around in his mind for a little while. No, not yet. He might have founded his career on honesty, but revenge, revenge on Treffen, was something else entirely. If the end had ever justified the means, it was now.
Now he stepped into the bar in the Bronx that was one step down from a dive and looked for Jaiven. His friend was parked in a booth of ripped vinyl in the back, a beer bottle already in front of him. “Hey.” Alex slid in across from his friend and hailed the waitress for his own beer.
“You look like shit,” Jaiven remarked.
“Thanks very much.” With a murmured thanks Alex took the bottle from the waitress. “As it happens, I didn’t sleep much last night.”
Jaiven cocked an eyebrow. “Good reason for that?”
“Not the one you’re thinking.” Alex thought, briefly, of Chelsea. Chelsea naked, that silver dress slithering off her like a snakeskin. Her hair down, long, wavy, mussed.