She made a dramatic flourishing gesture in Alex’s direction.

He waited patiently for everything to register with the Stiletto crew.

“No. A boy?!” Riley said, scandalized.

“I saw him without his shirt once,” Grace said, leaning over. “He’s not a boy.”

Emma leaned in toward her friends, speaking up for the first time. “I saw him without his shirt once, too. Boy’s actually not so far off. He’s a little scrawny, and the lower half…eek.”

Emma’s voice was little more than a whisper, but it reached his ears. It was meant to.

Alex didn’t take the bait. Hell, back when Emma had seen him naked, they’d been young. He had been little more than a boy.

And she little more than a girl.

A girl who could take his breath away with little more than a smile.

And when she’d taken her shirt off, he’d all but lost his mind.

But that was a long time ago.

“Mr. Cassidy has graciously agreed to oversee both Stiletto and Oxford for the next few months,” Camille said, jerking him back to the present.

A present where he and Emma wouldn’t be seeing each other shirtless…ever.

“Starting next week,” Camille continued, “He will be the one you go to for story approval, PTO requests, relationship advice—”

“Wait, what?” Alex said, speaking up for the first time.

Camille patted him on the head like he was a child, and he caught Julie smirking at him.

Alex gave into a sigh. It was going to be a very, very long three months.

“Any questions?” Camille asked.

Julie’s hand shot up. “Um, yes. Like a thousand questions. Starting with, where are you going? Is everything okay? Are your ovaries imploding? Are you having a crisis? Can I come?”

Alex hid a laugh behind a cough. From the resigned look on Camille’s face, and the lack of shock on everyone else’s, it was clear this group was used to Julie’s unabashed prying.

“Perfectly healthy. It’s a personal matter,” Camille said, in a tone that indicated the conversation was over.

Julie made a grunting noise that indicated the conversation was not over.

“Now, I’m sure you’re all itching with theories you’d like to share with your colleagues, and I have plenty to catch Mr. Cassidy up on, so if there are no other inappropriate questions—”

“Wait,” a tiny blond woman next to Grace said. “That’s it? We haven’t talked about the next issue, or story assignments, and there are about a million letters to the editor thanks to that story we did about Botox, and—”

Camille held up a hand. “Mr. Cassidy will be holding a meeting on Monday morning to go over all of that, Dana.”

Alex didn’t react, although inside he cringed. He’d agreed to this only because he’d assumed it was a figurehead position—a way of making the higher-ups feel comfortable with Camille’s absence. Surely she didn’t expect him to actually run this estrogen nightmare? He had his own magazine to take care of, a girlfriend that might actually last longer than two months, and—

“Cassidy,” Camille snapped.

He realized in dismay that the meeting was indeed over. And that everyone was looking at him with a mixture of resentment and curiosity. And, of course, a certain ice queen wasn’t looking at him at all.

That was fine. Just fine.

Alex had been through worse.

Starting with the night his beloved fiancée had told him she didn’t want to marry him after all.

Chapter 3

“Emma, a moment?”

Emma looked up from her monitor. She and the other Love & Romance girls had been in their usual pre-lunch “zone.” It was one of the few times of day when they put chatting and gossip aside long enough to get work done.

She pulled off her headphones and looked at Camille. “Um, sure. Now?”

Camille made it a point to meet regularly with all of her senior columnists on a one-on-one basis, but Emma’s scheduled time was Monday afternoon; today was Wednesday. It was never a good sign when their boss went off book.

“It’ll be fast,” Camille said, before her head disappeared from the door.

Emma pulled off the glasses she used when working on the computer and rubbed her eyes. “It won’t be fast. It’s never fast.”

“That’s what she said,” Riley muttered.

“That phrase doesn’t really work in this context, Ri,” Julie said distractedly.

“That phrase always works in any context,” Riley responded.

“Hey, Ems, see if you can get the inside scoop,” Grace said, leaning back in her chair as Emma stood and stretched. “I’m dying to know what the heck this sabbatical is about. Three months?”

“I can’t ask,” Emma said, moving toward the door. “She said it was personal.”

“Right. Which translates to interesting,” Julie said, pulling her hair into a pony.

“I’ll see what I can do.” Emma jabbed a finger toward her laptop. “And don’t touch my edits. I know it was one of you that tried to sneak the word penis into my last headline.”

“Um, yeah. Because you need some penis in your life,” Riley said.

“I’ll have you know that I had some penis in my life…last week,” Emma said. “No, last month. Maybe…”

Her three friends looked at one another, and although the shared glance was more good-natured than it was poor Emma, it didn’t stop the irritation from rippling through her.