Everyone shook their heads.
“Good.” He stared at the numbers again as he slowly nodded. “Very good.”
Two hours later they broke for lunch with a fairly detailed list of potential topics, ranging from local swinger groups to BDSM clubs. With the fetish convention being held in a few months, Bill wanted enough lead time to tap into that potential market. Suzanne would contact the promoters and secure an interview with them, the staff member to be assigned later.
Shayla avoided Suzanne’s gaze. Please don’t let it be me.
Shayla wasn’t a prude by any stretch of the imagination. She had no problem with people’s sexual preferences running more toward chocolate than vanilla. But after finding out that James was turned on by, among other things, anorexic, silicone sluts with breasts the size of watermelons getting the crap beat out of them, and that he regularly jerked off to them instead of her at times when she’d begged him to sleep with her, her self-confidence had taken a beating it hadn’t quite recovered from yet.
She knew she didn’t possess a Hollywood starlet’s artificially enhanced, top-heavy body, but she wasn’t ugly or obese. She didn’t consider a size sixteen “fat” especially when she was a lanky five-eight and it was distributed all over and not in any one area. Her pale northern complexion hadn’t seen enough of Florida’s tropical sun to tan yet, and her hazel eyes matched the rims on her glasses. She didn’t want contacts, not when she really only needed her glasses for reading or long stints on the computer. She wasn’t bat-blind without them.
Yet.
She’d chopped a few inches off her hair after moving down here though. Now it hung a little below her shoulders, a blasé brown that usually did what it was supposed to when she asked it to without it bowing too much to humidity’s wrath. Long enough to pull it into a ponytail, or wear it down in long layers.
Still, it stung to know James had preferred to sink into an artificial fantasy than to seek her out when there were times she begged for his attention. Rationally, intellectually, she knew it was his problem and not hers.
But her pride still suffered the aftereffects.
Adding to the sting, the additional betrayal of him taking out credit cards in her name and using them to charge his porn.
Bill accompanied them to lunch. After passing through the buffet line, he seated himself at the end of the table, next to Shayla.
Her senses on high alert, she recognized a setup when she saw it.
“I wanted to talk to you about this, Shay,” he started.
Oh, boy. Here it comes.
He speared a piece of raw carrot in his salad with his fork. “How would you feel about doing a hands-on investigative piece about the local BDSM lifestyle scene?”
She tried not to choke on her broccoli soup. “How hands-on?”
He chewed his carrot for a moment. “Something beyond the crap people normally see on the Internet. Separating fact from fiction. Is everyone doing like what’s on the porn sites, or is that the exception? That kind of thing. How do people get into this sort of lifestyle? Day in the life of someone. I’ve got Pete doing a report on the nudist colonies up in Pasco County. Alice is going to cover transsexuals, and we’ve got leads on strip clubs and swingers groups.”
Shayla felt her face redden. She studied her food. “What are you asking me to do, exactly?”
“Get to know some of these people. Write an article, hell, even better, a series of articles about them. What makes them tick, something fair and balanced. You could even interview mental health professionals and get their take on what they do, talk to law enforcement, that kind of thing.”
Shay’s appetite had faded. “BDSM?”
“I won’t require you to do it. If you want to say no, I understand. We can get someone else to do it. But I really think, after talking to some people locally and doing a little poking around of my own, that it’ll be one of our biggest series. A way to get your name well known on our site. I’m not talking about a sensationalized T&A piece. I’m talking seriously looking at it from the inside out. It’ll be a web-only series, but we’ll promo it in print.”
Serious writing. She did want to do serious writing. On her résumé, she’d highlighted some of the IR pieces she’d written, and that in-depth reporting was one of her loves.
She just didn’t know if she could be unbiased on that particular topic.
“Can I think about it?”
“Of course.”
She nodded. “Okay. Let me have a few hours. I’ll get back to you before the end of the day.”
She knocked on Bill’s open door later that afternoon. He was alone and on the computer. “Hey, what’s up?” he said.
“Can I talk to you privately for a few?”
He sat back and nodded. “Sure. Close the door if you want.”
She did.
Shayla sat in one of the chairs in front of his desk. It took her a moment to compose her thoughts. “About the story idea. The BDSM one.”
“Don’t want it?”
“I honestly don’t know if I can be unbiased.”
She’d found out in her few weeks of working for the magazine that Bill Melling wasn’t just a good boss, he was a nice guy. Fair, easy to talk to, and was considered a friend by many of his employees.
“Need to talk about it?” he asked.
She took a deep breath. “As long as it’s just between you and me.”
He nodded.
“I have ex issues. The reason I left my ex was because he downloaded BDSM porn behind my back. Well, that wasn’t the only reason, but that sums it up nicely.”
He sucked in a breath. “Yowch.”
“Yeah.” She studied her fingernails. “It was the second time I’d discovered he’d been downloading porn. The first time, I found it on my computer and he swore he’d stop. It turns out, after the final accounting the second time, he’d downloaded over fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of porn. Using credit cards he took out in my name.” She picked at her cuticles. “I believed him the first time when he said he’d stop. He did seem to change. Got more attentive. I had no reason to doubt his word that he’d stopped and wouldn’t do it again.”
“He didn’t stop?”
“Nope. He got sneakier, proposed, and asked me to set a date for our wedding.”
He winced. “Double yowch. Bastard.”
She managed a wan smile at his tone. Bill was obviously on her side. “So we spent months shopping for a dress and rings and ordering invitations and a cake. All that crap. Then I found out how sneaky he was when he’d borrowed my car. I found a stack of mail in it that he’d forgotten he left there. Including some envelopes with my name on them. That’s when I learned it wasn’t the one thousand dollars of the first go-round. It was over fifteen thousand, and it was six different credit cards he took out in my name without my knowledge. Most of it for sites showing that BDSM stuff.”
“Well, I appreciate your honesty. I understand that it would be too much for you. I’ll go ahead and reassign—”
“I’ll do it.”
He tilted his head as he studied her. “I was expecting you to say no after hearing about all of that.”
It surprised her, too. “I want to find out why he wanted that stuff more than me. Why he was willing to lie and steal and throw away what we had for it.”