“Ms. Wilder, there’s an Ella Campbell here to see you.” She paused a second, then lowered her voice to a hush only I could hear. “She looks about ready to explode.”
Perfect.
I nodded with a little stab of satisfaction.
“Send her in.”
Allison disappeared, shaking her head like I’d been spending too much time with crazy-Nicholas. A moment later, the door burst open and two people swept inside.
One was a tiny little man. Glasses. Tight suit. All the classic indicators of an over-worked manager to an up-and-coming star, the kind who couldn’t yet afford to pay him.
The second...? Well, the second was different thing entirely.
The first thing I noticed were the breasts. In fact, they were all I could notice.
For a split second, my heart froze in my chest. Nick was a breast man. Like all adolescents cast off at an early-age to boarding school, he had developed an almost unparalleled affinity for the wonders of the female chest.
But then my eyes traveled up to her face.
My heart continued beating.
The second I’d seen the picture in her file, I knew I’d found ‘the one.’ There were simply no other candidates—I’d closed my computer soundly behind me.
She was a dead ringer for Nick’s least favorite ex-stepmother.
“Emma?” I rose tentatively from my chair, extending out a hand.
She froze in her tracks, a rather frightening look contorting her painted face.
“It’s Ella, actually.”
Already, it was easy to hear that bitchy tone just beneath the surface. The tone of a girl who thought she was better than everyone around her. Better than she really was.
I warmed in anticipation just at the thought of it.
“But that’s alright,” she hastened to continue (after receiving a sharp look from her manager), “the two of us just met.”
I smiled sweetly, and gestured for her to sit down. Damn right she would behave. This meeting was her ticket out. She knew it. I knew it. We all knew it. Even little Allison, eavesdropping outside the door, knew the significance of what was about to happen.
I was the key to making all that possible. All her dreams. All that insatiable ambition.
She would play nice. She’d smile until that plastic face of hers cracked.
“We may have just met, but I already feel as though I know you,” I said in a disarmingly friendly tone. I flipped open the file in front of me, and began scrolling through. “So you signed last week with Ford Models, right?”
Just like a million other girls.
She perched on the edge of her chair, nodding with the speed of someone who had spent many such hours on the edge of that chair, just trying to get noticed. “Yes, a one-year contract.”
I paused and looked up.
One year in the modeling world was not a good thing. Not when someone was just starting out. They offered longer years to younger girls—trying to get the most out of their age.
Now this girl wasn’t as young as they got—not by a long shot. She was twenty-four years old. Same age as Nick. Two years older than me. But still—just one year?
I looked at her manager. Her manager sank an inch or two lower in his chair.
Yes, everything was riding on this meeting alright. This meeting was making them sweat.