“But it’s so warm and cuddly. Like a televised hug.” Pet ripped off a piece of notepaper, picked up a pair of scissors, and started making tiny snips. Most chronic fidgeters doodled with a pen. His sister cut intricate silhouette portraits. In less than three minutes, she could reproduce someone’s profile with meticulous accuracy. “Not the bits where you make someone cry, obviously.” Snip. Snip. “I’m still waiting to be invited for a studio visit.”
Tucking her tongue between her teeth as she deftly maneuvered the scissors, she sent him a teasing but hesitant look.
That cloak of reserve was seeping in again.
He didn’t know how to broach it.
And if he were ruthlessly honest, these interactions with Pet were so far out of his experience that a small part of him would find it easier if she was like his other sister, Lorraine.
A clinical narcissist and living on a different continent.
“Come on,” she said lightly, “you’re ancient and I’m short. If you can’t get a studio pass for a sibling, we could totally pull off a ruse for take-your-daughter-to-work day.”
“If you’d like to retain the illusion of the show being ‘warm and cuddly,’ I’d stick to couch-viewing like the rest of the country.” Shaking his head, he took the silhouette Pet handed him, an outline of Mariana Ortiz’s head. The food writer had a distinctive nose: narrow, turned up at the tip, and now perfectly captured on the crisp paper.
He turned it over on his palm.
“Should I give this to her?” he asked abruptly. He was not on gift-giving terms with Mariana. Even after six seasons of the show, they hardly knew each other outside of work. But Pet’s self-described silly whittling was art. It should be seen.
A faint flush crept into Pet’s pointed face. “If you like.” She was quiet for a moment before she seemed to shake herself. Tearing off another sheet of paper, she started snipping again. “I see the competition over yonder is doing a steady stream of business despite the foul weather. Please note my staunch loyalty in never having stepped through that adorable door, despite the fact that it looks like my natural habitat and I would really enjoy a cocktail served in a gold cauldron.”
Dominic closed the spreadsheet. “If you want to blow out your liver and brain cells at Sugar Fair, have at it.” Now that she mentioned it, Pet probably would love the place. If she’d been the one to take over De Vere’s, it would be twinning Sylvie’s dubious brainchild by now. He rested one hand on the desk, a silent assurance it wouldn’t be carved back into a tree trunk and smothered in fake leaves and spangles any time soon. “But I’d make a booking ASAP. It’s a miracle it’s stayed in business this long.”
Pet rotated her paper and made a careful cut. “Is your brother really such a surly bastard, they ask. Of course not; inside, he’s a teddy bear, say I.” Snip. “And then he opens his mouth.”
At his raised eyebrow, the left corner of her mouth indented slightly. A ghost of amusement was in her voice as she murmured, “You know, you can stream reruns of Sylvie Fairchild’s season. I binged seven episodes last night. Excellent executive decision to bring her onto the judging panel. The woman is a bloomin’ treasure.”
The woman was a bloody menace.
“Occasional spurts of technical genius wasted on garish, childish, obnoxious concoctions that ought to come with a health and safety warning.” A dull stiffness had invaded several muscles around his spine. Cupping a hand around his shoulder, Dominic rolled his neck. “As if it hasn’t devolved into enough of a farce. Every half-baked drama-monger in the competition will be rolling out the glitter cannons to win her vote.”
He felt more than usually irritated just contemplating it.
The deepening laughter in Pet’s eyes momentarily banished more of that god-awful tension in the room. “Think you sank your own ship there, Captain.” She grinned as his brooding preoccupation sharpened to acute attention, his gaze narrowing. “You should have kept to the usual Popsicle stare and impersonal critique four years ago. Sylvie was clearly the public darling back then, and Sugar Fair is a production draw now, but if you hadn’t needled back and forth like that, I highly doubt they’d have offered her the contract. Sugar-laced strychnine on one side, icy darts on the other. Jab, jab. And she was totally unfazed.”
There was a speck of awe in that last remark, and just a hint of bite underscored his response. “She was hardly the only contestant with enough brain cells to differentiate between honest feedback and a personal insult. I don’t dick around the truth with pointless bullshit, but if they’re giving it their all, there’s nothing to be fazed about.”
It was a small percentage that actually listened and took the advice on board, instead of staring like a headlight-struck rabbit and playing up to the cameras as if they’d just survived an encounter with the Sith, but the number wasn’t limited to one.
“No,” Pet agreed matter-of-factly, “but she also brings some serious cute factor to the table. She’s nice to look at, and the entertainment industry is a shallow beast. And she KO’d you with a sponge cake.” Her mouth twitched again. “Mortal Kombat with the Sugar Plum Fairy.” In a pitch-perfect imitation of Jim Durham’s West Country brogue, she drawled, “It’s all about those ratings.”
He always enjoyed rounding out a grim morning with a few unpalatable truths.
After a moment, he grimaced.
The show was a victim of its own financial success; from a modicum of legitimacy and a few scraps of genuine heart in the first few seasons, it was rapidly unraveling into sensationalized rubbish. Jim’s unexpected departure was a boon to a production team that delighted in constantly switching things up.
With a short sound in the back of his throat, he rose and took the files back to the locked cabinet. “If you’re not planning to do any more actual work today,” he said, “may I offer a suggestion?”
“For the afternoon?”
“For the future in general.”
The metaphorical drop in temperature was swift.
“For the last time”—Pet’s voice lost all traces of humor—“I am not changing career paths. I’m twenty-six years old, I’m good at my job, and most importantly, I enjoy being a personal assistant. We all have a calling, and this is mine.” She rubbed her thumb back and forth over the paper a few times. “Why else would I want to help out here so you can fulfill your contractual obligation to scare the living shit out of the nation?”
A question he’d also posed after a motorcycle crash had put his usual executive assistant on leave for weeks and his sister had jumped in to fill the vacancy. Prior to this month, he could count on one hand the number of times they’d been in the same room since she was a baby. So, a bit of a surprise when Pet had promptly showed up in his office with a temp contract she’d drafted, typed, and already signed.
He still wasn’t sure how he’d also ended up signing it, and he’d had to controvert her attempt to give herself a pathetically low salary. He wouldn’t let anyone work for that, and they sure as hell weren’t in such a precarious financial position that he was going to rip off his own sister, whether she needed the money or not.