More Muffia (The Muffia Book 2) Page 6

  Paige had yet to weigh in on the upcoming meeting, which was odd because she was sort of the Muffia’s mother hen—the one who kept the rest of us on track with dates, rules, who the next hostess was, and remembering what books we read, which would become more and more relevant as time went on. Not even brain Pilates could help me remember all the books we’ve read. I figured she would get to it soon enough and decided it was my turn to “Reply all ”:

  From: cunningquinn@Talentpool.com

  To: The Muffs

  Re: Next Meeting

  Hello, ladies. I’ve returned from the land of Toto. You can’t believe the shrines they build to toilets over there; they have a potty museum. Viggo M. tractor shoot went well, but the vigorous Viggo himself alas remains only a fantasy. Glad to be home, despite twisting my ankle (better now), lack of sleep, and other peri-menopausal symptoms. And guess what? I finished the book!!! Loved it. Helps to be trapped on a plane. Sorry for the call, M. I’ll bring a bottle of Bourbon, and we can pretend it’s moonshine.

  After perusing several more emails—deals from Amazon Local, a group conducting dating webinars, signature requests from watchdog groups, solicitations from what seemed like every site I’d ever been on, no matter how many times I’ve unsubscribed, and requests to wire funds to save the royal family of Burkina Faso—my eyes were glazing over. It was all I could do to retrieve my Kobo reader from the Tumi bag and put it next to the front door so I’d remember to bring it to book club.

  Exhaustion finally caught up with me and, after attempting to read through The Dating Company’s ten tips for successful online dating, all further thought was banished as the laptop slipped from my lap.

  What I didn’t yet know, as I crashed into the first deep slumber since my return from Japan, is that unseen by me when I’d pulled out the Kobo, burning a hole in the Tumi roller, was something that could change the course of the Muffia.

  CHAPTER 5

  The following morning, Jamie Harris strode through the mostly open floor plan of Talent Partners, Inc., per usual. Her hair appeared newly highlighted, and she was wearing a slimming navy suit that hung like nobody’s business, with a perfectly accessorized black Lauren bag swinging by her side. She gave me a nod in acknowledgement and made a beeline for the door of her corner office where, once inside, she deposited the bag on her desk and pivoted to return to the open door.

  All of us who work on the fifth floor within shouting distance of Jamie’s office know to look down at such a moment, hoping not to be called upon, prone as she was to addressing us like schoolchildren. This time, though, I felt the full heat of her withering glare.

  “Well, Quinn, were you going to tell me about this?”

  My head snapped up to face the threat, for in her tone there was an audible note of impending danger. But what was she talking about? What was “this”?

  I glanced over my shoulder to the few members of the Talent Partners team—my mostly self-serving colleagues—who were at their desks, heads bowed: Sameer, Carolyn, and Titania included.

  “They can’t help you,” Jamie said, and started backing into her office. “Would you come in here, please?”

  I rose slowly, putting the computer on sleep mode, and looked over to Sameer who gave me his signature head waggle, which simultaneously said, “Uh-oh,” and “Don’t worry.”

  Once inside Jamie’s office, I closed the door.

  “Ankle better?” she asked, getting the niceties out of the way.

  “Yes, thanks. Much.” I’d graduated to my lowest heels.

  “What exactly happened in Tokyo?” She sounded almost accusatory as she walked around to the far side of her desk and assumed an attack stance.

  “Nothing. I mean beyond the shoot, which went really well, as I told you. Kitomo Matsuhashi was very happy with Viggo’s work on Kubota, and they might want him back for their new bulldozer campaign.”

  “Never mind that,” she snapped. “We heard that one of our agents in Tokyo was misbehaving last week.”

  “Really? Who?” Best to play dumb while I tried to figure out how she could possibly mean me, which it was clear she did.

  “Who? Are you serious? You are who.”

  I hadn’t misbehaved; I don’t think. As quickly as I could, on only one latte, I reviewed the four-day trip. Had I eaten too many daifuku? If I had, so what? Did I splurge on the expense account? Not at all. It’s possible that I went by Viggo’s hotel room a few too many times, hoping to catch his door open, and he thought I was stalking him. Even this didn’t really rise to the level of punishable offense.

  “Who told you I was misbehaving?” I asked. That’s the way to do it; cast blame on the messenger.

  “Doesn’t matter who told me.” She pulled out her chair and gestured to the one I found myself already gripping the arm of. “Sit.”

  I slumped into the seat.

  She smoothed her hair and took a breath. “You were our only agent in Tokyo last week.”

  “Whatever it is, it’s not true!” Somebody was feeding Jamie lies; but why? And why was Jamie believing this person?

  “Talent Partners’ code of conduct demands that every member of our team, from the partners to the lowliest mail room Harvard grad, maintains a spotless reputation and does nothing to throw any unwanted attention on the agency. You know that.”

  As she was saying this, she picked up her iPhone, her fingers flitting over the touch screen. “You came to TP as a high-grossing booker with Commercials Plus, but maybe this was too big a move for you, our clients too rich and famous, and you haven’t been able to keep things in proper perspective.”

  Jamie had always been a snob.

  “How do you know another agent wasn’t in Tokyo? Talent Partners is a pretty big agency,” I pointed out.

  Jamie gave me a withering glare.

  Had I forgotten some altercation I was involved in? I couldn’t think of a single event. Maybe this was the kind of thing Lumosity was supposed to help with. I flashed on how snarky I’d been with that flight attendant about peoples’ excess baggage. Perhaps Japan Airlines was considering a commercial campaign with one of Talent Partners’ clients and they’d captured the whole thing on CCTV. Oh, shit!

  A sinking feeling came over me, and I felt sure I was about to be “let go”—that annoying euphemism for getting fired.

  Keep your mouth shut, Quinn. When in doubt, don’t crucify yourself.

  “These pictures arrived in my email inbox today.” Jamie turned the phone around so I could see.

  It was me, all right—a disheveled mess with the broken Lucite shoe in my hand. It was coming back to me. These shots must have been taken at the airport in Tokyo, and from the angle they were shot, it appeared as though I was holding the distressed Natasha Marro at a threatening angle while four or five Hello Kitty girls cowered beneath me. I felt my eyes bug. Who could have sent these? And even more curiously—who took them?

  “Where did they come from?” I tried to visualize the airport scene a few days earlier. I couldn’t remember anybody with a camera per se, but everyone had a smart phone, so realistically, everyone had a camera.

  “Doesn’t matter. You read the caption?”

  Peering at the screen, I read:

  Talent Partners’ agent, Quinn Cunningham, terrorizes Hello Kitty convention in Japan.

  I stared at the photos and the absurd logline, incredulous. Maybe with a little advance warning and a second cup of coffee I could have thought of a way out of my current predicament, but I was without words to defend myself. The evidence was damning, and there was absolutely no getting around the fact that the woman in the pictures was me.

  The only thing I had in my favor was a previously unsullied reputation and demonstrated ability to make millions of dollars for Talent Partners and its clients. Unfortunately, neither of these things made me irreplaceable. In Hollywood, everyone is replaceable, and though this fact interferes with many an industry insider’s hubristic belief of his own value, it’s wise not to
forget it. The script gets rewritten, new actors hired; the show really does go on.

  “So,” said Jamie, “we have a problem. Dakota Johnson will not be booked for Hello Kitty if this gets out.”

  I wanted to say that once Dakota Johnson stripped down in Fifty Shades of Gray, Kitty would be saying “Goodbye.” But my mouth remained closed.

  She pulled the phone back and put it down on the desk. “You agree it’s you?”

  “It’s me but... ”

  “The person who sent them wants you let go from the company.”

  Sometimes I really hate it when I’m right.

  “Did Viggo say something about me? I thought we got along well. You know, we had a good working relationship. All I did was make sure he showed up on time, which meant waking him up before he wanted... ”

  “It’s not Viggo. He likes you.”

  He likes me? That was nice to learn, especially since he’d been sort of cold toward me most of the trip. But if it wasn’t Viggo, who took the pictures and somehow dashed to the plane ahead of me; who would want me gone?

  “I guess I just don’t understand,” I protested. “I mean, I’m a nobody. I book actors who shoot television commercials in foreign countries. Am I a threat to the balance of trade?”

  “It is a bit of a mystery,” she agreed, admiring her manicure job.

  “If you don’t tell me who sent them, I really can’t explain it.”

  “I don’t actually know who sent them...yet. The Internet people are working on it. But the fact remains,” she glanced at her computer screen, “it IS you in the pictures and if this were to get out, it could damage us—the department—if not the entire agency.”

  “I don’t really see how,” I said, and immediately wished I hadn’t.

  “Quinn, we are a talent agency, and you must remember that as a talent agency, we exist to help create entertainment for the masses—entertainment which is a vehicle for corporations to market their products. It is a corporate commercial enterprise. Corporations don’t want anything out there in the media that will damage their brands. Your yelling at people in Japan damages our relationship with every corporation that is Japanese and every corporate entity that does business with the Japanese, not to mention any other corporation that’s offended by your behavior. If this gets out, they will use other agencies’ talent. Do you understand?”

  “Even if they really, really want one of our clients?” I asked hopefully.

  “They’ll go somewhere else,” she repeated. “So I need you to clean it up.”

  I nodded my head. I did understand.

  A thought hit me. I opened my mouth and just as quickly closed it again. If I’d learned anything about human relationships—which wasn’t much if it had taken me this long to break up with Steven— it was that you should never bad-mouth your friend’s or boss’s sex partners.

  In this case, the only person I could think of who’d want me gone was Jamie’s pretty little handpicked dog’s body and Moldovan Molotov cocktail, Titania. Their affair was not a secret; everyone already knew Jamie was gay, so no biggie there, either. But when Titania had arrived in the TP offices four months earlier, most of us had taken an immediate dislike to her. Her scantily dressed body—and even more scantily cloaked ambition—made Eve Harrington look like Melanie in Gone With the Wind.

  “Doesn’t matter where they came from or who sent them, just clean it up,” Jamie said, interrupting my thoughts. “Get some help. Get Reputationdefense.com, or whatever it’s called. If these pictures hit the Internet, I’m telling you right now, I can’t save you.”

  “I’ll handle it, don’t worry. Absolutely.” I stood, none too sure about how I was going to do it nor if I’d be able to halt the implosion of my career.

  “One more thing—”

  I sat back down as she scrolled beneath the pictures and once more presented the phone:

  You must terminate Quinn Cunningham’s contract, or this goes live in three weeks.

  My chest constricted; my throat tightened. Where were my aphorisms now? Yes, yes, thank you, thank you? They’d abandoned me.

  “Three weeks,” she said, just in case I’d suddenly forgotten how to read. “That’s how long you have, or I’m afraid we really will have to let you go.”

  I realize euphemisms are supposed to grease the wheels of social discourse, but let you go in this context is flat-out insulting. At least she hadn’t let me go immediately. I had time to get proof before exposing Titania as the culprit.

  “Thanks for giving me a time to fix things.” I stood once more and headed for the door.

  “Don’t thank me. Thank your persecutor for giving you some time.”

  Of course—why hadn’t I thought about thanking the person responsible for making my life more complicated?

  “Right.” I didn’t know how Titania, or whoever it was, had gotten my pictures, but I for sure was going to find out. But why the delay? That was a mystery, too. Find the culprit; find the reason.

  As I left Jamie’s office, closing the door behind me, Sameer suddenly appeared. “I won’t ask you what happened in there,” he said to my relief. “I just want to know, did you decide to date a farmer?”

  I stared at him. He had obviously heard far too much of my conversation with Vicki and had been preoccupied by its content. That made me feel uncomfortable, but I was still glad for the distraction.

  “Thinkin’ about it,” I said, feeling my phone vibrate in my jacket pocket.

  He beamed. “Excellent choice. Sometimes I wish I was still a farmer. At the end of the day, you make something that people need.”

  He had a way of putting things in perspective.

  CHAPTER 6

  His hands clasped either side of my low-rise thong printed with multi-colored peace signs, and he pulled it down, over my thighs, past my knees, and off, lingering for a few moments at my damaged ankle, caressing and kissing the pain away. He glanced up, his eyes meeting mine, whereupon he came high onto his knees before me as his lips took hold of my pussy, his tongue making the plunge.

  Yes, I’m weak. But OMG, it feels good.

  I sat perched on Gran’s sideboard/dresser thing—naked, spread-eagled, my skirt hiked up around my hips. Only instead of his cock availing itself of my throbbing pussy, he was demonstrating his oral skills. And he was so good at it—all the sucking, kissing, and licking that goes into orally getting a girl off.

  “I missed you so much,” he said, pulling back, his entire face shiny and wet with me.

  I didn’t say anything; I was trying desperately not to think about how weak I am, but instead to simply find a few minutes of escape.

  Steven kissed the soft insides of my thighs—both sides, of course; equal time. He kissed my ankles, giving greater care to the swollen one. “Poor baby,” he said, before moving toward my clit again.

  I groaned. This was no post-flight dream. This was happening, and it felt great.

  “You taste so—fucking” — he sucked on my clit—“good.”

  “I’m...so glad you…like,” I said haltingly.

  “Oh, yes,” he said between licks. “Very...much.”

  “Kiss me.” I pulled him to his feet.

  And we kissed. The taste of our flavors mingling got me almost as riled as his engorged penis impatiently throbbing against my thigh. He took my earlobe between his teeth.

  “I want you inside me,” I said, and his body responded, his cock moving toward my wet, warm center of its own volition. No five-finger assist from either of us. Like I said, I was at the perfect height on this thing, and his penis was as hard and directional as a rudder on an America’s Cup catamaran steering for home.

  He thrusted.

  “Agghhhh,” he growled.

  “Oooohhhhh,” I responded.

  His cock found its mark, high and deep inside me. It felt like it was pressing on my lungs, forcing me to take a sharp inhale.

  Thrust.

  Again I felt penetrated fully. How could I be
expected to give this up when there was no one else? And I’d had such a bad day! He must care because it wasn’t even Thursday.

  I know, I know; he’s married. But please don’t judge me too harshly. I’m working on it. I have some of my profile written. And anyway, it’s my karma that will be affected, not yours. If he wanted me this bad, I must be doing something good. He said his wife doesn’t like sex, so perhaps I’m actually being charitable.

  “Oh, my God, that’s good,” he said. I don’t question his God.

  I told myself this wouldn’t happen, and I do feel weak, but I needed some loving after being confronted with those pictures and the possibility of losing my livelihood. Any normal person would need a tension release. And, due to my ankle, neither dance class nor the treadmill was an option. Perhaps those of you who are single, with stressful careers like mine, with a shortage of romance, might relate. Or maybe you’d just say I’m rationalizing my bad behavior.

  Thrust and hold.

  “Oooooh.”

  “Ahhhh.” Yes, this could get me there.

  Thrust.

  Madelyn told me, after Steven and I broke up the first time, that I should just use a vibrator to release tension. We even had a date to go vibrator shopping, but I blew her off to go on another bad date with an actor; how tacky of me.

  Thrust.

  I did finally buy a vibrator but...

  “Oh, yeah!”

  “Oh, God—I just can’t get the hang of the thing. And it’s called The Rabbit, which—”“Oh, Quinn, you’re so wet!”

  —“I’m sorry, even with the clitoral—stimu—it’s not a... ”

  “Fuck—”

  “I look at the thing, and it’s like having sex with the Easter Bunny, all pink and—”

  Thrust

  —“which, in turn makes me think of a lot of little kids in pinafores watching and pointing, counting their jelly beans.”

  Thrust

  Suffice it to say, I remain weak where Steven’s concerned. I want my very own man, but my options for this kind of release are—