The woman snatched it off her and made cooing noises as she rocked it back and forth.
Loki eyeballed Felicity over her owner’s shoulder as if plotting some nasty vengeance.
Felicity scowled back. That cute act was fur deep, clearly.
Mrs. Henderson spun back to face her. “What sort of a monster attacks a beautiful, helpless kitten?”
Helpless? Felicity had puncture wounds that told another story. “What sort of an idiot fails to keep her pet indoors?” Felicity retorted. “That’s an expensive pair of imported lilly pillies she keeps defiling.”
“She’s a kitten!” Mrs. Henderson protested. “Sometimes she gets out. Have a heart.”
Felicity narrowed her eyes. “Look, lady, lock up that devil spawn. I don’t want to ever see it on my balcony again or I’ll bill you for my gardener’s pruning fees, and FYI, they’re the high-end kind that cause nose bleeds.”
“Monster! Oh, I pity you. The bitter, sad, lonely lawyer with no friends.”
Ouch. Felicity had no idea her dubious social life was such common knowledge. “What? I’m not bitter. I’m a dedicated professional with high career goals.”
“No, Ms. Simmons, you’re a sad case. I know because you hate animals.” She didn’t wait for an answer, instead turning and taking Loki indoors, slamming her balcony door shut.
Felicity turned to mirror the exit strategy on her side, but her nostrils twitched. She glanced down to discover her feline visitor had left a steaming, smelly calling card in her potted plant’s dirt.
Lovely.
Cleanup was a job for daylight and industrial-strength gloves. Sighing, she went inside. After delousing in the bathroom—animal saliva and claw marks could carry diseases, that much she knew—Felicity poured herself a glass of wine. Dropping onto the swanky nine-thousand-dollar couch that was the highlight of her apartment, she stared outside at her now disheveled tree. Damn, Loki. Perfection ruined.
Her eyes drifted to her own image reflected in the glass.
A bitter, sad, lonely lawyer with no friends? That was quite an impressive list Mrs. Henderson had flung at her. Not even remotely true, of course.
What do I have to be bitter about? Felicity was on top of the world professionally. Her mentor, Elena, had finally recognized her worth.
Okay, it was true she hadn’t made time for friends, unless you counted her local Starbucks employees, but frankly, their getting her triple-shot espresso right every morning was an absolutely beautiful relationship.
And it was equally true her bed was absent any warm companion these days. But pfft, no loss there. Hardly her fault that her new promotion meant she was now permanently based in New York after ten months in Sydney, nor that Phillip’s lack of interest in a transpacific relationship had brought things to an abrupt end.
“You’re not worth it,” he’d said.
That still stung.
Neither are you. That’s what she should have said, of course. Instead, she’d just stood there speechless like a gaping seagull, trying to think of something clever to say while he walked away.
But it was all moot. Relationships, friendships, exes. They could all go toss their emotional deadweights into the Hudson. Finally her career was about to hit its peak. Everything she’d ever worked for or sacrificed for was all within touch. That was all that mattered. She plucked a stray cat hair off her designer pants with determination.
No, when it came to her work, her focus would be absolute.
* * *
Elena Bartell leaned back in her austere black leather chair, smug as a cat in a puddle of sun.
Felicity surreptitiously wiped her hands down her tailored navy pants. Appropriately corporate, not too bland. Elena doesn’t like bland. God, it was hard to sit still under the Tiger Shark’s scrutiny, but she’d known this was coming. It might be a Friday, but this was day one of her training to take over Elena’s job so her boss could then swan off to Australia and edit her international fashion magazines from there. It was the world’s most mystifying career pivot, of course, and an even stranger choice of destination, but Felicity wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth.
“Your replacement for chief of staff seems adequate enough,” Elena said. “Perhaps don’t ask Scott to fetch your tea, though. Rumor has it chiefs of staff don’t take kindly to being asked to play assistant.”
Felicity felt the heat of her instant blush from her collarbone to the tips of her ears. “Erm. No.”
Oh, very smooth, Felicity.
Elena smirked, which just made her even more intimidating. Her black hair was slicked back, highlighting her pale skin and razor-sharp high cheekbones and bringing out her palest of blue eyes, which always gave her a lethal quality. That, paired with her pin-striped vest, matching trousers, and white silk shirt, made for an imposing impression.
The curious thing was that Elena was not tall. In fact, Felicity was taller, but next to her boss she often felt like she was shrinking—a turtle retracting its long neck back into its shell. Somehow Elena projected a greater presence than anyone Felicity had ever met.
She couldn’t look at Elena’s direct, amused stare, so her gaze shifted to everywhere else. It roamed to Elena’s desk. Gone was the picture frame that had held a photo of her now ex-husband Richard. Thank God. Waste of a pulmonary system, that asshole. Her eye fell to a new frame that hadn’t been there a day ago. She craned her neck just a little—subtly—to see who’d been promoted to frame-worthy status. Then she had to force herself not to jerk away.
Good God. What on earth was Elena Bartell doing with a photo of Maddie Grey on her desk? The blunt former night-shift reporter from Australia had somehow connected with Elena. Who’d fired her. Then rehired her. And fired her again. Honestly, it was hard to keep up.
Somehow after all that they were now…friends? How had that happened? Felicity had been in Elena’s life for years longer and had never been worthy of a framed photo. And if Felicity didn’t know for a fact that the twice-divorced Elena Bartell was entirely heterosexual, she’d side-eye the hell out of that photo.
Felicity swallowed back her surge of jealousy. No, she wasn’t doing this again. As part of Felicity’s new resolutions to be a better person, she’d promised herself to no longer fixate on all the ways Madeleine Grey kept winning at life, even though she totally didn’t deserve it and even if she was rather engaging, if you looked past the totally didn’t deserve it point.
The silence had dragged on far too long, and Felicity realized with a start that she was being watched as she studied the photo.
Elena’s expression was neutral, but her eyes were speculative. She waited, eyebrow half-cocked, as if expecting an awkward question.
Since Felicity was in the business of making her boss’s life comfortable, not the other way around, she met the look with her usual aloof lack of interest.
Finally, Elena seemed to give up waiting for a response and shuffled some papers. “All right.” She took a sip of tea from a mug on her desk that Felicity had bought her to replace the shattered one. “I’m breaking it in,” Elena said, “especially since my other one met its untimely demise.”
“Oh. Yes. Well, I’m truly sorry about that.”
