The drug trial results sat on his desk, along with a stack of other confidential paperwork he needed Guadalupe to file for him as his housekeeper plus therapist plus secretary. Although the trial had only included seventeen men, every single one of them saw tangible results… along with the blushing nurse staff. Seventeen subjects seemed like a quantifiable number to support his theory that the drug was effective, and safe, so he could push the drug through. With enough financial encouragement, he was certain the FDA would agree.
“Guadalupe, where are you?” Thomas called out again.
A couple minutes later the housekeeper bustled in, out of breath. It took a solid three minutes to sprint from one side of the house to the other, then compose herself in order to appear unruffled. A true lady didn’t sweat, after all. She glistened.
“Congratulations, Dr. Cook. I heard your news,” she huffed.
“I need you to file all of these documents for me. Post-haste. And once you’re done with that, I need you to draft up an employment offer for Miss Samantha Stanton.”
Guadalupe’s eyebrow rose. She had been following Samantha Says since its inception, and read her latest column that didn’t sound quite like herself as she announced her termination before shrugging off the advice-seeker’s question with a reply more befitting a man. Clearly Sam wasn’t taking her termination well.
“What’s the job position?” Guadalupe asked, taking notes on the notepad she always kept in her uniform pocket for exact moments like these.
“Editor-in-chief.”
“For what magazine?”
“Ladies Home Journal.”
“In New York City?” Guadalupe clarified.
“It’s the only way to get her away from that guy she’s seeing—Raul Smothers. Once she finds out that he betrayed her, she’ll certainly break up with him. And who will be there to dry her tears? Me. Then I can whisk her away to her New York City where she’ll forget all about Raul and we can finally have our happily ever after without any other distractions tearing us apart.”
Guadalupe looked up at him with judgement in her eyes. “That’s quite deviant, even for you, sir.”
“A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do,” he replied.
“Have you told your current editor-in-chief he will need to step down?”
“Oh, I don’t plan on actually giving Samantha the job. Just offering it to her. But once we’re settled in the city, I’m sure she’ll come to realize she doesn’t need a job when I can give her anything and everything she wants. She won’t ever have to lift a finger again!”
“What if she wants to keep writing and helping people, Dr. Cook?”
Thomas laughed. “No woman in her right mind would rather have a career over a cushy life, Guadalupe. Are you telling me you’d rather clean up after my mess than sit at home being taken care of?”
“Well, if given the choice, I actually always wanted to be a lawyer.”
“Ha! A lawyer? Why—so you can enact laws that help your people overrun America?”
“My people, sir?” Guadalupe didn’t know any fellow Spaniards eager to immigrate to America, let alone take it over.
“Illegals. You know, Mexicans.” He paused, giving his wording a second thought, then said, “No offense.”
Not that there should have been any offense to the word Mexican, if indeed Guadalupe was Mexican. But she was Spanish-American, which she had told him at least a dozen times. So she rolled her eyes as she did every other time she had corrected him about her ethnicity, but this time she didn’t bother to respond.
“Why are you so obsessed with winning this woman over, Dr. Cook?”
“Because I don’t lose. I never have, and I never will.”
Chapter 37
It had been everyone’s expectation—everyone being Raul, Bernadette, and even her mother Minnie, who desperately hoped Sam would forego the whole career aspirations fad and marry Raul instead—that Sam would be swimming in a sea of job offers after her termination. But the only employment opportunity that arrived came on a piece of Dr. Thomas Cook letterhead, and accepting the prestigious dream role of editor-in-chief meant moving back to New York City. The city that had spit her out in the first place. And the city where Raul was not.
It didn’t help her job search that Sam’s name had been permanently smeared across every Pittsburgh tabloid due to her “scandalizing revenge campaign” against Cook Pharmaceuticals. Or that she had been incarcerated for theft and forgery, which they never bothered to publicly retract after the charges were dropped.
Her phone calls went ignored. Her résumés were returned to sender. She was a failed journalist by day, and a homeopathic quack by night. And so Sam slipped into the tired cliché attached to every woman: that she was being “too emotional” and couldn’t be taken seriously. The only Samantha Stanton anyone was interested in was the one who’d made a public spectacle of herself. Finally the world had won as Sam learned to take her medicine and give up.
