Dirty Talk by Julie Kriss

Author:Julie Kriss [Kriss, Julie]
Language: eng
Format: epub

Seventeen

Emma

* * *

For Thanksgiving, I flew to Chicago to see my parents. I stayed in my old bedroom—now renovated—in the house I grew up in. I ate my mother’s roasted peanuts-and-pretzel snack and her buttered baked sweet potatoes. Samantha and Aidan came for a day, and that night all five of us—Mom, Dad, Sam, Aidan, and me—played Monopoly. Not surprisingly, except for Mom and Dad, it was a cutthroat game. I would have won except I went to jail too many times, and Sam lucked into a few sweet hotels and beat the rest of us.

Late Saturday night, I sat on top of the covers on my bed. Sam and Aidan had flown back to New York, and Mom and Dad were asleep. As I always did when I was home with my parents—and as I tried not to do, every time—I thought about who my real parents might be, and why they had abandoned Samantha and me. I wondered if they were even alive, if they thought about us at all. Who was I, really?

I found myself wiping tears from my cheeks. What the hell was wrong with me?

Get it together, Emma.

I picked up my phone, but instead of calling Noah like I wanted to, I called Catharine Knowles.

She picked up on the second ring. “Hello, Emma.”

“I’m sorry to call you so late on a holiday weekend,” I said, realizing at the last minute what I was doing. “Were you busy?”

“Actually, I’m working,” Catharine said. “I don’t have any family, and there’s too much to do. Especially since you haven’t found me an assistant yet.”

She was scolding me, and I deserved it. For someone who claimed to be the best recruiter in the business, I had done a terrible job. “Actually, I’ve found you someone, if you agree to it,” I said.

“Oh? You’ve been recruiting over a holiday weekend? I’d love to hear who you’re suggesting.”

“Me.”

There was a beat of silence on the other end of the line. “Emma. Are you joking?”

“No.” I wiped the last tear away and sat up straighter. “I’m offering to come to L.A. and work as your executive assistant while I recruit someone local. When we’ve picked someone, I’ll train her myself. That way we both know it’ll be done right.”

“I see.” Catharine paused again. “You don’t think you’re needed to run your company in New York?”

“I have excellent help who can take over. And I won’t work for you permanently. It will be for a few weeks while I put the new assistant in place. Then I’ll go back to my usual job.” I took a breath. “I know it’s unusual. But you know I can do the job. I can assure you I’m immune to movie stars. I never even watch movies, so I don’t know who any of them are. And I think—I think a change would be good for me.”

“Is that so?” Her voice was polite, but Catharine was no dummy. I was calling her late at night on a holiday weekend, nearly begging to come to L.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.