Exclusive Interview (3 page)

Ever.

Rage and panic battled inside me for an infinite moment, my heart swelling as though it were about to burst. My vision skated dangerously as I realized I wasn't going to take that. I wasn't going to let him get away with it any more.

My mouth opened without my consent.

“They aren't ugly! She looks great. Who the fuck do you think you are?”

Then the world snapped back into place as every head in the room turned and stared at me, including Mr. Kent Hudson.

Did I say that?
I wondered in a panic.
Did those words come out of my mouth? Oh please, no, no, no—

“I think I'm Kent Hudson. And who the fuck are you?” Mr. Hudson demanded. “And what would
you
know about fashion?” His eyes narrowed as he looked me up and down. I felt every inch of his burning gaze travel over my skin, setting me on fire and worming its way into places I'd never known existed. I noticed his eyes lingered on the full curves of my breasts before returning to my face. “Please,” he said. “Your name...?”

“Rebecca,” I heard myself say. “My name is Rebecca Alton and I think she looks great.”
Shut up!
My brain screamed at my mouth.
You want to get us killed? This guy looks like he might know a guy who knows a guy and the next thing you know you're vulture food in the Mojave!

He stepped back. “Tell me why you think she looks great.”

I glanced at Megan. Her face was as red as the shoes she now studied. “I think...” I cast about. What I really thought was that Kent Hudson was a giant shitheel and a bully—and I couldn't stand bullies. I'd also never successfully stood
up
to a bully, despite numerous tries, and I somehow doubted today would be the day to break that streak. Nevertheless, I had to give it a go.

I took a deep breath. “I think it shows boldness. A willingness to take chances. She wants to stand out in a crowd, but she'll do it without transgressing, er, common fashion wisdom? I think she carries it off very well, and she looks amazing.” I don't know anything about fashion, and it showed.

Silence rushed in to fill the space between us after I stopped speaking. I stood there, heart pounding, body temperature spiking off the charts, a blush burning through my cheeks as a thin trickle of sweat worked its way down my spine. I stared at Kent Hudson, daring him to blink first and hoping my eyes wouldn't start watering.

At last he crossed his arms. “Very well,” he said. “I take it back, Megan. You do indeed demonstrate a willingness to take chances and a faint hint of courage in making sure you stand out in the crowd.” Then a pale, humorless smile sliced across his face. “Unfortunately, that is not what I am looking for in a personal assistant. Get out.”

Poor Megan didn't even spare me a glance as she quickly paced out of the office, her head bowed. I steeled myself for the inevitable dismissal. If Megan got thrown out for red high heels, imagine the insults I was going to have to endure. I forced myself to keep my hands on my messenger bag so I wouldn't self-consciously tug my jacket closed to hide my tube top.

But Hudson merely clapped his hands again and smiled. “Well then. Congratulations to the three of you left standing, Daniel, Randy, and... Rebecca.” His gaze lingered on me, and I didn't quite think it was entirely due to my inappropriate attire. Licking his lips, he seemed to pull his attention away from me and refocused on the group.

“Please,” he said, “:come line up here, give your full names to my interns and then grab your cars, as we will all be heading to the airport. We have a flight for Vegas that leaves in an hour and a half and we must be on it.”

Gobsmacked, I just stood there, staring at Hudson while Daniel and Randy practically
skipped
up to the interns and started rattling off their names and addresses and whatever else they thought the airlines might like to know. Kent Hudson stared back at me. His blue-green eyes seemed to swirl, like the sea in a hurricane, as though beneath his Take-No-Shit exterior there raged a deadly storm. My heart skipped a beat, leaving me dizzy and breathless.

Or I could just have been severely sleep deprived. You never know.

Then the two other candidates passed between us, breaking my line of sight and the strange spell of Hudson's eyes. One of the interns cleared his throat and, flustered, I hurried over to give them the information they needed, not even really thinking about why they might need that information. Only when the intern I was speaking to gave me a big smile and said, “Okay, your ticket will be ready for you at the airport,” did it really click with me what was going on.

Vegas.
Why were we going to Vegas? I hadn't expected to go to Vegas as part of my job hunt. It was nuts. Completely bonkers.

Then again, who in their right mind would turn down a free trip to Vegas? A thought occurred. I turned to Hudson. “This
is
free, right?”

He gave a tiny snort through his nose. “Yes. On the house. A last minute change to the vetting process, if you will.”

I nodded. “Oh. Okay then.”

For a moment we stood there, watching each other. Then Hudson cleared his throat. “Time is wasting,” he told me brusquely as he strode to the gaggle of interns and held out his hand. One of them rushed forward and pressed a dark leather satchel bag into his outstretched palm. He slung it over his shoulder. “Grab your car. I'll meet you at the airport.”

It was a struggle not to start chewing on my fingernails. “I don't have a car,” I said.

Hudson, already heading for the door, stopped in mid-stride. He turned. He blinked. A faint expression of puzzlement passed over his face. “You what?”

Embarrassment stung. “I don't have a car.”

The interns fell silent. Hudson, for his part, appeared to think about this for a few beats. “How do you get around?” he asked finally.

I understood what he was getting at completely. Going without a car in LA is next to impossible. “I walk. Ride the bus,” I said. “And also I don't really have anywhere to go. I'm new to LA I don't have, you know... 'friends'.” I put the little air quotes around the word friends, just to emphasize that I didn't have any in LA Although, to be truthful, I probably didn't have any at all. Yeah.

“So... you
don't
have a car?” Hudson couldn't quite seem to comprehend this.

I shook my head. “Nope.”

“Huh.” He studied me, his face almost a blank. Anything could have been happening inside his head. Then he appeared to reach a decision, pulled a set of keys out of his pocket and walked to the glass doors, giving me a magnificent view of his ass. It was like sculpted marble, but with the bonus of being squeezable, and my fingers twitched with the impulse before I quashed it. What the hell was wrong with me?.

With a heave, he pushed them open, then turned and met my eyes again. “Well?” he asked. “Come on. I'll drive you to the airport. It's not like I don't have the room.”

The thought of being in such close quarters with Kent Hudson sent my heart pounding and my stomach lurching, although whether it was from anticipation or from fear I couldn't have said. Clutching my bag I hurried after him while behind me the interns giggled and I had to fight down a blush. Only one question burned in my head:

What the fuck am I doing?

I
still hadn't figured out the answer to my question when I managed to catch up with Hudson in the parking garage beneath the building. He'd led me down the stairs instead of into the elevator and he'd taken the steps two at a time, the hard soles of his fine shoes clattering against the concrete and echoing like gunshots in the narrow industrial stairwell.

I nearly sprained my ankle several times jumping down after him, and I thought, ridiculously, that this was one of the reasons he hadn't chosen Megan: her red high heels would have been ill-suited to keep up with a man as driven and busy as Kent Hudson.

At the bottom, Hudson pushed open the heavy metal door and charged into the parking garage as though he were late for his very important date with two blond nymphomaniac twins. I had to jog to keep pace with him, and by the time he stopped I was completely out of breath. It turns out that lying on your sister's couch for a week was not conducive to maintaining one's cardiovascular health. I stumbled to a stop and stood there, panting, as Hudson held up his key fob and unlocked his car.

His car. Right. How do I put this? I am not, by any means, a car person. I don't even know how to identify cars by their company logos. I always get them mixed up and I'm never sure of myself. However, I had seen a lot of junk cars in my time. Cars whose windows don't work, cars that had people living in them for several months, cars that had such huge patches of rust that a fun highway game was to count how many bits of the car fell off and went skipping along the interstate before you reached your destination. I knew bad cars. I had seen bad cars. I had lived bad cars. Hell, I'd owned a bad car right up until a little over a week ago. I knew what I was talking about when I saw a bad car.

This car? Was the opposite of a bad car. If the great war horses who carried kings into battle had mated with panthers and then made huge, lithe, graceful panther-horses and those panther-horses had died and then been reborn as cars, then
this
car was surely their final life before achieving Buddhahood.

It was black. It was sleek. It was solid and shiny and expensive. I was afraid to breathe near it. It squatted in the neon lights of the parking garage and stared at me with it's spotless silver headlights. Licking my lips, I tried to step back, but Kent Hudson was already walking to the driver's side door. Reaching out, he yanked it open and got in.

His casual treatment of a car that could probably have bought me a small house in a bad part of town goosed me into action. I shuffled quickly to the other side of the car and opened the door, sliding in just as Hudson started the car up and stomped his foot onto the accelerator.

"Whoah!" I nearly shouted. "Why can't you wait until I had my seatbelt on? I thought you said we have an hour and a half." I scrabbled for the buckle and clicked it into place, shooting him a glare as I did so.

The darkness of the parking garage could not completely obscure his eyeroll. He didn't answer my question. "Your seatbelt is on now," he pointed out. "You're an adult, you will figure it out. I'm afraid the real question here is why did you come to an interview to be the band's personal assistant dressed like a bartender from the early 90s?”

I almost laughed at that. "Because all my other interviews today were for bartending gigs," I told him. Then his words started to sink in. "Uh, wait a second. What band?"

Mr. Hudson snorted at me. "Are you serious? You just walked into my office without even reading the job description?"

"I didn't think I was going to be applying for a PA position, I thought I was going to interview for a housekeeping gig with some computer consulting company In fact...." I sat my messenger bag in my lap and flipped it open, sorting through it until I found the file folder. "Here it is." Pulling it out, opened it and began to thumb through the listings.

Ah, yes. The consulting firm. I pulled the paper out and read it aloud. "Maid needed for Monday and Wednesday cleaning," I said, reading the little headline. "And they'll be taking applications all week. In... Oh. Oh, shit."

Suite 503. They were located in
Suite 503.

I put the paper down and collapsed back in my seat, groaning. "Dammit," I muttered.

"You read the paper wrong?" He sounded amused as he flashed his badge to the ticketeer, then gunned the engine. Under us, the car roared to life and we pulled out into the early afternoon sunshine.

I thought about it for a second, and then snapped my fingers. "No," I said. "I didn't. My sister was helping me get ready this morning and she typed all the info into my phone. She must have made a typo." On a hunch, I pulled my phone out and scrolled through the information Rose had given me. Sure enough, she had switched the three and the five. Sheesh, what were the odds? How on earth did that happen? Two jobs in the same building, just separated by two floors, and I'd gone to the wrong one. I felt like an idiot.

See?
I told myself.
You should have asked. You should have looked at the original documents or something. Who cares if you look stupid? If you had, you wouldn't be in a car right now with an epically gorgeous asshole on your way to Vegas.

Okay, bad argument. If this wasn't a good way to get out of any further job hunting this afternoon, I didn't know what was, but it still put a kink in my plans to go home and rot my brain with daytime talk shows for the rest of the time I was conscious. Maybe I could get around to cleaning up the baseboards or something...

"The
band?
" Hudson prompted after it became apparent that I had disappeared into my own little cleaning-fueled world. I snapped out of it and turned to listen to him. The car beneath me hummed and rumbled as he switched gears. His long, strong-fingered hand gripped and moved the knob of the stick shift with grace and ease. He had musician's hands.

Suddenly I was intensely aware of the way my pussy pressed and rubbed against the fine, buttery Italian leather seats, and the way his muscles of his thighs shifted beneath the fabric of his fine, expensive trousers as he changed gears. It took great strength of will for me to drag my eyes back to his face, and when I did I saw he had a faint smile on his face. He had been watching me check him out.

Humiliated, I whipped my head around and stared out the window. The silence in the car was deafening. Where were we? Oh, yes. “Yeah, um,” I said. “Right. About the band... what band?”

He chuckled, and the dark sound dragged over my raw, exposed nerves like black velvet. I shivered in pleasure. “Have you ever heard of a band called 'The Lonely Kings of Lifeless Things?'”

Had I? Had I
ever.
Only a few months ago they had burst onto the music scene with dark, grungy melodies and a female vocalist with the voice of an angel, singing beautiful songs with complicated lyrics written by the band's guitarist, Carter Hudson...

Hudson.

My mouth dropped. Humiliation forgotten, I whipped back around and stared at Hudson. He was watching the road, his pouty lips parted in a pearly grin. “You're...” I groped for words. But the guitarist was
Carter.
This man had said his name was Kent. “You're a relative of Carter?”

“His brother, actually. Also the bassist and the band manager.” He seemed incredibly pleased with himself, and he should be. The Lonely Kings were blowing up all over the charts, their songs showing up in a thousand and one teen flicks, their concerts sold out within minutes of tickets going on sale. And here I was, sitting in the car with the band's bassist.

“Wow,” I said. “That's... I had no idea.”

“Hmph,” he said. “I think I actually believe you.”

“You should,” I told him. “I'm a terrible liar. I seriously... I thought I was applying for a housekeeping job.”

“And the pool of strictly-business applicants didn't somehow tip you off?”

“I've been awake since Sunday morning,” I said defensively. “I'm not at my sharpest.”

“Obviously.”

He gunned the car as we neared the highway, and the force of momentum slammed me back in my seat. A thrill bolted through me, and I sucked air through my teeth in appreciation. I'd never been in a car this nice in my life. The car seemed to fly low along the ground as we slipped up the on ramp and slithered into traffic. Traffic in LA is always atrocious, but Kent Hudson was blessed by the god of automobiles with hair-trigger timing, and I had to grab the door to keep myself from flipping out as he wove the car in and out of traffic at almost seventy miles an hour.
Jesus.

“It will be interesting to see if the other candidates make it to the airport in time,” Hudson said. He seemed amused by the idea. “I'd meant for this to be a part of the test—if you can get from point A to point B in time, but since you don't have a car I can't test you on that. Should you win the job, what methods of conveyance do you have at your disposal?”

I pressed my lips together. “None,” I answered truthfully. “My last car... yeah. I had to sell it quickly.”

“Oh?” The car swerved around a semi, and my whole body tensed. The rumble of the engine through the seat had me on edge, sending little ripples of something that could almost be called pleasure through my limbs, and it was hard to ignore. “May I ask why you had to sell it?”

“You can,” I said. But I didn't want to think about it. Parting with my car, poor Sir Percival, had been a terrible wrench, especially since he had been worth only a thousand dollars. It had barely covered the debts I had to my name, and the guy I'd had to sell it to... I didn't even want to think about him. “But, um. It's touchy for me.”

“I see.” His voice took on a slight tension. “Was it trouble?”

I bristled. “Not trouble with the law, if that's what you're asking,” I snapped at him. “Just personal trouble. I don't want to talk about it.”

“You ran up debts?”

“
I
didn't!” I exclaimed, then clammed up. “It's complicated.”

“Mm,” he said.

“So tell me about this job,” I said, desperate for a change of subject. “You said I'd be a personal assistant for the band?”

Hudson laughed, but it was without humor. "I said that, yes, but I'll be honest with you, Rebecca." The way he said my name was like a caress running over my throat and down my body, leaving me breathless. "I am looking for someone who will babysit the band with me. There are three other members besides me. There's Carter, whom you already know of, doubtless because he's the most trouble. Then there's our vocalist, Sonya Kyle, and our drummer, Manny Reyes. Neither of them are going to win an award for responsibility, but Carter is the worst.

“What I'm really looking for is someone to watch over Carter the most. He manages to give his personal assistants the slip easily, hence why we are headed to Vegas. His current assistant called me just before interviews were to begin and quit because he'd lost Carter yet again. I knew it was coming, don't get me wrong, but it's always bad when a well-compensated employee tells you they won't put up with their employer any longer because it's not worth the money. I made a few calls, found Carter in Vegas, and here we are. That is the gist of things. So prepare yourself. I'll be throwing you to the lions in a few hours."

The lions. I tossed my head. I'd heard of Carter Hudson, sure, but he couldn't be much worse than most of my terrible friends back in San Diego. They were all shiftless drug addicts or lazy artists always trying to break into the biz while smoking enough juanita to kill an elephant. Which is a lot, because marijuana can't kill you. Those guys were sure trying, though.

"Okay," I said. "I think I can handle it. I've handled a lot of stuff. No big."

"No big?" I glanced over and saw his face take on a hard expression. "It is big. Carter is a handful. I can handle the other two, but I need someone on Carter's ass twenty-four seven. In fact, it might be good that you don't have a car..."

"It is?" I said.

But he shook his head. "Never mind. Just a stray thought." He cleared his throat and gunned the engine again. I felt my blood rise in response to the raw expression of power. His long fingers wrapped around the stick shift and moved the car into high gear. He wore silver rings on most of his fingers, and the tattoos on his wrists were bright flashes of color against his monochrome businessman's uniform. I swallowed and forced myself to look at the road. An exit sign for LAX was coming up. How was it that we were already here?

"You say you think you can handle this job?" he said suddenly.

"What? Oh. Yeah, I bet I can. I worked as a bartender for years and I hung out with some people that were basically walking drama bombs. They all went off like clockwork, too."

"I see," he said, but he sounded as though he didn't believe me. Suddenly he reached forward and turned on the radio player. It roared to life, right in the middle of a song I recognized.

High, beautiful vocals soared over a hard, grinding beat.

'You came from nothing, nothing came to me, I missed your face as we passed by, in the boundless dark of the sky...'

“A Dark Moment,” one of the singles off the first album by The Lonely Kings. I recognized it because it wouldn't stop playing everywhere.

Then Kent Hudson put his hand on my thigh and all my thoughts flew out the window.

Everything in the world funneled down to that hand. It was huge and warm, splayed across my raggedy jeans, the heat of his palm leaking through the denim and spreading across my skin. He hadn't even bothered to put his hand on my knee. Instead he'd left it on the inside of my leg, mere inches from my suddenly red-hot pussy. My mouth went dry and my body was suddenly paralyzed.
What the hell does he think he's doing?
my brain demanded.

My body, of course, didn't care what it was he thought he was doing as long as he kept doing it. The car swerved off the road and down the exit ramp as Kent Hudson slipped his fingers down the swell of my thigh to the hot valley between my legs. I tensed, clamping my legs together, and he chuckled over the pounding din of the music.

"You see?" he said. "Anything can and will happen to you in this industry. You will be expected to rise to meet the occasion each time."