BREAK - A Bad Boy Romance Read Online Free PDF

wasn’t managing to capture. Each paragraph just looked like something cheap and nasty from one of our rival magazines.
    I backspaced everything and started again.
    I had to show the reader how dazzling it had felt to be there with him, with the gravity of his presence seeming to warp and dominate everything around it.
    I wanted to write about Kai, too, and about how completely she seemed to have surrendered to this invisible force. I didn’t write how jealous it had all made me, and how badly I had felt the pull to let myself slip away with the current of his charisma.
    “Tom Hood nude pictures,” I asked Google for the bajillionth time that week.
    Who was I kidding? It wasn’t even remotely “research” anymore.
    I scrolled through and landed on the picture I had first obsessed over on my cold kitchen floor a lifetime ago. It was the same grainy candid celeb shot it always was, but this time it looked different to me.
    This time, the expressions on the girls’ faces seemed so much more …joyful. Tom’s grim seemed broader, more wholesome, and the surface of each of his limbs seemed less flat, imbued with new depths somehow. People were wrong about him. He wasn’t a vapid playboy. He was an Adonis, and these women were not groupies, they were devotees, sexual pilgrims, and the only difference between them and me was that they had given way to his…
    I threw my phone into my bag and stared at the blank page again. I was a professional. What I thought about him didn’t matter. Just write, dammit.

Chapter Seven
     
    I turned the package over in my hands again and again. It was almost a perfect cube, tastefully wrapped and giving no clues at all about what could be inside.
    “Oh my god, is what’s-his-name still sending you shit again?” said Clara.
    I’m pretty sure I’ve had hours-long conversations with Clara only to discover at the end of it that we both had been talking about completely different what’s-his-names. Present circumstances meant I was relieved from having to lie to her, which was convenient, so I managed to be less curt with her than I usually am.
    “Yup, from what’s-his-name. Idiot.”
    “Open it.”
    “Nah, later.”
    “How did the meeting with what’s-his-name go?”
    “Fucking hell, Clara, which what’s-his-name? I can’t believe anyone ever lets you near a keyboard.”
    “You know, buddy, what’s-his-name …Tom Hood. Your interview with him.”
    “Yeah it was OK. He’s a bit of an asshole, no surprise there.”
    “Oh,” she said, taking her turn to look over the box.
    “Complete ego maniac. Wants me to write a big piece singing his praises.”
    She lifted her eyebrows. “Are you going to?”
    “Nah. What kind of asshole does that? I’m just going to write it like I see it,” I said, putting on a phony accent and shrugging. Why was I saying this? Why couldn’t I tell Clara what I really felt?
    Her face went serious.
    “It’s such a big story, though. And it is kind of weird. No offense, but …well, why not get Penelope to write it? Why did he ask you ? No offense.”
    I took the package from her hands.
    “None taken. He just saw that I had mentioned him in another piece and he thought I owed him an apology.”
    “That’s it? So, Tom Hood, the Tom Hood, wants you to do a feature piece on him, just like that?”
    I shot her a sour look and she balked immediately, sensing she had overstepped.
    “Whatever, celebrities, I don’t understand them,” she said breezily.
    “He’s not just a celebrity you know, he is an actual entrepreneur … and a lot of what we’ve written about him is actually kind of shitty and--” I stopped. Clara was staring at the package with renewed interest.
    “Oh my god. That’s from what’s-his-name isn’t it?” she said slowly, eyes widening.
    I spun around and went to shove the package in my desk drawer.
    “Yes, it’s from what’s-his-name, so what?”
    She backed away with a sheesh and left, leaving me to think about what