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admitted, “but I’m not exactly hedgie bait.”
    “Whatever. I smell a Banner plot.” Charlie propped his feet up on his desk and balanced a red editing pen on his knee. He looked tired and pasty under the fluorescent lights, like he’d been hung upside down in a meat locker for the day. “And Alicia’s on the fucking warpath, by the way. You’d better watch your ass.”
    I leaned back in my chair and rubbed my eyes. “That’s all I need.”
    We were sitting in adjoining cubes, coming up with a more sensible revenue model for ChemoDerma. That was the cover story, anyway; at the moment my laptop displayed a long list of Google search results for
Julian Laurence Southfield
.
    I’d already read most of them, doing my due diligence on Southfield the last few days, and there wasn’t much I didn’t already know. How Julian Laurence had started the fund in 2001, bringing together a couple ofgenius traders and his own impeccable talent for timing markets. Returns had piled up, new investors had piled on, and now Southfield Associates was one of the largest hedge funds in the world.
    But for such a dynamic company, it had remarkably little buzz. Here and there a quote appeared, attributed to Julian, usually some dull reflection on market conditions, nothing with any sort of personality.
    And that was the strange part. Here was this freakishly handsome man, the young CEO of an explosive hedge fund, an absolute prodigy in every respect: where were the interviews, the
Vanity Fair
cover, the snarky
New York
magazine hit job? Even Page Six returned only one mention from last year, when he had attended some charity function at MoMA: Julian Laurence,
the elusive founder of mega hedge fund Southfield Associates, made a rare appearance, setting socialites’ hearts briefly aflutter until his early departure.
    That was it. Not even a photo of that remarkable face.
    I ran my cursor over his name. Why keep such a low profile? He ought to be out enjoying himself, dating supermodels and buying up beachfront property in the Hamptons. He had the world at his feet. He couldn’t just be staying in at night.
    “So are we supposed to check any of this shit with ChemoDerma?” Charlie was asking. “Because it’s pretty weird, messing with the IPO pitch without… s
hit
.” His feet swung back down to the floor.
    I looked down his line of sight and saw Alicia marching toward us in a sleek black pantsuit. There were about a dozen other analysts still in the bullpen, working on various projects, but I knew there wasn’t a chance she was hunting down one of them.
    It didn’t take her long to find me. “Kate, I’d like to…” She stopped and ran her eyes up and down my figure. “Is
that
what you’re wearing these days?”
    My hand went to the strand of faux pearls at my throat, lying atop the wide neck of my charcoal sweater-dress. “I don’t have any meetings today.”
    She narrowed her eyes at me. “Whatever, Kate. I need to talk to you. Is there a conference room free?”
    “There should be,” I said. “We’re not too busy right now.”
    She followed me into an empty room and shut the door, bracelets clanging against the handle. The floral scent of her perfume closed densely around us. “Just what the living
fuck
do you think you’re doing?” she hissed.
    “Wow,” I said. “I don’t know what you mean.”
    “Stealing my fucking deal, that’s what! Cutting me out. Setting Banner against me. And after all I did to make you look good…”
    My cheeks grew warm. “Excuse me, but what planet are you living on? I had nothing to do with any of that. Banner called me in for a meeting and said he was putting me on the revisions. It wasn’t
my
idea. I didn’t even have a
choice
.”
    “Do you think I’m a fucking
idiot
, Kate?” Her voice, building in shrillness, crested on the verge of a shriek.
    I raised one fatal eyebrow.
    She turned red; her eyes bulged, blue and globular, from beneath their heavy lids. When she