The First Assistant Read Online Free PDF Page B

if I was trying to protect Scott, more that I was trying to protect Lara.
    “Then why don’t I go in and say hello to my husband?” she challenged calmly. I must have looked like a deer caught in headlights.
    “Sure,” I said and reluctantly stepped aside as slowly as possible. But just as I did, Scott flung open his office door with a big grin on his face. “Honey,” he said. “Come in.” Lara narrowed her eyes as she walked by me into his office. It was no use even attempting to hide anything
    from her. “Where’s Lachlan?” he asked.
    “With the nanny. We need to talk,” she said and closed his door be-hind her. I waited an ultracautious thirty seconds for either Lara or the pantyless teenager to come flying out the door, but nothing happened. Eventually I walked back to my desk, still holding my breath for some flotsam to come hurtling at me. Scott’s office was on the top floor; there was no way the girl could have left without passing us. No convenient fire escape, even. She must be stashed under his desk or behind his plasma. Still, it appeared he’d gotten away with whatever it was he was up to, which was a temporary relief.
    Half an hour later Lara and Scott emerged from his office. There was an easy way about them that suggested they’d made up.
    “We’re going for a cocktail, ladies,” Scott said. “I’m in a meeting with Ang Lee. Okay?”
    “Sure,” Amber and I piped in together. Lara winked at me; clearly she’d gotten her own way,
    “Baby, I’ll catch up with you, I just have to give Lizzie my boxing teacher’s number,” she told her husband.
    “Okeydokey.” Scott did a detour into Katherine Watson’s office.
    When Katherine wasn’t busy mentoring the butter-wouldn’t-melt vampire slut on the desk next to me, she was the brains behind The Agency. It was Katherine who’d encouraged Scott to join her in a hostile takeover last year to oust the then-president Daniel Rosen from power. She was his polar opposite, a smart, neat-freak mother-of-four—with a devastatingly attractive photographer–husband—who managed to be that most oxymoronic of things, an ethical businesswoman. “Kathy, got any juice for me?” we heard Scott ask.
    “So, you’re not going to Vietnam,” Lara said loudly enough for Amber to hear.
    “Thailand,” I said. “Are you sure?” I couldn’t believe that Scott would relinquish his new toy-to-be so readily.
    “Positive.” She smiled. “And I didn’t even have to raise my voice.
    Come to lunch on Saturday?”
    “Great,” I said as she hugged me good-bye. “And thanks for sorting that Thailand thing out. I’m not sure that Luke and I would have survived the two of us being on location at the same time.”
    “Bye, Lizzie. Bye, Amber.” She smiled pointedly at our archenemy, who ignored her.
    “It must be hard getting old in this town,” Amber said as she watched Lara get into the elevator with Scott. “But to be old and fat? I’d rather be dead.” Luckily the phone rang, because I didn’t have a nasty retort ready to fire back at Amber at that precise second.
    “The Agency,” I answered.
    “It’s me.” It was Scott, presumably from the elevator. “I didn’t bring my call sheet.”
    “I’ll run it down,” I said and hung up. I went into his office and couldn’t resist a swift check under his desk for the pantyless one. She wasn’t behind his Space Invaders machine either. I even looked up to see if she might be hiding Spidey-style on the ceiling. I grabbed the
    doodled-on call sheet from his desk and raced down to the parking garage with it.
    “Here you are.” Scott was chatting with a very familiar-looking and very handsome actor by the valet booth as José, one of my two beloved valets, both of whom were named José, went to get his car.
    “Great.” Scott took the call sheet and seamlessly continued telling the actor how stellar he’d been in the screening of his new movie. This was why the stars loved Scott—he was the