These Girls Read Online Free PDF

rumpled ease in his old jeans and a gray sweatshirt, with his head full of pure white hair, classic Roman nose, and electric blue eyes. He wasn’t her type—he wouldn’t have been, even twenty years earlier—but the vibe he emitted made it clear he found himself irresistible. Apparently lots of women agreed; he’d been married twice, both times to women young enough to be his daughters, and he dated voraciously.
    “I wanted to show you this layout,” he’d said. “What do you think? Do you see anything that troubles you?”
    It felt like a trick question—did he want her opinion, or was there something wrong with the page, something she was expected to catch?
    To buy time, she’d taken a sip of the Starbucks latte she’d picked up on her way in.
    “Is everyone in our office addicted to this stuff?” he’d asked, picking up an identical cup from his desk and taking a sip.
    Just as Cate had laughed, Jane had popped her head into the office.
    “Sorry—I didn’t know you were busy,” she’d said.
    Cate could see how the scene appeared from Jane’s perspective. It was 10:00 A.M. on a Saturday and no one else was at the office. She and Nigel had both just arrived. Did it seem like they’d come in together, maybe stopping for coffee on the way?
    It had looked bad.
    “It’s okay,” Cate had called after Jane, but she didn’t seem to hear.
    Could people suspect Cate and the editor in chief had something going on? No one else had heard that low, appreciative noise he’d made, but his appetite for young women was common knowledge.
    Why had she gotten the promotion? Cate wondered again.
    Cate had finished talking to Nigel quickly—she’d told him the truth, that she loved the layout—then she’d gone to heroffice and worked straight through until it was dark outside. As she was hailing a cab to go back to the apartment to meet Renee, inspiration had struck. She hadn’t yet assigned the cover story for her first issue as features editor. As usual, they were spotlighting a celebrity—a young singer named Reece Moss, who’d burst onto the scene with the voice of an angel, face of a cover girl, and moves of a pole dancer. She’d bring some star power to the issue, but what about getting Trey to write it? It wasn’t the sort of thing he usually did, but even though she didn’t know him well, she could try to convince him. And her gut told Cate the singer might open up a bit more with a gorgeous guy hanging on her every word. Trey could turn a routine story into a coup.
    Getting an outside writer to pen the cover story might cause some grumbling within the magazine, but Cate couldn’t worry about that. This issue had to quash anyone’s—especially her own—doubts about Cate’s ability.
    From the moment they’d arrived at the party, she’d been tracking Trey with her eyes, waiting for a chance to pull him aside. But apparently she wasn’t the only woman with that agenda; he was constantly surrounded—filling drinks, laughing, and switching around the music when a tipsy woman hung on his arm and complained about the Death Cab for Cutie song that replaced the jazz.
    “We need something sexier,” the woman breathed, her glossy red lips practically touching Trey’s cheek, and Cate barely refrained from snorting. She glanced at her watch and covered a yawn: It was almost eleven o’clock. She needed to get Trey alone soon.
    Renee had been pulled away by friends the moment they’d arrived, but now she walked back over to Cate’s side. Renee looked especially pretty tonight, Cate thought. She had the lushfigure of a forties pinup girl, her blond hair was shining, and her eyes were bright.
    “Isn’t this place amazing?” Renee asked. “You can tell a lot about someone by seeing their living space. If we’d walked in here and discovered he collected Precious Moments dolls, I never could’ve looked at him the same way again.”
    Cate laughed, thinking for the hundredth time how much she wished