Dangerous Curves: The Good Girl

Lick (6)

Lick

"Looks like you've created quite the stir with your column."

"Excuse me?"

It was the following morning and Mariah was standing at the edge of my cubicle, tapping her heel.

"You created quite a stir with your column," she repeated, in case I hadn't heard her the first time. "Your naughty little secret."

Uh-oh! She'd found out. But how? And, most importantly, how much did she know? Did she know what my column had sparked? Did she know about Nick and I?

"Um, could we talk about this in private?" I asked.

She winked. "Absolutely. Meet me in the conference room in a half hour."

I spent the next twenty minutes nervously anticipating our meeting. What if Mariah had somehow found out about my night with Nicholas Colby? Not that we'd done much...I still hadn't had an orgasm with him. Despite all the promises of all the 'incredible pleasure' he was going to show me, thus far, I'd really just been 'showing myself.'

But if Mariah somehow knew, there was no way I could go through with this.

Fortunately, she did not. Despite my fears, it turned out that she had only found out about the column.

Thirty minutes later, when we were seated in the conference room, I asked her point blank how she knew.

"How did you find out I wrote that column?" I asked. "I put Staff Writer on the byline, just like you always tell us."

"I have my sources," she said mysteriously.

"Nick Colby?" I blurted, without thinking.

"Who?" she seemed taken aback. "Oh...wait. You mean Nicholas Colby." She burst out laughing. "Don't flatter yourself, honey. The odds of Mr. Colby ever reading any of your work are slim-to-none. He doesn't even read my column, and I've been writing it for five years."

So Nick doesn't normally read our magazine? I filed this information away mentally. Well, then, how did he find out it was my column? How did he know I wrote it? Perhaps Mariah could provide some insight, without even knowing it.

"So who told you?" I asked, trying to sound casual.

"I was curious who wrote it, and when none of the freelancers took credit I had IT run a trace. It came back to your computer. I didn't know for sure that you wrote it, but your response when I asked you basically confirmed it. Good job, Violet!"

Yeah, good job, indeed. How could I have been so unsmooth? I couldn't even bluff my way out of simple test from Mariah; what was I thinking getting tangled up with someone like Nicholas Colby?

As it turned out, Mariah's "good job" had been literal.

"We're promoting you to guest columnist!" she announced.

"Wow! Really? Thanks!" I couldn't believe it. After all these years, I was finally getting a shot at writing for the magazine.

"Don't thank me. You earned it. You got quite the Twitter response, my dear!" she said cheerily. "Lots of retweets with links to your article. Our naughty little secrets column was a trending topic all day yesterday. Let's see if you can repeat the magic next week."

"Next week?" I asked. Katie, who was already a guest columnist, usually only wrote one piece a month in addition to her editorial duties. Was Mariah really asking me to write for Brown-Eyed Girl on a weekly basis?

It turned out that she was.

"I want to strike while the iron is hot," Mariah continued. "Oh, and you've been cleared by HR to leave for the day. Something about taking off for extra hours you worked last week.