The Gideon Affair

Her attempt at humor to defuse the tension fizzled when Mickey hit the next stage of fury.

“Paige! Fuck.” Pointing a damning finger at Markus, he boomed, “Shut-the-door-and-grab-a-chair-because-you’ll-need-to-be-sitting-when-you-hear-what-this-shithead-has-done.”

He hadn’t been kidding.

Pressing a button to increase the intensity of her workout, she strained to keep up, silently hoping the grueling effort would soak up some of her tension as she reviewed the day from hell.

Hadn’t taken but half a minute for Mickey to unload enough detail for her to know all bloody hell was about to break loose.

The stripped down four-one-one with no extraneous whiny laments for forgiveness went like this—Markus had been fucking Joa

Because that wasn’t enough, this fucking involved an audience. Of course, it did. Why the hell not?

And the audience in question? Paige shuddered with revulsion. One of the movie’s producers, a man with deep pockets and unimaginable behind-the-scenes power had been involved.

Involved was putting it lightly.

There had always been whispers about this guy, but truthfully, most stories that sounded like Hollywood legend, laced with current day fuckery, were a dime a dozen and easily discounted. Plus, worrying over some dude’s idiosyncrasies wasn’t a contributing factor when choosing movie roles.

Blind items about pool parties with naked starlets, rails of coke long enough to form a conga line, and some S&M shit that sounded made the hell up were being posted more and more often. His business partner, a highly talented mega-producer with serious family money, was supposed to be the one who kept the other guy’s debauched ways hushed up.

Never in a million years had it seemed remotely possible that what went on in someone’s personal life could impact a project. Boy. Had that assumption ever been wrong.

As if an audience of one wasn’t bad enough, finding out this regular occurrence took place in what one could only describe as a communal setting, took Mickey and her to DEFCON status.

Having taken in way too much detail as the sordid tale unfolded, now she had forever burned into her brain an image best described as the polar opposite of hot and sexy. The strap-on thing notwithstanding, the imagined visual of Joa

Holy mother-of-pearl. No wonder Markus had lost his mind at the end of the filming. Joa

Mickey had been apoplectic, making Paige briefly toy with the idea of giving his wife a call. He needed calming before a gasket blew, or he dropped from the balls-out fury he’d unleashed on Markus.

The shitstorm, however, had not stopped there.

Huddled with the Russian agent through lunch and well into the afternoon, they’d worked their sources and had honed a plan for keeping as much of the blowback off Gideon Shaw when this story hit as possible.

She’d texted Edward at some point and told him in direct terms to put his sunglasses on and keep his head down. He was to get from the medical building where he’d spent most of the day back to the safety zone of his house and then wait for her call.

At exactly four fifty-two in the afternoon, eight minutes before the agency closed and all calls went to voice mail, the whitewashing producer had rang Mickey on his direct line.

Cue the dramatic background music. Someone like John Williams would have a composer’s field day with this.

A dozen epic movie lines came to mind as Paige remembered that phone call. The moments before had been the like Gandalf’s, “Deep breath before the plunge.”

And after? Any damn quote that implied doom. They were all good.

Above her head as she thundered against the treadmill, a nighttime entertainment show was starting on the TV. She could have put in her earbuds and ignored the host’s witty repartee but hadn’t bothered. The sound of her heart pounding as she ran as if the devil was chasing her was enough to drown out most of the sounds around her.

Back to the phone call … when it was over, Mickey had looked at her with real concern in his eyes.

“He wants a meeting. Something private.”

He wasn’t talking in his normal, full-speed-ahead way, and that alone bothered her.

“Meaning?” she’d asked.

“I don’t know, but my gut tells me we have a bargaining chip. Thing is …”

Paige was on pins and needles waiting for his thoughts to form and finish.

With an expression that swung between shrewd and intrigued, he had shrugged slightly. “I have no idea why that’s the case or what kind of bargain is on the table. But this is big … whatever it is.”

And that was why and how she had ended up at the gym. Burning off the tension squeezing her into a twisted pretzel of anxiety was an absolute necessity.

It was either this or a fall off the ice-cream wagon.

Sweat soaked through her sports bra and a t-shirt, dampening the elastic band of her workout pants, but she powered through, chasing the limit of her endurance. Deftly reprogramming the treadmill, Paige downshifted to a less vigorous pace for her cooldown and refocused on her surroundings.

The stationary equipment zone was packed. All around her were bodies in motion under the bright lights of the fancy workout space. At that moment, she was just another gym rat trying to squeeze in a workout.

There were two women on elliptical trainers in the row in front of Paige, who were laughing somewhat loudly and gesturing between the push-pull of the moving handlebars.

“Oh lordy, he’s hot!” one chortled.

Her friend laughed. “I’d do him. No problem.”

Paige glanced at the TV and immediately stumbled when Gideon’s smiling headshot filled the giant screen.

Having lost her footing, she grabbed for the treadmill safety bar to stop from falling, but it was too late. Next thing she knew, as Gideon’s unseeing face looked on, the still moving machine ejected her, and she had landed like a bumbling clown on her hands and knees.

Immediately, one of the gym staffers came ru

Hobbling to a nearby bench, she sat down and shushed the attendant blathering on about getting the first aid kit because she needed to hear what the TV was saying.

Gideon’s headshot faded, and a clip from an interview began. A cute entertainment reporter was asking him questions, and the snippet they chose had to do with his professional name.

“So, the name Gideon Shaw. Many have said it’s the perfect marquee name. How’d you come up with it?”

Paige remembered this interview. The reporter had soft balled her questions and then offered up her phone number in the hopes of a personal one-on-one. There wasn’t any need to clarify what that meant, and she recalled having thought of the reporter as an idiot for being so blatant and unprofessional. No wonder it was damn hard for women to gain power and be taken seriously in this town when that kind of stuff was the norm.

Turning on the mega-wattage of his growing superstardom, he’d given as good as he got by smirking a little and gri

“Actually, I was drunk when the name came to me, Alycia. So if it’s perfect,” he stopped and laughed for emphasis, “Captain Morgan gets all the credit.”