Far Too Tempting by Lauren Blakely Read Free Book Online Page A

label, his brother inked me and I surprised Jeremy with it a few days later when I showed him my ankle. He knows I’ll never leave him, even though other labels called me after Crushed shot up the charts to see if I’d jump ship. I said no. My loyalty is on my skin.
    But I push tattoos and teenage desire out of my mind as I open the door to the Glass Slipper offices, in the heart of the garment district on the seventh floor of your average, ordinary, completely unremarkable Manhattan office building. Jeremy wanted to name the label Gnarled Sunrise, but his wife liked Glass Slipper better, so he deferred to her, though he christened the accompanying recording studio with his name of choice. The walls are plastered with album covers, music posters, magazine reviews. I spend the next hour eating the most amazing chocolate cake with butter cream frosting from Kara’s Kake Saloon a few blocks away and chatting with the label’s fifteen full-time employees and a handful of freelance sound mixers and producers who work regularly with the label’s acts.
    The great thing about working for an indie is just that—working for an indie. Glass Slipper is smaller, eons smaller, than the Capitols and Islands and Virgin Records of the world. We don’t have the money, the staff, or the resources of the big guys. But, there’s tremendous freedom and faith. I asked Jeremy once why he stuck with me after my first three albums, when most big labels would have dropped me. I remember him leaning back in his creaky desk chair, placing his meaty, inked arms—covered in dragons, Chinese characters for good fortune and health, and the names of his three kids—behind his head.
    “I liked you,” he said. “I knew eventually you’d produce something great. You were like this diamond in the rough.”
    “A lot of rough.”
    “A lotta, lotta rough,” he added with a hearty chuckle.
    I finish my cake and head into Jeremy’s office with Owen close behind. He works with some of the other Glass Slipper acts, but he also seems to spend a fair amount of time in coffee shops with his laptop working on his novel. It’s a gritty, urban tale of a young woman who moves to New York determined to find a boy who worked at the Museum of Natural History when she visited it in high school, only to learn he’s now a ghost. Or so Owen tells me. He won’t show it to anyone besides his writer’s group.
    “You know that’s the last cake we’re going to let you eat,” Jeremy says in an offhand way, settling into his creaky chair.
    “Yeah,” Owen chimes in. “We talked about it earlier and you’re going to have to become a size zero now that you’re a star.”
    I look at the two of them quizzically and hold my hands up in the air. “It’s not like I’m a chubster now,” I say, then pinch my flat belly for emphasis. “See, nothing there.”
    “I don’t know, sis. Looks like there’s a little meat on your bones. You know there are expectations now,” Owen says.
    Jeremy tries his best to hide a give-away smile.
    “Oh, ha, ha. Very funny. Give me a complex why don’t you? I think size six, four on a good day, is just fine.”
    “Of course it is. And speaking of”—Jeremy reaches for a packet of white envelopes on his desk—“I’d really rather fatten you up.”
    He hands me the envelopes.
    “What’s this?” I ask.
    “Open,” he says in his gruff voice. I do as directed and find gift certificates for Café Cluny in the West Village, Per Se in the Time Warner Center, Aureole where the tony Upper East Side begins and many, many more.
    “Jeremy.” I’m touched and totally surprised.
    “Look, it’s not like you’d want champagne or a party with all of us at some stupid place. Or any more goddamn records or iTunes gift certificates. I swear if I get another iTunes gift card I’m gonna scream. I have a million already.”
    “You could start giving them to the homeless, Jeremy. Let them sell them at half price. Could be your charitable