Hidden Heart (Love Is The Law 1) by Isabella Brooke Read Free Book Online Page A

outgoings
would exceed all that. The last story she'd been working on had died a
catastrophic death, and she still couldn't quite face up to how badly she'd
messed up on it. The repercussions were wider than the damage to her heart. Her
current account was sinking fast and she'd never got around to starting any
savings.
    So what was it to be? Temping
agency, staff writer, what?
    God damn women's lib. If she
lived a hundred years ago, she wouldn't have these kind of decisions to make.
Her eye caught an article featuring a woman in some repressed country where
everything was decided by her husband and she had a brief pang of politically
incorrect envy.
    Then she put herself in that
position more fully, and felt the old anger unfurl in her belly. No, it wasn't
right. There were still injustices in the world. She still got emails from
people who had been touched by her stories. Maybe her reports and her articles
didn't change the world but taken as part of a whole, perhaps they could.
Perhaps they would.
    One voice couldn't do anything,
but as part of the collective…
    The water was cooling around her
but she ignored it, scanning the periodicals that littered the room. Faces jumped
out at her. Headlines. Pull quotes. Things that she'd grown passionate about
were now reigniting her fire. She remembered how she'd covered a story about
abuses in a care home, and how the relatives had thanked her, crying as they
shook her hand. Yes, the care home was still running but under new management.
Was it any better? She hoped so. She had made a difference.
    She might have let Joel down but
since then, she had tried to change things, and perhaps she really had. She
remembered how fiercely Turner had spoken of the prison system and how he now
felt trapped in a cycle of crime and punishment. There was work to be done.
Could she really walk away now, and start writing about novels and indie bands?
    Her thoughts went in circles.
This, that, this, that. It was exhausting. Adult life was a pain in the
arse.
    The shrill scream of her mobile
phone made Emily jump. She launched herself out of the bath, patting her hands
dry on a towel as she wrapped it around her body and splashed through to the
living room where her phone danced across the table. It was the editor of a
newspaper she'd worked for in the past, and her heart leapt. Yes! Let's make
some ripples in the world of social justice once more.
    God, she was easily swayed.
    "Emily!"
    "Nathan! How are you?"
    "Good, good. And you? Good.
Smashing. Right. Working much?"
    Ahh. That question.
Unanswerable, really. Yes meant she might be too busy for him, and no meant she might have lost her touch. He would have heard some rumours about her
last job, no doubt. "This and that. Doing all right."
    He knew she was keen. But what he
said next just stunned her.
    "Look, this isn't your usual
thing but we're a bit short on people. Made a load of staffers redundant. You
know what it's like. Now we're got a story coming up and every other ink-stain
is on holiday or something. August. Crap."
    Emily immediately felt like the
scrapings from the bottom of the barrel, but she knew not to interrupt the
editor in mid-flow. After all, she currently was the scrapings.
    He continued, his squeaky voice
irritating her more and more with each high-pitched sentence. "So anyway,
we need two thousand words on the Baileys who are doing that husband-and-wife
arthouse funky multimedia collaboration in the city centre. I know it's totally
not your thing but…"
    Emily squeezed her eyes shut
momentarily. It was pretentious claptrap of the very lowest order. When she
opened her eyes again, the first thing she saw were her notebooks scattered
before the computer. Turner's name was circled in heavy black pen, and spidery
lines radiated out, the results of a late-night brainstorm. Chances. Rehab.
Perceptions. Opportunities.
    And she found herself saying,
"Ahh, sorry. You're right, Nathan. It really isn't my thing…"
     
    * * *