“Thanks,” Grace murmured, not missing the way that everyone smiled at her in that too-careful way, as though she was likely to break at any second.

But as the meeting settled into its old, familiar rhythm, she started to relax a little.

She could do this. It was just like old times, except she was a little older, a little smarter.

In fact, it was better than old times, because Grace wasn’t ever going to let a guy get the drop on her again.

She half listened as Camille went around the table, asking for department updates. When Camille turned to the Love and Relationships section, Grace sat up a little straighter. She didn’t have any updates on her first day back, but she smiled and nodded at everything Riley and Julie said so that there could be no doubt that she was still a part of this crew. She even kept an approving smile pasted on her face as Emma spoke.

And then Camille dropped those dreaded magazine words that occasionally made the rounds at Stiletto but were almost never associated with the nearly flawless Love and Relationships department.

“… there have been some complaints.”

Wait. What? What?

Grace listened in dismay as her boss read letter after letter of complaint.

Riley held up a hand to stop their boss’s flow of words. “I’m sorry—did you just say that some readers think we’re naive?”

Oliver snickered. “As if you could ever be naive.”

Unperturbed, Riley gave him one of her sassy winks. Riley McKenna was anything but naive, at least in the ways of the bedroom. She managed to dazzle all manner of people, from homosexual men to heterosexual women. But her real talent was with heterosexual men, which was a good thing, seeing as she was Stiletto’s number one sex goddess. Riley didn’t just write about sex, she embodied it. Her long black hair had that perpetual just-rolled-out-of-bed look, and her bright blue eyes had a naughty, Marilyn Monroe kind of way about them. Most annoying of all? Riley McKenna could out-eat anyone Grace knew and still wore a size two.

All of which would make Grace hate her if Riley wasn’t just about the best damned friend she could imagine.

Of course, none of this was even remotely relevant to their boss right about now, as Camille was definitely less than pleased with her usual golden trio.

Or golden quad, Grace thought, with a quick glance at Emma.

“There’s just been increasing feedback that we’re not adequately tapped into the male perspective,” Camille said. “That we’re living in a female bubble.”

“Crazy, since this is a female magazine,” Julie muttered.

“Exactly,” Camille said, jabbing her finger on top of her notebook. “Just like Oxford is in a male bubble.”

Everyone exchanged a confused glance. What the hell did Oxford have to do with this? Grace was willing to bet most of them had never read it—she certainly hadn’t, beyond occasionally flipping through an issue Greg might have left on the coffee table.

Oxford was to men as Stiletto was to women—and seeing as how most everyone in the room was female, Oxford was about as familiar a reference as, say, jock strap. Only Oliver could pretend to relate, and even he made it clear to anyone who would listen that he preferred talking shoes over cars any day.

“I’ve had several meetings with Alex Cassidy over the past two weeks, and he’s been finding the same trend in letters from his readers,” Camille was saying. “Quite simply, both Oxford and Stiletto are guilty of the same one-sided journalism.”

Grace lifted a hand to get Camille’s attention. “Who’s Alex Cassidy?”

“The new editor in chief of Oxford,” Emma Sinclair volunteered. Grace thought she heard something bitter in that tone, but a quick look at the other woman revealed nothing. Just a calm, nothing-fazes-me expression.

A quick glance around the table showed that Grace was the only one surprised by this news. What the hell had happened to Bill Heiner? He’d been Oxford’s editor in chief since before most people in this room were born. Being out of the loop sucked.

“Got it,” she said quietly.

But Camille apparently had bigger things to worry about than the fact that one of her most tenured columnists was out of the loop, because she was doing that weird hair-tugging thing that generally meant trouble for someone.

“So what’s the solution?” Julie asked. “You want one of us to grow a penis? Maybe throw in a couple token interviews with guys so we can get the man’s perspective and all that?”

“No, we need to address it more head-on than that,” Camille replied.

More head-on than growing a penis? Grace wondered.

“Alex and I have talked about this, and we want to be deliberate. To let the readers know that we’re hearing their concerns. Apparently there are more crossover readers than we realized, and we can’t have male readers hollering about how we misrepresent males. And Oxford doesn’t want female readers lamenting about how Oxford’s way off base.”

This was not sounding good.

“Which is why we’ll be inserting a new special series of stories for the next three issues. A sort of his-and-hers approach to the Love and Relationships section of the magazines.”

“I’ll do it!” Oliver said, his hand shooting in the air.

Camille gave him a look. “With all due respect, Mr. Harrington, aren’t you the one always telling us you relate more to women than men?”

His brow furrowed. “Right. I was thinking I’d write the her perspective.”

God help them, he looked serious.

“Ollie, until you’ve had to suffer the indignity of running into an ex while buying Vagisil or asking a stranger for a tampon, I’m thinking maybe you don’t quite have the proper intel or the proper parts for this,” Julie said kindly.

Oliver gave a shudder and raised his palms as though to say, I’m out.

Exactly, Grace thought. Being a woman was messy business.

“So who’s it going to be?” Camille asked, her eyes flitting among Julie, Riley, Grace, and Emma.

“How about a little more information?” Riley said, sitting back in her chair and playing with a long strand of shiny black hair. “Is this, like, an article swap? Our stuff goes in Oxford, and one of their monkey reporters gets a page in ours?”

“Sort of,” Camille said, tapping her nails against the table. “We’d be very transparent about what we’re up to. Alex and I were thinking that we’d take one of my girls and one of his guys and send you on a couple of dates. Three, at the minimum. Each of you will write an account of what you’re thinking. First impressions, assessment of the other person’s first impressions. You’ll analyze how the conversation went, what the other person’s thinking … all without actually discussing the article itself.”

“Sounds very natural and non-awkward,” Grace whispered to Riley.

Camille spared her a brief glare before continuing. “Stiletto will more prominently feature the female perspective about the date, but with an inset on what the guy was thinking. Oxford will do the same in reverse.”

“What’s the objective?” Emma asked. She had one of those slightly husky, soothing voices, like a jazz singer or a sexpot, with just a touch of southern. Great. A sexy, smart, composed southern belle.

“Now, here’s the part I think you ladies will like,” Camille said. “Alex and I were thinking of making it a competition of sorts.”

“Go on …,” Riley said, tapping the tips of her fingers together like a cartoon villain.

“Well, the goal here is to show that both Stiletto and Oxford aim to provide an accurate representation of what goes on inside the other side’s head. Women reading Stiletto want to know that the advice there is actually going to resonate with the guy in their life. Oxford is the same—what’s the point of all their tacky ‘How to Please a Woman’ sex advice if women don’t agree?”

Grace hid her wince. Camille’s words cut a little too close. Wasn’t Grace guilty of this very thing? Of smugly writing article after article like some sort of expert on men, only to be blindsided by her own man?

“I’m not disagreeing that we need to accurately represent the opposite sex,” Julie was saying. “But how is this a competition between Stiletto and Oxford? Who decides who wins?”

“The readers,” Camille said, as though this was completely easy and obvious. “We’ll have the digital team get some sort of poll up on our respective websites. After each his-and-hers article is printed, they can vote for who’s ahead in knowing the opposite sex. For example, if the male columnist writes that the female columnist completely ate up his compliments on her hair color, and she writes that he’s an insincere oaf who was making fun of her roots, the women pull ahead. Similarly, if the woman insists on paying because she thinks he’ll appreciate it, and then he writes that she was a pushy ball-buster, the guys get the edge. You see? Everyone knows dating is a game. Now we just see who wins.”

Nobody said a word.

It was contrived. A little weird …

And yet intriguing.

“Julie’s out,” Camille was saying. “Mitchell will have my head if I put her on a real-life date for a story.”

“And he knows firsthand how that turns out,” Riley said. “He ended up having to buy a ring the size of a baseball.”

“So, Riley, you in?” Camille asked.

Riley blinked her cat shaped blue eyes in surprise. “Me? This? But it’s so … tame.”

Grace leaned forward and rested her chin on her hands while smirking at her best friend. “You could just slather the guy with bacon-flavored lube. Sex it up a bit?”

“There will be no lube,” Camille said with a sharp finger jab. “And no sex. This is a dating column, not a prostitution ring.”

Riley faked a big yawn.

“Fine,” Camille snapped. “Emma? You up for it?”

Grace’s spine slowly straightened. Whaaaaat?

She understood why Riley had been Camille’s first choice—this sort of battle-of-the-sexes thing was a perfect fit for Riley’s snarky, bold style. And she understood why Julie was out of the running—an engaged woman doing a first-person dating project wouldn’t work.

But why Emma before Grace? Adding insult to injury, nobody else in the room seemed to think this was strange. Even Riley and Julie didn’t seem fazed by the fact that Grace was apparently freaking invisible.

Oddly, only Emma seemed aware that something was off, and her eyes flicked to Grace as though asking permission. Grace wanted to give her a reassuring smile. To tell Emma to go ahead and take the story because it wasn’t Grace’s thing. She gravitated toward stories that were less edgy, less ballsy …

Less interesting.

At least Grace 1.0 gravitated toward stories like that.

Grace 2.0 was screaming that this was their chance to redeem themselves. To expose men as philandering frauds while slowly rebuilding their dignity.

“I’ll do it!” Grace blurted out, her hand shooting in the air like a precocious second grader rushing to beat her classmates to the answer.

Twenty pairs of eyes fell on her.

“Grace …,” Camille said, her voice gentle.

Oh shit. If their take-no-prisoners, half-batshit-crazy boss was going soft, it was worse than she thought.

“You just got back from vacation,” Camille said. “Give yourself a little breather to get back into the swing of things.”

But Grace 2.0 was strapping on battle armor, so Grace forged ahead. “Look, you need someone to go with an open mind into a dating scenario, right? Who better than someone who’s freshly back on the dating scene?”

“But we need—”

Grace held up a finger to stop the objections. “And who better to see through a man’s bullshit than someone who just got thrown over by a man? Nobody will be more watchful of a guy’s BS than me.”

“She has a point.”

Grace was a little startled to realize it was Emma who had spoken, but the new columnist looked completely unperturbed by the fact that Grace was trying to steal a prime story from right under her nose.

“Look,” Emma said in her husky voice. “Office water-cooler gossip has made it obvious that Grace is coming out of a nasty relationship. If this is truly a competition—and if Stiletto wants to prove that women read men far better than they read us—then we’ll need someone who has a burning desire to get it right.”

Grace didn’t know why Emma was taking her side, but Emma made an excellent point. Grace did have a burning desire to get it right.

She felt Camille studying her, her boss’s auburn bob barely moving as she tilted her head to the side.

“Okay,” Camille said simply.

Okay? Okay? That was it?

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Julie and Riley give her victorious smiles.

Camille changed the subject to some rant about organic skin care, and Grace sat back in her chair, feeling the best she’d felt in weeks.

Grace 1.0 was biting her nails nervously, and Grace 2.0 was doing victory push-ups.

Operation Reclaim Dignity was officially on track.

And Mr. Oxford better watch his back, because Grace Brighton was fully committed to exposing whatever smarmy, womanizing tricks he had up his sleeve.

* * *

“Cheers to Greg,” Riley said, lifting her cocktail to be clinked.

Julie choked on her martini. “You’re not suggesting we toast to the guy who cheated on Grace?”

“Actually, I think Riley’s on to something,” Grace said thoughtfully. “Had Greg not been a philandering jerk, I would be at home right now, watching whatever he wanted to watch, eating whatever he wanted to eat, after which I’d be putting away his laundry. So yeah … Cheers to Greg.”