Emma Ever After: A feel-good romantic comedy with a hilarious modern re-telling of Jane Austen. Brigid Coady
Читать онлайн книгу.
breath caught.
It couldn’t be?
She shouldn’t be star struck, she’d hung around with Gee for long enough but… Sprawled around the table, draped over chairs and talking over each other and the harried looking middle-aged men attempting to look trendy in skinny jeans was this year’s, hell this decade’s, biggest boyband. THE boyband…
Breach Of The Peace. Or BOTP as they were known by their fans, who pronounced it Bop.
Their success knocked Gee’s band, Status Single into a cocked hat. His one Brit and Teen Choice Award were dwarfed by the number of awards they’d collected in the past two years.
Bloody hell.
Emma’s hand shot out quickly to steady herself on the door then dropped. This was it. This was the big time.
Those Gantt charts in her life plan would be moving so much she might have to make new ones. If she did well here, she could jump any number of stages.
Gee wasn’t going to believe this.
Okay, professional face on. If she could deal with Gee on a daily basis and the Feckless Rogues every time they camped at the house while Gee remastered some tapes, then she could do this. Shoulders back. Head up.
These were her clients…
They were on every magazine cover, every gossip site. Their music was at the top of charts all over the world.
How had they snuck into the building without hordes of screaming teenage girls following them?
‘Ah, Emma…’ McKee said with a smug smile; he must have been watching the shock hit her. He waved her in from where she was currently hugging the wall.
She put her notebook on the part of the huge conference table nearest her and gripped the back of a chair. It was somewhere to put her hands, nothing to do with needing support.
‘I wanted to introduce you to Breach Of The Peace. Your new project.’
Everyone turned to look at her except two members of the band who sat at the far end of the table and were too engrossed in talking to each other.
‘Boys, this is Emma Woodhouse, she’ll be coordinating that special publicity we spoke about.’
‘Hey.’
‘Wotcha’
Those comments came from the two boys that were paying attention.
‘Ed! Will!’ One of the middle-aged men snapped a finger at them. Emma noted out of the corner of her eye that McKee had crossed his arms and was staring at them, his smile hardening.
The two blokes turned away from each other and looked at her. They looked as if they’d stepped directly from one of their posters, all boyband cool and yet they also looked like any normal teen boys, wishing to be somewhere else.
‘Hey,’ Ed drawled, his voice deep and sleepy. He blinked slowly. All curls and dimples. She tried to remember everything she knew about him, the memory of stories of him being a bit of a ladies’ man tickled the back of her mind.
‘Hi.’ Will’s voice was higher and lighter. His gaze was sharp, and she recoiled slightly. His chest puffed out, like a small terrier dog. She wondered whether he’d bite if she held her hand out to shake. She didn’t remember much about Will, he always seemed to be in the background, unlike today.
‘Hi.’ Emma smiled and nodded at them all, keeping her hands firmly on the chair. She didn’t want any kind of bites.
But this was going to be great with four of them to sort out, hopefully. Ideas and plans started to spark and roll out as she looked round.
It was a dream come true. Each one of them fit a different fan demographic. She got it now, why they were successful. Something for everyone – they’d been constructed to appeal to the greatest amount of people. A bouquet of ‘boys next door’ for anywhere you lived.
Whoever had done it deserved a medal. It was as if the prototype had been Status Single and they had perfected it for BOTP.
And yet, none of them were intimidatingly plastic and perfect, although… She looked at Amit whose eyes were inky pools of darkness and you could cut silk on those cheekbones plus the eyelashes… she pulled her thoughts away.
Okay, so some of them were objectively very good looking, but none quite reached the gloriousness of Gee. Admittedly she was biased, but he’d always been that bad boy and very masculine, while these boys, who were all over eighteen, were still boys. They were definitely not threatening to any parents anywhere. There wouldn’t be an outcry in Middle America because of them.
‘Emma, I’ll leave you here. Good luck, I’m expecting to hear good things about this.’ He smiled at her showing her his gappy front teeth. It made his words seem less intimidating, almost benevolent.
‘Thank you for the opportunity.’ She wished that hadn’t come out quite so breathlessly. That wasn’t the way to be professional.
McKee walked back through the door into the office and the room seemed to be suspended as they waited for it to close. As if the headmaster was leaving.
‘Thank you for the opportunity.’ A voice sneered as soon as the door shut. It was Will. She turned to him, frowning. He’d only just met her.
‘Oi, stop that. We’re going to get Emma up to speed, have a nice chat, Will. If that is something you can find yourself doing, yeah? Then we’ve got rehearsals.’ It was the same middle-aged man who’d snapped his fingers earlier, he seemed to be in charge.
Who was he? She looked questioningly at him.
‘Oh, I’m Simon Campbell, Si, I’d forgotten we haven’t met yet. I don’t work out of the office very often.’
Oh, so this was Si Campbell. He was Mega!’s biggest success story. The man who put the band together and now managed them. In the past two years, Emma had only seen the back of him as he whizzed through the offices. Rumour had it he had his own office at Maple Groove records, the band’s record label.
She had always thought it was a little odd. A bit incestuous having management and record label teams in the same office. A conflict of interest, surely?
He came around the table and shook her hand before she could think further. He was younger close up, less middle-aged. He was maybe mid-thirties but due to the extra weight around his stomach and his too tight, trendy clothes, he looked older. Probably not the effect he was going for.
The handshake was brief and too tight.
‘Okay, Emma, here’s the deal. We’ve got a presentation that can get you up to speed faster than telling you.’
Before she knew what was what she was pressed into the chair she’d been holding onto. Si took the back of it and swung it round to look at the TV screen at one end of the room.
She clasped the arms of the chair, trying not to slap Si’s hands away. This wasn’t on, no one pushed her around like this. She felt like she’d been overrun by a personality even bigger than her own. She was the one who made the plans and made people go her way.
It was a good thing that the presentation started right then, before she said something that would ruin this opportunity. She swallowed down any hasty words and sat on her hands.
After slide fifteen of the presentation, she started to frown.
Where were the other band members in it? Because it seemed to be photo after photo, video after video, of just two of the boys. Occasionally one of the others was in shot but the focus was on two of them.
Will Poulson and Ed Selley.
The two who were currently sat together, at the other end of the table from her.