Spotlight & Giveaway: The Receptionist by Kate Myles

Today, HJ is pleased to share with you Kate Myles’s new release: The Receptionist

In this domestic thriller, sex, ambitions, and disaster burn more intensely than the Los Angeles sun.

Emily is a top talent agent who rules the land of talk shows and reality TV. Whip-smart and brutally practical, she outmaneuvers all rivals…except in her personal life. Emily willfully ignores her CEO husband Doug’s philandering in exchange for their glamorous one-percenter lifestyle, until a surprise pregnancy changes everything.

A TED-Talking business guru with a reckless streak, Doug embarks on an audacious relationship with Chloe, the stunning young receptionist at his market research firm. But Chloe has a secret: a volatile past she’s desperate to forget. Their chaotic entanglement sets off a chain of shocking scandals, plunging Emily into a scheming fight for survival.

As they each try to fight their way to the top, there’s only one question: How far will Emily go to protect her child and preserve her carefully curated life?

Enjoy an exclusive excerpt from The Receptionist 

EMILY
Oh my God, this girl is fucking my husband.
That was my first thought when Chloe showed up outside my office. She was too striking, lingering there in the doorway in her pencil skirt and tank top, with a face that somehow managed to appear both cherubic and angular. She raised her fingers to the doorjamb, hesitat¬ing, waiting for me to invite her in. Her bare shoulder caught the light of the hallway fluorescents, giving her the faintest shimmer of a halo. She smiled.
“Thank you so much for meeting with me,” she said.
I ignored her and turned to my laptop. I’d already told Doug I didn’t want to see any more of his “hungry creative” types. His company was bursting with these day jobbers who’d stayed too long in entry-level positions, hoping to expand some hustle in content creation. “My wife’s an agent,” he liked to brag before signing me up for another favor meet¬ing, another waste of my time.
Chloe took an exaggerated breath and stepped toward my desk with her hand extended. I gripped the rounded arm of my chair and tried to control my breathing in the face of this nerve, this absolute gall.
Was he actually sending me his side pieces?
“Mr. Markham said you’re a great agent,” she said.
“Please,” I said slowly. “Call him Doug.”
She blinked and wiped her palm on her hip, easing herself into the seat across from me.
I wasn’t jealous of her beauty. That wasn’t it at all. I’d grown accus¬tomed to the gorgeous. They were everywhere in my work, filter¬ing through the waiting rooms of the entertainment industry, their cheekbones and long layers bowed toward scripts and iPhones. They whispered to themselves and emoted silently and were often objects of ridicule until they became wives or became successful.
But outside my world, even a few miles down the 10 freeway at Doug’s office, the simple, supple fact of Chloe would have been a con¬frontation. She’d have stood out as a goddess amid the scattering of hip nerds and tech bros and fierce young women in communications. I couldn’t picture a scenario where he wasn’t sleeping with her.
She made a show of looking around my office, opening her arms to the space. “I love this building,” she said. “Is that a real Calder in the lobby?”
“What do you think?”
“Okay,” she said, nodding to herself. She was silent another moment before starting off in a shaky voice. “I guess I’ll tell you about me? I’ve been in LA two years. I’m the receptionist at Beyond the Brand, Doug’s company. But that’s just my day job. My real work is with this group, Common Parlance. We’re performers. Well, we don’t call ourselves per¬formers, really. We do pop-ups. But not like a restaurant pop-up. It’s immersive. We wear carnival masks.”
There was something odd in her manner. Her hands were trem¬bling, along with her voice, and her eyes kept fluttering to her lap. The people I normally dealt with were so slick; I almost didn’t recognize the behavior of a nervous person. I pushed my chair from my desk and sat back, taking a better look at Chloe’s outfit. Her tank was thin cotton, like something that came in bulk packaging. Her skirt was pilling at the waist. She needed a pedicure.
She trailed off as I looked her over and chewed the inside of her thumb.
“So you do happenings,” I offered.
“I guess you could call them that.”
“What would you call them?”
“We’re trying to figure it out. I like `guerrilla theater,’ but nobody else does. Whatever happened to plain old `performance art,’ right?”
Her smile was goofy, friendly.
“How old are you?” I asked.
“Twenty-four.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I am! I don’t like lying about that stuff. I think . . . never mind.”
“What were you going to say?”
“It’s stupid.”
“Go on.”
“Oh gosh, it’s just that I’m trying to approach everything in life like I approach my art. I want to make sure everything I do is real, you know?”
I focused on her eyes. They were round and clear, with a lack of guile that would have been charming in someone a few years younger. Maybe she wasn’t having sex with Doug.
“Like, if you’re mostly telling the truth,” she said, “and that’s what we do as artists, right? Tell the truth?”
“I’m not an artist.”
“But you work with them.”
“Actually, I work with experts: psychiatrists, former FBI agents, people you might see on a talk show.”
“Oh,” she said and looked confused. She edged to the front of her chair. “Well, I have this belief that if there’s something fake in there, people will see it. Even subconsciously, they’ll know something is wrong.”
No, I decided. She was too sincere. She’d never have been able to pull off this meeting if they were having an affair.
I felt a ball of warmth inside me then, solid and radiating and about the size of a lemon. That was how big the pregnancy books said the baby was now. I was four months along. I hadn’t told Doug. I brought my hand to my belly. It was barely perceptible, the tightening, the round¬ness under my palm. I wasn’t going to be able to keep it secret much longer.
But Doug knew. Of course he did. The one time he didn’t clear his internet search history, I saw what he’d written. Wife hiding pregnancy.
I could tell him now. We could start being honest with each other. Because Doug had sent Chloe to me as a sign, a peace offering, an example of someone he could have slept with but had chosen not to. I moved both hands to my desk and straightened, overcome with an unfamiliar sense of well-being.
“Tell me, then-how can I help you?” I asked.
“I was hoping you’d come see us perform.”
I paused and raised my eyebrows. “Can I be honest?”
“Please.”
“You’ve been talking about your group for a while, but I still don’t understand what you do.”
Chloe sat back. “I’m sorry,” she said. “We do site-specific perfor¬mances, like street theater. It’s improvisational. We start out really subtle and play off what’s happening around us, like we interact with reality, if that makes any sense.”
“Do you have any press?” I asked.
“We do Snap and TikTok. Oh, and YouTube.”
“What kind of hits do you get?”
“I can tell you . . .” She pulled her phone out of her pocket and frowned at the screen. “What’s your Wi-Fi?”
“Never mind,” I said. “I get it. You’re alternative. But this is RFG.” I waited for some recognition from her, some acknowledgment she was out of her depth. “We’re a major agency. We don’t pluck people out of obscurity.”
The disappointment flushed across her face. She certainly hadn’t thought anything was going to happen here? I was hoping to make the rejection painless.
I softened my voice. “I work with the elite. People we can market across different platforms: publishing, retail, that kind of thing. It’s hard to get there. I mean it’s impossible.”
She narrowed her eyes, ready to take me up on a challenge I hadn’t given her.
“Do you want advice?” I asked.
“I’d love some.”
“Your group needs a hook. Something simple that tells people who you are.”
She pursed her lips and swished them to the side. “Would the masks count as a hook?”
“Maybe. But think in terms of what’s out there already, like Blue Man Group. You’ve heard of them? They’re blue men. They’re easy to understand.”
Chloe propped her arm on the back of her chair. It was a pose, exquisite and still. Doug had told me she’d been a backup dancer for Fefu Fornes, the latest child actor turned racy pop star. “Yes, but we go deeper than that,” Chloe said. She sounded like she was talking down to me. “We’re beyond entertainment, beyond language, beyond form, even. Like, there’s this undercurrent to every crowd and interaction. We tap into what’s really going on and bring it to the surface.”
“Sounds exciting.” I flashed her a smile and stood to start the pro¬cess of getting her out of my office. “You have a great look. Have you done commercials?” I grabbed a business card from my desk. “Send me your headshot, and I’ll forward it to our commercial agents.” My hand was on her shoulder, and she was almost out the door when she stopped.
“Wait,” she said. “I forgot to give you a flyer for our next show.”
“Don’t worry-” I started, but she’d already unzipped her hand¬bag, a cheap yellow-leathered overnight bag of a purse, full to the top with faded receipts and free-floating tampons. I saw a flash of hot pink that might have been underwear. She shoved it under the hairbrush and stapler, all tangled up in what looked like two different brands of computer cable.
“I’m sorry. I know I put the flyers in here.” She leaned on the arm of my tufted leather sofa and lowered her head, plunging her arm into her purse and churning. “I’m sorry,” she said. I wanted to tell her to stop, to email it to me, but her movements picked up speed. “I’m sorry,” she repeated. She started trembling again.
“Where is it?” she whispered with an intensity so out of place in my cool, professional world. It was something from the domestic sphere: intimate, desperate, with a hint of violence at the end of it. “I’m sorry,” she said again, shaking her head in a tiny, frantic figure eight.
“Chloe.” I put my hand on her back. “It’s okay.”
She stopped and slumped and reached in once more, grasping a handful of something inside. “I must have taken them out for some reason.” She tried to perk up with a smile, but it was too late. The entire meeting must have been an exercise in keeping it together.
I remembered this kind of unraveling from the early days of my career, trying out unproven clients. The crazies always made for a good story. But Chloe was so young and pretty. I had an urge to help her.
I thought of taking her purse from her hands and showing her how the yellow was cracking near the bottom seam. Look, I wanted to say. This is why your bag is so crappy. The leather was colored with a surface dye. It’s like the manufacturer slapped paint on skin.
I wanted to take my Bottega Veneta from the back of my chair and let her run her fingers over the soft woven pattern. Leather needs to breathe, I wanted to tell her. See how you can still see the grain? That’s called aniline. It’s been dyed all the way through.
These are the things you should be focusing on, I wanted to say. This is what you should aspire to. Everything else is madness.
Maybe I should have said it. Maybe she would have taken the advice, embarked on a shallow existence, and left us alone. Maybe she would have dismissed me as a materialistic loon. I refuse to speculate. Turning philosophical is the last refuge of the pathetic.
I believe in judgment. I believe in assigning blame. Everything that came after was Doug’s fault.
And I did try to help Chloe that day in my office. I used my gen¬tlest tone as I said, “You’ll need to upgrade that purse if you want to be taken seriously.”
She looked like I’d smacked her.
I almost said I was sorry, that I didn’t mean it to come out that way. I almost told her not to worry about any of this because life was long, and she was young and probably wouldn’t even remember this in a couple of years. But I said nothing.
You have to be careful of people.

CHLOE
Chloe makes a wrong turn out of Doug’s wife’s office. She’s desperate to escape Emily, escape the RFG Entertainment building, but nothing is ever easy. She starts left instead of right. The assistant jumps up from his desk and says, “No, this way.”
“I’m sorry,” says Chloe. She stumbles as she turns, and her cheeks-she can barely see over them. It’s like they’re bulging, like her whole body is swelling with shame.
Just twenty minutes earlier, she was fearless, bounding down this same hall with disorienting optimism. She had a meeting at RFG! She had a contact! Contacts. Networking. It’s who you know. That’s what everyone says. But these things that work for other people, they never work for Chloe.
She lunges for the elevator button. She can feel the agents and their underlings on the floor behind her, watching. The elevator is empty, thank God, and for a moment, she’s safe. But then, every few seconds, it stops with an agonizing bell chime. The doors open to clone after clone of Doug’s wife. They crowd the car in groups of two and three, and it doesn’t matter if they’re male or female; they’re the same, all bundled against the air-conditioning in their sleek gray suits and closed-toed shoes.
Chloe’s instinct is to smile, to offer them tiny greetings. But no one reciprocates. Instead, each person gives Chloe a hard once-over, and not with jealousy or lust like she’s used to but with an authoritative sweep from her hair to her roman sandals. They assess and ignore, and Chloe stares down at the nail polish chip on her right big toe and wonders, Why, oh why didn’t I get a pedicure? These are the type of people who notice feet.
She hits the lobby atrium and winces at the sight of the giant Calder mobile. It’s imposing now, casting its translucent shadow across the marble floor. On the way in, she was comforted by the artwork, by the thought that it had started just as an idea in someone’s head. Chloe swallows. She focuses on the front door as she passes the guard booth. She’s almost out of the building when she senses she’s in trouble. It’s always there, that feeling she’s about to be yelled at, but right now it’s strong.
“Miss,” she hears. “Excuse me.”
It’s the security lady, calling out to her.
“What’s the matter?” Chloe asks.
“Do you-”
“I’m sorry?”
“Do you need your-”
“What?”
The lady thrusts out her bosom with the shiny brass badge and draws out every syllable. “Your parking. Do you need it validated?”
“No, I parked on the street.”
The people around Chloe stop, listen, and stare. The lady puts a smile and a frown on her face in a way that no one ever does, and Chloe’s body sparks in anger. That’s not a real expression, Chloe thinks. She’s just showing off. Chloe turns her head hard to her right, to give one of the bystanders a dirty look, but the guy’s back is turned. He’s studying the directory.
She speed walks out the door, into the sun, and down the street. She waits until she’s across the six lanes of Wilshire Boulevard before she turns around. The top half of the agency is still visible, a monolith of dark amber jutting up over its neighbors like a middle finger. She flips a bird back to the building and glances at the bright smattering of pedestrians on the sidewalk. No one noticed what she did. She can’t act like that in public, making obscene gestures at buildings. It’s how things unravel.
She leans against one of the Beverly Wilshire’s front columns. The terra-cotta is hot and sandpapery on her shoulder. She closes her eyes, trying to make the last half hour of her life go away, but the memory of meeting Doug’s wife keeps replaying like a looping GIF. She’s look¬ing for the flyer, and she can’t find the flyer, and what did Doug’s wife say? That her purse was ugly? How did that awful woman end up with someone as amazing as Doug?
Doug. Chloe keeps her eyes shut and touches her collarbone. She conjures an image of her boss in one of his faded T-shirts, leaning over her desk and whispering, I’m sorry my wife was mean.
“Are you all right?”
Chloe opens her eyes. There’s a lady in front of her with a face full of wrinkles crisscrossing into matronly disapproval. She’s close enough for Chloe to smell her coffee breath, to grab her silk scarf if she wants to. Chloe shuts her eyes again. Go away, go away, go away.
“It’s hot out,” says the woman. She reaches for Chloe. Her fingers touch Chloe’s arm.
“Boundaries!” Chloe screams. She slaps the woman’s hand away. But it’s not enough. There’s a wave inside her, and it’s fiery and cresting, pushing her forward, toward the woman’s chest until Chloe has shoved the woman back a step. Chloe wants to hit her. She raises her hand.
A picture enters her mind then: a vivid blip of a different old lady falling to the ground. A half-cried moan of “Why!”
Chloe stops. This surge, this continuing of anger, she’s been trained to recognize it. She can choose to interrupt it. She can calm down. She lowers her hand and takes a deep, conscious inhale, but the woman-if only the woman would stop moving too-the woman spreads her hands across her neck, all imperious, like she’s never been told to mind her own business, like she’s never had to worry about getting punched in the face.
“You pushed me!” yells the woman. She turns to the crosswalk, where a man in a suit is watching. The lady points at Chloe. “She pushed me!” The man starts toward them.
One, two, three, Chloe thinks. She blows air through her lips, like she’s blowing through a straw. She unclenches her fingers. Four, five, six. She holds up her hands. Her fingers are splayed. The woman flinches.
“I didn’t,” says Chloe. “You grabbed me.”
“I was trying to help.”
A young woman in a printed maxi dress joins them. “Is everything okay?”
The man reaches them. The lady starts explaining how Chloe looked like she was fainting, hanging on to the pillar. Chloe wants to run. But they’ll chase her if she runs.
The bystanders’ eyes are on the old woman. Chloe takes a sideways step. They don’t notice. She backs up. She turns and walks at a normal pace. She doesn’t look their way, doesn’t jinx her head start. The Beverly Wilshire doorman smiles as she enters yet another marble lobby blast¬ing cold air.
“Where’s the bathroom?” she asks.
“Up those stairs and to your left,” says the doorman.
Chloe navigates around the clusters of tourists snapping selfies in front of jewelry displays. She locks herself in an empty bathroom stall. Her phone chimes. “Shit!” she says and turns it off.

She waits. She slows her breathing. Someone in kitten heels enters and click-clacks across the tile floor. Chloe lifts her feet. She scrunches her whole body on the toilet and holds her breath as the person tries her door.
The person moves to the next stall over. Chloe digs a fingernail into the side of her thumb. The skin there is sore and raked over.
This thing, it keeps happening. When she goes outside, there’s trouble. It doesn’t matter how many warnings she gets, how many anger-management classes they make her take. It doesn’t matter that her public defender got her latest expunged, that she has a clean slate. Even with all the help, she never knows how she’ll react to provocation.
The bathroom door opens again. Chloe winces. She braces herself as the sound of footsteps approaches her stall. Please, Chloe thinks. Please. Get me out of this. I swear I’ll never lose my temper again.

Excerpt. ©Kate Myles. Posted by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.

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Meet the Author:

Kate Myles has worked as television producer for a variety of networks, including Discovery, OWN and the Food Network. Before her producing career, she was an actor and comedian, enjoying a two-year stint as a host of the Travel Channel series, Not Your Average Travel Guide, among other adventures. Her short fiction has appeared in Quarterly West, Necessary Fiction, and Storm Cellar Quarterly. The Receptionist is her first novel. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son.

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