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turned to his daughter. "Gretchen, my sweet, I hope you've alerted Heck Cochran about the new contract." Hector Cochran was the VP in charge of promotion and public relations. "I want Gin on every talk show in the free world, even Howard Stern's, and I expect to see her charming freckled mug smiling back at me from magazineracks everywhere. In other words, I will be quite vexed if we do not get a dollar-per-dollar value back in publicity."
    It was his exit speech, but before he and Gretchen could make it to the door, Rudy said, "Just a second, Commander. That's it? Blessing cost this company millions and we just blow it off?"
    "Weren't you listening, Rudy?" the old man said. "Billy just told us that he did not advise Gin to ask for more money."
    "You believe that?"
    "You're a relative newcomer to our operation, my boy," the commander told him. "Billy's been with us long enough he's like one of the family. Shouldn't one trust members of one's family?"
    As soon as the commander and his daughter had exited the conference room, Rudy spun around facing me and said through clenched teeth, "Well, you're not part of my fuckin' family, Blessing. I'm disowning your ass. You can forget about the
Food School
pilot."
    "It's your show, but Lily and I have worked out some of the kinks and--"
    "I also plan to take a long, hard look at
Blessing's in the Kitchen,
" he said, interrupting me. "There are definitely some changes to be made there. Maybe we should get one of the hot new chefs to share the kitchen, one of the shaved-head muscle boys who do tae kwon do while filleting a sole. Bring in a younger demo."
    He gave me a zero-mirth grin. "The old man won't let me can your ass, but there are lots of ways to cook a goose, right, chef?"
    "That's true, Rudy," I said. "But unless you know what you're doing, you just might get burned." A careless comment that would come back to haunt me.

Chapter

EIGHT
    Gin's new proactive positioning on the morning show did away with the spare moments in the past when we'd both been free to do quick coffee catch-ups between segments. And as soon as the closing credits rolled each day, Heck Cochran's people whisked her off on publicity errands. So after the first week, I stopped trying to link up with her to find out why she'd embroiled me in her now-infamous contract negotiations.
    Time had made the point moot, anyway. My on-camera associates apparently had been arm-wrestled by Rudy into staying satisfied with their admittedly lucrative lots. And their old self-involved but generally pleasant attitudes returned. Even Rudy seemed to have reached the stage where he could look at me without frowning.
    As best I could tell, he'd not followed through on his threat to banish me from the
Food School
pilot or to mess with
Blessing's in the Kitchen
. I suspected the commander may have had something to do with that. Or maybe Rudy had just been too busy with other matters to bother. He certainly seemed distracted.
    By the time I finally did bump into Gin one morning, minutes before the start of
WUA!
, her contract was old news. The blogosphere blaze had cooled down and her picture no longer graced newspaperfront pages, though the tag "The Fifteen-Million-Dollar Woman," bestowed on her by the
Post
, lived on.
    "It's been a while since we talked," I said.
    "I know, Billy. It's been so hectic. But I love it."
    At six-forty-three a.m. Gin was glowing like the midday sun. And it wasn't the makeup. Her boyfriend, Ted Parkhurst, was a lucky buck but also, I thought, something of an idiot for continuing to work on other continents when his rep as a journalist was such that he could probably have found something closer to Manhattan to write about.
    "I'm getting everything I've always wanted, Billy," she said. "And it's all because of you." She warmed me with a look that, to my jaded eyes, came damn close to adoration. "My guru."
    "That's very flattering, Gin. But I really didn't do anything. I certainly didn't tell you to hit them