Chapter One

Bridgette tried her best to be pleasant. She knew Claire, her regular make-up artist was going to take the night off, but she didn’t expect the fill-in to be quite so talkative. The young Korean girl, after professing to be a big fan of hers, continued to drone on about her weekend excursion to Montauk with her new guy friend well after Bridgette thought her make-up should have been finished.

When the stage manager appeared and lit a fire under the makeup artist’s ass, Bridgette had to stifle a sigh of relief. Many of the anchors at MXFBN enjoyed being showered with accolades by the crew, staff and random people in the cafeteria, but Bridgette was not one of those people. She was about the work, and that meant guarding her mental space whenever she could. It was unfortunate that people mistook that for being a diva, but as a young, attractive black female appearing on TV every day, she knew scrutiny and people jumping to erroneous conclusions came with the territory. Well, that and all the teen boys on social media openly speculating on how awesome it would be to do her.

Minutes later she calmly ignored the middle-aged cameramen stealing glimpses of her curves as she walked across the soundstage and let the audio assistant clip two wireless transmission packs to the back of her skirt, run a black wire through her blouse and clamp the lav mike on the end of the wire to her lapel.

“There were some script changes,” the stage manager warned as she took a seat behind the desk. Under the studio lights, her make-up felt too heavy. The stage manager was calling out that it was five minutes to show time, so it was too late to worry about it now. She scanned the hard copy of the script and sighed.

The audio assistant came to the desk and handed her