Page 11

“Whatever it’s called. The TV thing is where you probably picked up the whacked-out nutjobs.”
Ella rubbed her temples. “Honestly, that’s all just a medium.”
“Meaning?”
“I didn’t set out to be on television. I didn’t wake up and say ‘I want to be famous’ or whatever.” It felt so weird to even say that. More often than not, people didn’t recognize her. Actually, they did, but she dropped her head and tried not to be noticed. It wasn’t as though she was Hollywood-famous; she was just Eco-Ella-famous. She thought of it as if Martha StewartLivingand Katy Perry were smashed into a celebrity sandwich and spouted out an environmentally focused spawn. Everything about her was still in the infantile stages, but it was growing exponentially.
“Explain it to me, Ella.” Jared leaned back, crossing his arms. “Because from my point of view? The fans, millions of people up on your shit? I’d say that would be the driving force behind what most anyone would do.” He paused. “We’re behind closed doors, and I give no fucks about your answer. But the truth matters.”
“Of course it does.”
“No one’s going to hear what you say. You’re going to have to convince me that you’re not selling me a line of bullshit. Between that jackass ex-boyfriend of yours—”
Ella leaned forward. “I ran Eco-Ella before the website went viral and the TV cameras showed up because it’s important. And if they go away tomorrow, that’s fine. But it would break my heart, because my message is important.”
He lookedsounconvinced.
“Everything’s about the air. It’s a finite commodity.” She stood up. “In China,right now, not decades from now, where there aren’t regulations, where environmentalists like me don’t exist without major repercussions, people—kids, grandmas, even dogs—they have little masks they wear every day because pollution is as thick as fog.”
His glower didn’t change.
“You don’t get it, and that’s fine. It’s hard to, maybe, unless you have kids or a dog, so whatever. My point isthey can’t breathe. When you can’t breathe, you die. If you could ever imagine something like that.” Ella smoothed her long, wispy skirt, hating where he’d forced her to go in her explanation. She drank in a mind-clearing breath and sat in her chair again. “It’s horrific. Watching someone die who can’t breathe…”
Still, he didn’t utter a word.
“My work is more than just a blog, and what’s grown from simply protecting the air has been amazing: protecting animals and taking down corporate asshats who would rather save a buck and poison a community than tell the world they’re responsible for cancer clusters.”
Jared smirked—or was that a smile? “You certainly grow a set when your buzzwords are touched, don’t you?”
Now it was her turn to size up the mountain of a man before her. “Maybe.”
He gave an imperceptible grin that lasted as long as a blink—though maybe she’d imagined it. Definitely she’d imagined it.
Jared grumbled. “Back to business. You’ve had death threats.”
She crossed her arms just like him. “No one threatened my life.”
He tilted his head. “What do you call pictures with your face sliced and diced? The carcasses that were—”
“All right, okay. Those things would all kill me.”
“Slowly and painfully.”
Ella tried to hide the swallow that seemed hard to take. Better that than to have lost her dinner on the guy. “Understood.”
“And the language.Always watching. Variations of that.”
“Throwbacks to the TV show? Watching to see what position I take on an issue?”
“You don’t believe that, but you do put up a strong show.” He shrugged. “Look, we’re not investigators, though in our own way, at times, we hunt people and organizations.”
That sounded ominous. “The police didn’t really think that I had much to investigate.”
He nodded as though he knew or expected that. “We’re going to loop you in with our FBI folks.”
Oh.HisFBI folks. She squared her shoulders, readying to explain that while she didn’t appreciate not being taken seriously, the feds sounded as though he was going overboard. “Well, as it turns out, something has to happentoyou before someone can help. I have asituationwhere someone is antagonizing me.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “You have a stalker.”