by Julie Kriss
Five
Samantha
* * *
I’d never been a big drinker. Some of the executive assistants I knew drank a lot, and I didn’t blame them—dealing with an asshole CEO all day, every day, could drive anyone to the bottom of a bottle. But I’d always kept my drinking to the occasional glass of wine, because my job was hard enough without trying to do it with a hangover.
Tonight, though, I called my sister and made her come out for drinks with me. I needed to break my rule.
I had to twist Emma’s arm to meet me—not because she didn’t like me, but because she was a workaholic who made a habit of staying in the office until at least nine at night. Executive assistants are driven, and they work long hours—and Emma was no exception. Twelve-hour days were the norm for me in many of the jobs I’d done, though so far Aidan had never made me work an extra-late night or a weekend.
I left the office at six thirty and took the subway uptown to our favorite wine bar on the Upper West Side. It was a tiny sliver of a place, with rich, dark wood furnishings and tasteful lighting. The wine menu was sensational, and for a few hours at least, I planned to fully enjoy it.
Emma walked in ten minutes after I did. She was wearing a jersey dress and boots, her straight, dyed-red hair pulled back into a ponytail. She put her purse on the seat next to her and didn’t even bother to say hi. “Fuck,” she said instead. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
I felt myself smiling. Emma was stressed and usually wound up tight, so when she got together with me, she liked to let it all go. It would start with her sailor mouth—which she never, ever let loose on the job—and would get raunchier as the evening went on. It was like she put a lid on herself all day, and only took it off when she was with someone she trusted, like me.
“Good day?” I asked her.
“Fucking fantastic,” Emma said, taking a sip of the glass of wine I’d ordered for her—the place’s best pinot. “Oh, God, that’s good,” she said as she swallowed. “Almost as good as sex. Almost.”
I sipped my own wine. “You’re extra stressed, I can tell. You usually don’t talk about sex until the third glass.”
“What can I say? Running a successful empire isn’t easy.” She took another sip and sat back in her chair, looking at me. In her purse, I heard her phone buzz, and then again, as if she was getting nonstop texts. “What’s up, little sis?” she asked me.
“Do you need to get that?” I asked her.
“If you want me to spend the entire evening on the phone, then sure. Remember Danielle? I’ve sent her on her first assignment.”
I rolled my eyes. Yes, I remembered Danielle—short, pretty, the daughter of rich parents. Smart, but not very confident and incredibly needy. “You’re telling me she actually made the cut? You’re getting soft, Emma. When you first started, you would have put her out on the street after the first interview.”
“She impressed, me,” Emma said, shrugging. “She has gumption. But she also texts me questions a thousand times a day. I’m practically holding her hand through every day at work, and if she does a shitty job, it reflects on me. It’s hard to find good help these days, Sam.”
My sister was the only person in the world who called me Sam. Even our parents always called me Samantha. You just look like a Samantha, my mother had said once. I wasn’t sure if that was a compliment, but I decided to take it as one. Aidan called me Samantha, too.
And that brought my thoughts to Aidan again.
“What happened?” Emma said. “You just looked like someone killed your dog.” She blinked, alarmed. “Wait. You didn’t call me here to tell me you screwed up the Aidan Winters job, did you?”
“No, I didn’t.” Not exactly a lie.
“You’re quitting?”
“No.”
“You fucked him?”
“No.” Though I wanted to. The thought flitted through my mind, and I pushed it away again. “Jesus, Emma. I’ve never had sex with a client.”
“Fucked,” Emma corrected me. “It’s after hours, so you can say the word. It’s fucked.”
“I know the word, thanks.” And I wasn’t a prude. I just didn’t want to say it in reference to Aidan, because he was my boss and the visuals were way, way too hot. “Still, there was a bit of a problem today, and it’s bothering me. I’m not sure what the fallout will be.”
Emma looked serious. In the years I’d worked for Executive Ranks, I’d never given Emma a major problem. The worst was when I’d had to leave a job because my boss wouldn’t quit making sexual innuendoes at me. “Am I going to need more wine for this?” she asked.
“I wish I knew, but I don’t,” I said honestly.
I watched her take another sip, then square her shoulders. “Okay, go.”
I’d learned something today that I never knew before: the glassed-in meeting room at the Tower VC offices had a sound problem. If you stood right in front of the meeting room door, you could hear the people talking inside. Which meant that after I’d shown the Egerton brothers into the room and closed the door behind me, I’d heard exactly what they said.
Samantha, huh? Is she single or what?
She’s hot, man. Really fucking hot. I mean, that ass.
I hadn’t lingered. I’d kept walking away from the door, my back straight and my ears burning. It shouldn’t have bothered me—a couple of idiotic frat-boy lines, spoken by rich, spoiled men who meant nothing to me. I was a professional. It should have rolled off.
But it hadn’t, because Aidan was there. They’d said those things to Aidan, as if he would get it, as if he was one of them. As if that was something he was already thinking, and they knew it.
The office door I was heading for blurred as my eyes watered, and for a second I had felt sick. We had such a careful thing, Aidan and me. It wasn’t just the relationship of a boss and the underling he got to abuse. We treated each other with respect. His attitude to me was one almost of old-world courtesy, underlaid with—I had thought—genuine liking. In three months of working closely with him, I had never seen Aidan check out my tits or my ass. So I had let myself believe that he didn’t think of me as a piece of office meat.
So the words, even though he hadn’t spoken them, were like a slap. A reminder that I’d been an idiot. That was how men thought. All men. Even Aidan. Even about me.
Nine years of being the best executive assistant in New York City, possibly the country, and I was still that ass.
I was humiliated, and I was angry. Tears of rage blurred my eyes. If anyone had spoken to me as I did that walk of shame across the room to my office, I would have slapped them. I was used to the executive boys’ club, but this one hurt. It really did.
I had reached my office when I heard the meeting room door open. I turned to see the Egerton brothers come out, their postures stiff. Jared had a smirk on his face, and Rob had his hands jammed in the pockets of his Dockers. They kept it out of their expressions, but even I could see that they were both angry, boys who were being marched out of the principal’s office in front of their classmates.
Behind them was Aidan. His expression was icy and his body moved with its usual fluid grace, but he walked right behind the Egertons, as if daring them to slow down. His black suit was dark as an ink stain. He didn’t look left or right, and he didn’t look at me.
The Egertons were mad, but Aidan was fucking furious.
In that moment, I saw something different in Aidan. He wasn’t my rich, civilized boss, the CEO of a major company. He looked sharp edged, almost rough, even though he still wore the beautiful black suit. He looked like a man who was very, very capable of kicking another man’s ass.
The meeting had lasted less than five minutes. The entire office watched as the Egerton brothers walked stiffly past the reception desk and got into the elevator. When they were gone, Aidan turned and walked back to his office, still not looking at me. He was in there for only a few minutes, and then he came out again, closing the door behind him. I heard it lock with a fi
nal click. And then he walked to the stairwell and was gone.
The room was hushed and quiet. People were frozen in their cubicles, their jaws slightly open, their fingers hovering above their laptop keys. You could have heard a pin drop. And I still stood frozen in my office doorway, trying to understand what the hell had just happened.
Obviously the Egerton brothers had said something even worse about me, something I hadn’t heard.
Aidan had kicked them out of the building.
And then Aidan had left without a word to me, or to anyone.
I took a deep breath and tried to clear my thoughts. And as I did, three things came to the surface.
First: Aidan hadn’t slammed his door; he’d closed it softly, without a show of temper. Because Aidan Winters was a gentleman.
Second: I had somehow just derailed a multimillion-dollar deal by showing two men into a meeting room.
And third: I didn’t know if I had a job anymore.
Six
Samantha
* * *
I told Emma everything. Well, everything except the part about feeling a hopeless kind of lust mixed with affection for my boss, and I left out the part about wanting to slap someone. Some things you don’t need to tell the woman who gives you the assignments that pay your bills, even if she is your sister.
Emma listened intently, moving seamlessly onto her second glass of wine. “And he left for the day after that?” she asked when I finished.
I nodded.
“Have you heard from him?”
“No.”
She thought it over, like a doctor arriving at a diagnosis. “Well, I didn’t get a phone call, which makes sense, since you didn’t do anything wrong.”
“That doesn’t matter, and you know it.” This was why I had wanted to talk to Emma so badly: she knew the business like I did. “What matters is that there were millions, maybe tens of millions of dollars on the table. And the deal is off because my presence disrupted it.”
“The Egertons being fucking assholes disrupted it,” Emma corrected me.
“They wouldn’t have been fucking assholes if I had been the kind of woman they don’t find attractive.”
Emma swirled the wine in her glass. “It sounds like the Egertons would be assholes no matter what the circumstance.”
“Emma, come on. You know your CEO clients. What’s more important in their scheme of things? A single assistant or a multimillion-dollar deal? All Aidan has to do is fire me, then call you and request someone conventionally unattractive, or male, or gay. Problem solved, and he goes back to making millions. It’s shallow, and it’s completely unfair, but it’s how the world works. Especially this world.”
Emma sighed. “I’ve had that phone call before, I admit. The Get me someone ugly call. As if the men can’t help themselves and they don’t think they should have to. I mean, really.” She rolled her eyes. “But, okay. Let’s say Aidan sees your presence as the thing that derailed the deal. The fact is, he hasn’t fired you.”
“He also hasn’t talked to me. About anything.” It had been a long, long day. I’d kept my head down and kept my focus on my work, but I didn’t know where Aidan had gone, or what he was doing. And, of course, it was none of my business, especially if he was upset with me.
I cared about keeping my job. I cared about my paycheck. But this job was different. I liked it. I could work somewhere else, but I didn’t want to. I’d only been at Tower for three months, but it was already more than a paycheck. And I had a good guess as to the reason I felt that way.
What was he doing right now? Did he have plans tonight? There was nothing in his schedule. Then again, there never was.
“Okay,” Emma said, her tone decisive. She pulled her phone—which had been buzzing during our conversation—from her purse and tapped quickly through something on the screen. “Here’s my diagnosis. It’s a tough situation, but it’s made worse by the fact that you want to fuck your boss.”
“What?” I gaped at her. “What does sex have to do with anything? I don’t want to have sex with Aidan. I work for him. I’m a professional.”
Emma kept tapping her phone, ignoring my outrage. “The word is fuck, Sam. You need to loosen up. You want to fuck Aidan Winters, just like every other woman in New York with a functioning vagina. It’s okay to admit it, because you won’t act on it. But in the meantime you’ll be hung up on him and undersexed.”
“I have no idea what this has to do with the fact that I almost lost my job.”
“When was the last time you got laid?” Emma asked, ignoring me again.
I pressed my lips together and didn’t answer.
She glanced up at me briefly, then nodded, going back to her phone. Frankly, it was a little annoying that she was only giving me half of her attention. “I thought so,” she said. “Have you even dated anyone?”
“You know how dating is in this business.”
She nodded again. “It’s impossible. The long hours, the nonstop commitment to the job, combined with the fact that most men can’t handle a woman who is successful and makes a lot of money—there’s almost no time to meet anyone, and the dating pool is thin. And you can’t fuck your hot boss, so you need another sexual outlet. As in, a one-night stand.”
I rolled my eyes. “Emma, I haven’t done that in years. Since my early twenties.”
“Well, you can do it tonight.”
There was a split second when my heart skipped a beat. Having sex with a stranger… Well, it had an attraction. It was dangerous, illicit, maybe hot. I wasn’t about to admit this to my sister, but often when I was alone in bed with my fingers between my legs, I pictured having sex with a man I’d just met. He’d be gorgeous, and we’d barely speak, and we’d have hot, raunchy sex until I came. It was my go-to fantasy, to tell the truth.
But a fantasy was all it was. The reality was different. The reality was some guy who talked too much or told dumb jokes, or whose gaze crawled all over me, or me not knowing what to say. Then—if we even got that far—his not-so-clean bedroom in the tiny apartment he shared with roommates, who were pretending to watch TV while they listened on the other side of the wall. And if we got that far, the reality was awkward sex that lasted a few minutes and was completely unsatisfying. Followed by an embarrassing walk of shame past the roommates, who were still sitting on the couch. And all of that was aside from the fact that the whole thing could be dangerous if the guy was a violent creep.
The fantasy was much, much better.
I shook my head. I was twenty-nine, successful, and rational. I was going to be smart about this. “Emma, I appreciate your help. I do. And I think you’re probably right that I need to meet someone. But a one-night stand is not what I need. Meaningless sex is fine, but for me it just isn’t the answer.”
“Mmm,” Emma said, still looking at her phone. “That’s too bad.”
“Are you even listening to me?”
“Yeah, I am.” She finally tapped her phone dark and looked up at me. “You said that meaningless sex isn’t the answer, and I said that’s too bad. Which it is. Because it’s too late.”
“Too late? What does that mean?”
“It means I just went on Tinder and got you a date. He’s going to be here in twenty minutes.”
Seven
Aidan
* * *
After the day I’d had, I knew what would get me out of the funk I was in. It was the same thing that got me out of a funk every time. I really, really needed to fuck someone.
How long had it been? The last time had been a woman I’d met in a first-class airport lounge. Our flight was delayed and we spent some time talking. She told me her name was Rita, which was either a lovely name or an equally lovely lie—I hadn’t cared which. When we got off the flight in Miami, she’d taken me to her hotel room near the airport. I didn’t know her, and she didn’t know me.
Two strangers. Completely anonymous, and only there to please each other for as long as it took to get off. Th
at was the way I liked it.
Except I hadn’t particularly liked it.
I mean, it had been fine. Me, a willing woman, both of us naked. It had all the ingredients of a pleasant hour. There’d been physical satisfaction for both of us with minimal awkwardness. No expectations and no exchange of phone numbers. Pleasant, polite farewells when we were finished and I was dressed again.
It was my usual routine. I had never had a girlfriend, only the occasional encounter with an attractive woman. It happened a few times a year at most, when the pressure and the need became unbearable. I liked to be in complete control of my sex life; what that said about me, I had no idea.
A number of those women had made it clear they’d be open to more. Women try to get into Aidan’s pants, and Aidan says no, Dane had said, and he wasn’t entirely wrong. Most of those women would be wonderful partners—for some other man. But I was busy with my job as CEO of Tower VC, I was choosy, and I had no need to fuck all the time. It messed with my control. Besides, any woman who dated me would be in the eye of a lot of publicity, and I had no desire for wealthy divorcees, rake-thin models, or any of the other types the society pages expected to see me with.
So I kept to the routine. My sister, Ava, was the only constant woman in my life, and I only saw her when I took her for dinner a few times a year. You’re a loner, Aidan, she’d said to me once. Lots of guys say they’re a loner, but you’re the real thing. It was how I liked it.
And yet, that last time in Miami had been… unsatisfying. Rita had enjoyed herself, but to me it had felt mechanical. Practiced. Almost tawdry. Even though I’d gotten off, I’d left as unsatisfied as I’d been when we started. Maybe even more so, and I had no idea why.
That had been months ago—nearly six months, I realized now when I did the calculation. No wonder I was so restless, unable to stay home at night, and irritable with idiots like the Egerton brothers. No wonder I was making rash decisions and fixating on Samantha’s sexy goddamned shoes. No wonder I was still pissed off hours after I’d kicked out the Egertons, still so angry I couldn’t talk to Samantha directly. I needed to let off some steam, and tonight I would do it the usual way.
