Chapter One
Verity Carmichael scrunched her brows together and gave her boss the grumpiest look she could manage.
“You aren’t eating your salad,” she said.
“I told you I didn’t like salad.”
Alexios Economides was one of the most feared and revered men in the tech industry, a dark imposing storm of a man who—at roughly six foot five—towered over everyone around him.
His black hair was always swept back from his forehead, glossy like a raven’s wing and with no indication he used styling products of any kind.
It was as if every strand was held there through the sheer force of his will.
His eyes were a deep brown, with one spot of red in the iris on the right one, she’d taken note.
Alex was unfriendly, ill-tempered, stubborn, maniacally controlled and as beautiful and sharp as a piece of cut obsidian. The blessing and many, many curses of Alexios Economides, et cetera et cetera.
Everyone was afraid of him.
Except Verity.
She hadn’t been hired to be scared of him. She was his assistant, but more than that. He’d hired her to be his...
Conscience.
His Cricket, which she had pointed out once in reference to a classic cartoon, and he’d taken it on board as a nickname that she pretended to dislike, but secretly loved.
The idea made her smile just slightly as it always did, and then she frowned because she was trying to look grumpy.
“You did tell me you were going to try and eat more vegetables,” she said. “So I decided we could have matching lunches today.”
“Did I hire you to be my nutritionist?”
“No. You hired me to talk to you and to presumably listen to you also so when you said you wanted to eat more greens, I listened. I acted.”
“Sneaky Cricket,” he said.
She smiled. “I wasn’t being sneaky. Eat your salad.”
He seemed to not know what to do with the lettuce he stabbed up onto his fork.
“I wish I had a steak.”
“Try wishing on a star, Alex, I hear your dreams might come true.”
“What?”
“It’s a... Never mind.”
She’d worked for Alex for two years now and it was the weirdest, nicest job she’d ever had. Not just because she was thousands of miles away from her parents, her siblings and their assorted drama and living on the shores of the Aegean Sea. Not just.
That contributed to her happiness, though, without a doubt.
She liked this job because it was an interesting challenge.
EconomicTech was on the forefront of hardware and software breakthroughs, with new, exciting innovations happening every few months.
It was exciting to work in a company that was this dynamic.
There was always a buzz in the building—unless Alex was walking through and then it hushed.
Verity could admit that maybe part of what she enjoyed was being the Alex Whisperer. That was what her coworkers called her. And she simply grinned in response.
That was another bonus of this job. She’d turned childhood trauma into a work skill.
She knew how to soothe; she knew how to smooth over every situation. How to sublimate her own feelings and show nothing but calm.
Blissful, cheerful calm.
She demonstrated her cheerful calm now by taking a smiling bite of her salad, which only seemed to aggravate Alex more.
It was odd to think this was her life now.
All because one of her friends from college created an app for elite job postings where every employee would be prescreened, and prevetted.
If celebrities could have their own dating apps, why couldn’t major corporations and the rich and famous have their own job listings?
With confidential terms, only visible by candidates who had agreed to keeping details to themselves.
Knowing the app creator was as vetted as it got, so even without a lot of job experience, Verity found herself approved and given access to the kinds of jobs most people could only dream of.
When she’d first seen the job listing, she had thought it odd.
He wasn’t only looking for an assistant; he was looking for a confidante.
Someone to talk to him, not just about work, but about personal things.
She’d been a bit nervous at first. Partly because he was an intimidating man (she’d googled him immediately when she’d seen the job listing) and partly because it seemed almost too good to be true.
Relocation to Greece? Great pay? Reasonable hours? Hot billionaire boss?
Even though there was a layer of protection provided by the system she’d used to get hired, she’d been secretly waiting to discover that “conversation” was code for Wear a Sexy Godzilla Costume and Stomp Around the Office to Satisfy My Dinosaur Fetish.
Which she’d said to him once, after she’d been working at the office for six months and he’d said, simply: “Godzilla isn’t a dinosaur.”
Then they’d debated what the best actual dinosaur was, because somehow that was her job.
He didn’t want anything weird or sexual from her. He really did just want conversation.
She’d been given a small packet when she was hired that included a list of hard conversation limits, and she’d been happy to respect them initially because of the money and then later because she genuinely cared for Alex. How could she not?
That didn’t mean she didn’t wonder about him, of course.
She spent five days a week with him. When she wasn’t with him, she thought about new topics she could cover with him. In a professional way, of course.
She didn’t feel like that about him.
Sure, he was the most handsome man she’d ever seen.
Probably because he was the most handsome man on the planet, in a purely aesthetic sense.
But he was intense, and Verity could do intense from nine to five, but she would never ever ever sign up for intense in her personal life. In her home. In her heart.
No, thank you.
She was far more interested in men who were nice and smiley. In theory, since she’d never actually dated anyone at the very ripe age of twenty-four, which was starting to be bothersome. But Verity was nothing if not a problem solver.
She’d smoothly and cheerfully problem solved her way out of Oregon, away from her family, away from all the toxicity in her childhood home. She’d worked her way through college and gotten herself this job.
There hadn’t been time to date.
There was now, though, and she had a lovely, lovely coworker named Stavros who was all the things she could want. He was close to her age, he looked lovely in his navy blue and tan suits that weren’t anything like as severe as Alex’s commitment to all-black everything.
She took another bite of her salad. “I think I’m going to ask Stavros on a date.”
Alex’s face did something she’d never seen it do before. It flashed between confusion, irritation and something else she couldn’t pinpoint. Then it was like she could see him doing a math equation in his head, and get the answer in record time.
“Stavros from the accounting department who has worked for this company for six months?” he asked.
“That would be him,” she said, demurely, crunching her lettuce.
“He is your superior, technically.”
“We work in totally different departments and HR allows for romantic relationships at this company as long as both parties sign a waiver.”
“I am aware.”
“I assumed, but you were acting like maybe you didn’t realize that.”
“Of course I realize it, Cricket, but from a moral standpoint, he is your superior, and it is problematic.”
It was so funny to hear those words come out of his mouth because she had a feeling he had no emotion behind any of them. What he had was a computer program he’d uploaded into his head to make sure he knew what was okay, and what wasn’t.
Which was maybe mean, because he wasn’t an unkind man—not really if you dug down deep and got to know him over salad—but he was...detached.
There was a reason she’d been hired to be his human connection.
He was deeply unpopular in a world that was skeptical of billionaires. Where investors wanted their money placed at ethical companies, and social media made memes out of every lip twitch and eyebrow lift.
And while the internet agreed that Alexios Economides was hot, in all the various forms the internet declared a man hot, from panting emoji to all caps declarations of DADDY beneath photos of him, they also agreed he was an evil, MORALLY GRAY billionaire who had ice in his veins.
The truth was, Alex was very ethical. He donated to a great many causes and he offset his carbon footprint judiciously.
But it was the...general vibe of him. His good deeds couldn’t transcend the fact that if he were to stand in front of a podium and tell the world that he was Hades incarnate, they’d believe him.
But that did make the lectures on morality ring a little hollow.
“Are you saying I don’t have agency?” she asked, licking some dressing off of her thumb.
“Excuse me?”
“I’m a grown woman, and I like him. I want to date him and yes, he’s in a more senior position than I am, I guess, in a department I don’t work in, but I’m the one who wants to ask him out. Are you saying that my personhood evaporates when it comes into contact with corporate structure?”
“I’m not saying that at all.”
“You kind of are. You’re telling me that what I want is problematic.”
“Men use positions of power to manipulate women.”
“Thank you for that, Alex, I didn’t know that until a man in a position of power told me.” She stared blandly at him and he shifted, a dark, unamused look in his eyes. Which amused her greatly.
He cleared his throat and her heart jumped in her chest, just a little bit.
“No one ever dares speak to me that way,” he said, taking another angry bite of his salad.
“You hired me to talk to you like a human being and to teach you to talk to other people like a human being, and I have to tell you, you reciting a list of rules, divorced of context and emotion, doesn’t really make you human. It makes you seem even more robotic.”