Chapter 1 #2
It’s a good thing I have practice keeping myself walled up behind a mask of cold professionalism.
In my head, I’m rolling my eyes so hard.
I watch as Roxana reaches out to touch Gavin’s hand—a bold move, especially when he’s in full-on fierce serious business mode.
He casually picks up his coffee, avoiding her touch without being rude.
Score one for Gavin. More like score one hundred, because Roxana has been flirting that hard during this meeting. Honestly, it’s more than a little embarrassing. I think Roxana is trying to distract Gavin from her awful proposal for a local auto shop rebrand.
Gavin is clearly not interested. In her or the proposal. But that hasn’t slowed Roxana’s roll. Not even a little. She’s like a cartoon skier who becomes a bigger and bigger snowball as she rolls head over foot down the mountain. I almost smile at the mental image.
She doesn’t let his brush-off deter her in the slightest, shuffling the folder in front of her, as though that’s what she was doing, not trying to stroke Gavin’s hand with her French-tipped fingernails.
Suuuuure. You’re a consummate professional, Roxana.
Usually, her ideas are brilliant, but today, it’s a hard pass. I’m shocked Gavin hasn’t thrown her out yet, telling her to start over. I’ve been hoping he would. Partly because that growly voice when he’s all serious and bossy makes my insides quiver like a Jell-O mold balanced on a jackhammer.
Gavin frowns. Why do I like even his grumpy look so much? Maybe it’s the way his brown eyes flash or his full lips become almost pouty.
Focus, Zoey. And not on Gavin’s mouth!
“I don’t know what to say,” Gavin says, finally. “This isn’t what I was hoping for.”
I force my body not to outwardly show the shudder inside at the low rumble of his voice.
Roxana shrinks in her seat. I would almost feel bad for her, but I suspect she’s the one who drew the cartoon of the Zoey-Bot on a napkin and hung it on the fridge in the break room.
Plus, I don’t have the emotional bandwidth for sympathy right now. It’s taking all my energy to keep focused on these meetings with the marketing directors while my resignation letter is burning a hole in my bag.
Will Gavin fight for me to stay? A big part of me hopes he will. Okay, maybe I’ve fantasized about it.
He’ll tell me that I’m indispensable to him and an asset to the company. He will offer me what I really want—a position as one of the marketing directors, not his exec assistant—and then we’ll make out in his office until I’m breathless.
“Zoey? Do you have any thoughts?” Gavin asks.
Like the ones I was just having about you and me making out in your office? I feel a brief flash of panic, then realize he is asking me to weigh in on Roxana’s proposal.
Do I have any thoughts? Me ? The lowly assistant?
My mouth drops open a little before I force it closed, adopting a neutral expression.
Switzerland of the face, here I come. I can’t say the same for Roxana, whose cheeks are a mottled red.
Gavin always has me sit in on his meetings with the marketing directors but hasn’t ever asked what I thought.
Because I’m not a marketing director; I’m his executive assistant.
Gavin’s brown eyes pin me to my chair. “You hear the same number of proposals I do in a given week, which makes you as qualified as anyone to poke holes in a proposal. What do you think?”
It’s a challenge. It’s also a high compliment that Gavin is even asking me to weigh in. I want to bask in his praise. To roll around in it like a dog in grass on a sunny day in spring.
He’s going to be sorry he asked if you don’t say something, dummy.
The problem is that, like Gavin seems to, I hate Roxana’s proposal. And it has nothing to do with the way she’s been aiming her cleavage at him through this whole meeting, flirting throughout the presentation, or the way she’s currently looking at me with acid in her eyes. It’s just a bad idea.
Roxana is brilliant. All of the women in this office are. Juliet, the original owner who sold the business to Gavin when her elderly parents needed more care, dreamed of a whole office full of talented, smart women, making deals and taking names.
But whether Roxana is having an off-day or losing her edge, I can’t pretend the idea works. It doesn’t. I also don’t want to make her hate me more.
“Well,” I say, channeling a confidence I don’t yet feel, “I’m not sure about the print part of the campaign. I would cut that budget and shift the money toward the social media and influencer aspects.”
“No surprise that the barely out of college graduate doesn’t want to consider print.” Roxana raises her eyebrows, giving me a clear challenge across the table.
Gavin makes a low rumble, like he’s about to correct her for the dig, but I don’t need him to be my defender. Even if I love the idea that he wants to stick up for me.
I lock eyes with Roxana. “I’m not against print, when there’s a need. But the last few campaigns we’ve run for brick-and-mortar businesses lost money on the print side.”
“I’ve run the numbers,” she argues. “They’re solid.”
“I’m sure you have. But an all-digital campaign would make better use of your money and increase your reach.
Consider the last campaign we ran for Blaze Auto.
No print. All digital. The most effective part was utilizing Instagram influencers.
It’s not what I would normally think of, but it worked.
We can pull the numbers if you need a reminder. ”
There’s a beat or two of silence. I keep my expression smooth and my gaze up. I see the moment that Roxana knows I’m right, and the struggle as she tries to figure out how to respond while saving face.
Gavin has been silent this whole time, and I’ve seen his frown deepen from the corner of my eye. I’m always simply aware of him, like my body has a Gavin-radar constantly tuned into whatever he’s doing.
“What will this do to the cost projections?” he asks. I’m shocked when he looks at me, not Roxana.
“It shouldn’t do much to the bottom line,” I say. “If you look on page three, where Roxana outlined the overall budget, we could cut the ads in the local magazines. We could use half that amount on influencers. You might even save a little.”
“Interesting idea,” Gavin says. “Roxana, what do you think?”
Roxana blinks down at the papers in front of her, then smooths out her expression and looks at Gavin. “It’s a different approach, but one that doesn’t fall far outside my original proposal. I think it could work.”
Gavin nods, then smiles at us both before standing. It’s lunchtime, which means the clock is running down and I need to give Gavin my resignation. But it’s hard to think about that now because Gavin asked for my opinion. Gavin likes my idea .
Maybe Gavin will finally promote me? Except then I have to stay here, fighting my crush and feeling out of place in this cold, cutthroat office.
Juliet may have amassed a group of smart, capable women (Roxana’s performance today notwithstanding), but the vibe here is not warm.
We’re not one big happy family. Everyone around me always feels like they’re trying to claw their way to the top.
“I’m happy with where we landed on this,” Gavin says. “Roxana, get me an updated proposal by the end of the day.”
“Of course.”
Before he leaves the room, Gavin turns, flashing those brown eyes at me, his expression hard to read. “Can you meet me in my office?”
Why does that sound like a summons to the principal’s office? And yet, my crush-drunk heart is stumbling over itself in excitement. I get to go to Gavin’s office! Alone!!
Where I need to tell him I’m leaving . Ugh. That thought is a total buzzkill.
I’m halfway out the door when Roxana calls out, “Hey! Robot.”
I grit my teeth. “Yes?”
“That was a good call.”
“Thank you.” My words are automatic and cover my shock. Roxana actually said something nice?
She heads for the door, then calls, “Maybe you’ll get good at this—once you go through puberty.”
And … there it is. The insult I’d been expecting. With a smirk, Roxana disappears. I wish it were into a puff of smoke, but she just vanishes into the main office.
I’m not going to sit and stew in her words.
I refuse. There was a compliment buried in there somewhere.
I think. But I have better things to occupy my mind.
Like whether or not right now is a good time to hand Gavin my resignation.
Just in case I can work up the nerve, I stop by my desk and pick up my bag.
Nancy smiles at me as I approach her desk, which is just across from Gavin’s closed office door. She is a bright spot in the office with her easy smiles and grandmotherly persona. But today she seems a little too bright. Her cheeks look flushed, and her eyes are glassy.
“Are you okay, Nancy?”
“Oh, yes. I’m fine. Mostly. I didn’t sleep well last night. I started watching Pride and Prejudice and just couldn’t stop.”
I smile. “The mini-series?”
She looks down at me over her bifocals. “Like that newer one could compare. You can’t cram Jane Austen into a two-hour movie. It’s insulting. And I don’t care what the big fuss is about some hand gesture.”
I know exactly what hand gesture she’s talking about. I’m pretty sure anyone who has seen the movie knows exactly what hand gesture she means. There are blog posts and memes and Reddit threads all dedicated to the way Mr. Darcy flexed his hand after the first time he and Elizabeth Bennet touch.
“Plus,” Nancy continues, “that Colin Firth is hard to beat.”
“I don’t disagree with you there. But I have to say that I’m one of the people who loves the hand gesture.”
Nancy clucks her tongue and opens her mouth to speak, when a voice interrupts us. A deep, rich voice that has a direct line to some primal part of me. It’s a voice that makes me think of chocolate and dark coffee and warm kisses.
“What kind of hand gestures are we talking about here?”
Oh. My. Holy. Crackers .
Even my inner monologue is too thrown off to make sense. For sure, my mouth isn’t about to answer Gavin.
“Just having a little debate about men,” Nancy says with a wave of her hand.
No.
No, she didn’t.
My horrified gaze flies to Gavin, whose mouth tips up in a half smile. The kind that makes me want to press my mouth to the corner, just to see how it would feel against my lips. He crosses his arms over his chest and leans against the doorway.
“Enlighten me. What kind of debate about men involves discussing hand gestures? I’m curious.”
“Not real men,” I manage to say. Which, of course, sounds even worse. Gavin’s brows shoot up. “Mr. Darcy. We’re discussing which edition of Pride and Prejudice is better.”
“And what’s the verdict?”
I glance at Nancy, who is chuckling. I can see mischief glittering there. Or maybe it’s fever? Because she definitely looks unwell.
“Depends on which one of us you ask,” she says. “Maybe you should be our tie-breaker. Have you seen either one?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
“Well,” Nancy says, sliding a look my way. “Maybe you two should remedy that. Together .”
Nancy definitely has to be feverish. That’s the only reason I can imagine she would say something like that.
I don’t think she knows about my feelings for Gavin.
She’s certainly never tried playing matchmaker before now.
Suggesting we watch Pride and Prejudice together?
I’m not sure I would survive with my heart intact. No, I most definitely would not.
Gavin’s eyes flick to me, and I swear, for a brief moment, there is a smoldering heat in his gaze. Just as quickly, it’s gone, and his next words are like my own personal version of the ice bucket challenge.
“I don’t think that would be a good idea.”
Business Gavin is back, and I wish that I didn’t like both versions of him so much.
“Nancy, hold my calls for the next twenty minutes or so. And, at the risk of being rude, are you feeling okay? You look flushed.”
“I am feeling a little hot,” she says, fanning herself with a magazine from her desk drawer.
“Why don’t you head home for the day? Put a call in to your doctor. I’ll stop by to check on you later.”
The tenderness in his voice only makes the flame of my crush burn brighter. Because who can resist a man who cares that much for his personal assistant? He treats her more like family than an employee, and it’s heart-squeezingly sweet.
“You don’t need to do that,” she says, smiling weakly.
“I know,” he says. “But I will. Zoey? Follow me.”
“I hope you feel better!” I tell Nancy.
And then, it’s time. No more stalling. No more putting this off. My letter of resignation is in my bag, and I’ve practiced the speech while looking in the mirror at home. I’ve already had a few interviews, with a follow-up next week at a company that seems perfect. It’s time.
But first, I need to survive being alone in a room with Gavin, pretending like his presence doesn’t make me want to spontaneously combust.