Chapter 5
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 final 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.