Chapter 1
Emma
This was not happeningthe way I planned it. At all.
Not this trip, and not this meeting. To be honest, not my life either. But I was in the middle of trying to save my business, so I had no time to think about that.
I was sitting in a large boardroom in an office building in downtown L.A. The boardroom had a bank of windows, and from the windows was a view of smoggy city and hills, all of it suffused with sunshine. The sunshine creeped me out, because it was late October, and I was a New York girl. New York was cloudy and chilly right now, like October was supposed to be. What kind of unnatural place was this?
Worse, I was in a meeting with Catharine Knowles, the CEO of one of Hollywood’s trendiest production companies. Catharine needed an executive assistant. My company, Executive Ranks, supplied the best executive assistants in the business. We meet, we make a deal. It should be simple, right?
It wasn’t.
“Next page,” Catharine said, flipping the paper in front of her. She was in her late fifties, slim and stylish, her hair in a sleek bob streaked with gray that ended just below her ears. She wore reading glasses as she read the page. “My investigator has found out that another of your executive assistants, Tricia Clark, had a long-term affair with the CFO of Northwest Bank, who was married with three children. What can you tell me about that?”
Nightmare. This was my nightmare.
When we started the meeting, Catharine had asked me about my sister, Samantha, who I had hired out to Aidan Winters, the CEO of Tower Venture Capital. Sam and Aidan had fallen in love, gotten married, and Aidan had made Sam one of the company’s executives. It was a great love story, and I was glad my sister was happy, but here’s the truth: it didn’t make my company look very good. I’m supposed to hire out qualified professionals, not potential wives.
But I was ready for that line of questioning. I responded that Sam was my very first recruit, that she had already been an executive assistant for nearly a decade when she met Aidan and was more than qualified for a promotion. Sam hadn’t been out scouting for a man—she was the best executive assistant in the business. And, honestly, sometimes love happens. Workplace romances happen. People fall for each other. No one can completely control that, even me.
It was a good answer. Catharine accepted it. Then she dropped a bomb on me.
“What about Helena Parkinson?” she asked. “She’s one of your current recruits. She eloped with the head of payroll at Smith and Koenig last week.”
That sound? That was a nuclear bomb going off in my business. Because Helena had told me she was going on vacation last week. When she’d actually been eloping with the head of payroll. And I hadn’t known.
Not until Catharine told me in this sunny-as-hell boardroom, in this sunny-as-hell city.
I had no doubt that her information was good. She’d hired an investigator to do some digging before deciding to hire my company. She’d gone to pretty great lengths, but that didn’t surprise me. Executive assistants were given access to incredibly sensitive information: salary numbers, contract details, the private phone numbers and home addresses of top executives. An executive assistant in Hollywood could be privy to even more sensitive things, like movie stars’ addresses or their private texts. Hell, even their dick pics. The wrong person in the job could leak very bad information to the online press.
So no, it wasn’t out of line for Catharine to hire her own investigator to look into my recruits. It was exactly what I would do in her position. What was a disaster was that she’d uncovered information I didn’t know myself. Which meant three things.
One, I may as well be standing in this meeting with my skirt up and my panties down, my bare ass showing. Because it was that embarrassing.
Two, my recruits had been lying to me. Bold-face lying, straight to my face, when I prided myself on being the bitch in control.
And three, my business was about to swirl down the drain.
“Well?” Catharine said, her sculpted eyebrows rising as I twisted in the wind. “Tricia Clark?”
Right. The other recruit who had fucked me over, this time by fucking the CFO. Why hadn’t I known? Why couldn’t my executive assistants keep their panties on?
“I’ll be discussing that with Tricia,” I said, because what could I say? “But I think you should look at our record of success. I sent you a portfolio of testimonials from a dozen Fortune 500 companies, and all of them say?—”
“My executive assistant,” Catharine said as if I hadn’t even spoken, “will, among other duties, accompany me to script and set meetings. It means that she will be in contact with some of the most famous actors in the business. I need an assistant I can trust not to be tempted to act out of line.”
Cold sweat was trickling down the back of my neck, and I kept my arms to my sides because I had the suspicion there were sweat marks in the arm holes of my sleeveless sheath dress. “If you’d prefer, I can find you an assistant of a more mature age. Or a man.”
Catharine held up one hand, which had a series of beautiful one-of-a-kind rings on it. She was a great dresser and, I thought, an interesting woman. The kind of woman who would be cool to know if she wasn’t currently raking me over white-hot coals. “I am not hiring a man,” she said with finality. “For God’s sake, you think any man can keep it in his pants in Hollywood? Gay or straight, not a single one of them can manage it. And my assistant is a reflection of me. I’m way over the hill in Hollywood terms, but no one minds, because I have the money. But my assistant should be impressive.”
Impressive.Young and attractive, female, and immune to Hollywood sex appeal. Where was I supposed to find this unicorn? “How about a lesbian?” I asked. It was a callous question, and any HR department would tear me limb from limb, but I was desperate. I didn’t have any lesbians that I knew of in my current recruits, but if I had to, I’d scour the fucking earth for one.
“I don’t care who my assistant sleeps with on her own time,” Catharine said. “I want one of your recruits, Emma. But this report says I can’t trust them the way you say I can.”
“You can trust my recruits,” I said. “They go through a complete background screening before I even take them on. Then they take IQ and personality tests. If they pass those, I put them through training and job shadowing for months. Less than ten percent of the people who apply to Executive Ranks ever make the cut.”
Was I begging? Maybe I was. Executive Ranks was my baby—me, Emma Riley, a girl who came from nothing and climbed her way up in the world, lonely step by lonely step. I’d built my baby from nothing but a website URL, a five-thousand-dollar loan, and an unbeatable willingness to make something of myself. I was twenty-one at the time. Now I was thirty-one, I had recruits in some of America’s biggest businesses, and I had no life outside of this business.
No friends, no boyfriend, no social life, no children—not a fucking thing. Just this.
Catharine Knowles leaned back in her chair. “Emma,” she said, “I’ll be honest. I need someone, and Executive Ranks was my first choice. Your reputation is that you’re a bright young CEO on the rise who runs a tight ship. But these reports show the cracks in the foundation.” She motioned to the papers in front of her. “There seem to be a lot of cracks.”
“There are no cracks,” I said, a notch louder than I needed to. I pinched the bridge of my nose and got myself under control. “I can handle this. I can find someone for you. Just let me take care of it. You’ll see what I can do.”
Catharine shrugged. She slid her papers across the table to me. “I’m willing to see what you can do, if that’s what you want. But I’m not signing a contract until I’m satisfied.”
I got it. Again, she was only doing what I would do in her position. But it still burned, because reputation was everything in my business. If word got around that my executive assistants were too horny for their own good, I could kiss my hard-won business goodbye. “How confidential are these findings?” I asked, picking up the papers and putting them in my Italian leather bag.
“No one has seen those except me and my investigator,” Catharine said. “I run a tight ship.”
Unlike me. She didn’t say it, but her meaning was crystal clear. There seem to be a lot of cracks.
I thanked her and walked out of the boardroom. Got in the elevator like nothing was wrong. Like I wasn’t panicking.
Chin up, Riley,I thought. I hadn’t gotten this far by freaking out when things went wrong. I could salvage this situation. I’d talk to Helena and Tricia, cut them from the roster. I’d go back over my current list of recruits. Go back over the applications I’d gotten in the last month. Get my own investigator and come up with someone that would make Catharine Knowles think she was dreaming. After all, no one knew about these latest indiscretions, and no one ever had to know.
I walked out of the building into the warm, late afternoon. I was tired, hungry, and—Jesus, it was hot. Now the cold sweat on my back was just damp and uncomfortably warm. I should probably get an Uber back to my hotel, which wasn’t very far from here. But all the energy went out of me as I inhaled the smoggy breeze. There was a small courtyard around the side of the building, probably made for employees to take lunch and smoke breaks. It was empty at the moment. I walked to it and sat on one of the benches, feeling my body deflate.
Five minutes. I had five minutes to feel sorry for myself, and then I had to be Emma Riley again. Because I was the Boss Bitch, the one with all the answers. Everyone who knew me knew that I was smart, ballsy, afraid of nothing. A man-eater.
I pinched the bridge of my nose again, closing my eyes as a headache tried to crawl up my skull. I should probably get laid, I thought. Find a man and fuck him, see if that would clear my head. I didn’t have a boyfriend, just one-night stands. A girl didn’t need a boyfriend when she had Tinder.
But as usual, on the heels of that thought—which I had often—was a twinge of something darker. An uneasy feeling in my gut that almost felt like fear. Whenever I felt the loneliness creep up on me, the uncertainty about the life I was living, I always opened Tinder, found a man, and fucked him. I always told myself it was something I wanted to do, that I was living my life to the fullest as an independent woman. That I was free and single and could do what I wanted, and my Tinder record proved it.
Sometimes, I almost believed it.
It wasn’t that I was pining for a relationship. God, no—I had no time for that. I wasn’t going to go all sappy over one man, like my sister had. Samantha was very happy with Aidan, and to be fair he was pretty hot, but what she had wasn’t for me.
But I wanted something. I couldn’t put a name to it, but whatever it was, I wanted it pretty badly. So badly that maybe—just maybe—I wasn’t thinking straight. Maybe I wasn’t making the good judgment calls I thought I was making. Maybe, like Catharine had said, there were more cracks than I had thought.
And why was I even thinking about my sex life right now, when I had bigger problems to worry about?
My phone rang in my handbag, and I pulled it out. I didn’t recognize the number, but almost no one had my cell number, so I answered it. “Hello?”
“Emma Riley?” The voice was male, smooth as malt whiskey.
“Yes.”
“This is Noah Pearson.”
As soon as I heard the name, I remembered. “Aidan’s business partner,” I said. Aidan and his partners ran Tower Venture Capital—Aidan from New York, with another partner in Chicago, another in Dallas, and this one, Noah Pearson, in L.A. Samantha had told me before I left New York that she would give Pearson my number, “so that he can show you around L.A.” I’d nodded at her, fully intending to dodge the guy, and then I’d forgotten she said it. Until now.
“I’m the L.A. one,” Noah said. His tone was a little dry, as if he was as pleased about this phone call as I was. He was also in a car, by the sounds of it. “I’ve been instructed by Aidan to take you out so you aren’t all alone in the city. Where are you now?”
“That’s really nice, but I’m not in the mood,” I said.
“Neither am I,” he said, surprising me. “But maybe I can get in the mood. Where are you?”
“I just finished a meeting. I’m at a building called the Mulvaney Building. I haven’t been back to my hotel. Maybe we can meet in an hour.”
“Maybe we can meet now,” Pearson said. “I’m hungry, and I’m sure you look fine. I’m actually not far from there. I’ll be there in ten.”
“You really don’t have to.” I wanted to go back to my hotel room, soak in the tub, and come up with a plan to revive my business and crush my enemies.
He sounded resigned, but his voice was relaxed, and it really was smooth. A hell of a nice voice, to be honest. “We’ll never hear the end of it if we don’t do this.”
“So we’ll make something up,” I said. “We’ll tell Aidan and Sam that you took me out for a burger or something, it was nice, the end. They’ll buy it if we sync our stories.”
He laughed, and the sound made a sensation go down my spine that I wasn’t used to—pleasure. And actual interest. I realized I’d never seen what Noah Pearson looked like, but from the sound of him, he was hot. “Look,” he said. “You’re standing in front of an office building?—”
“Sitting,” I corrected him.
“Fine, you’re sitting. Your meeting is over, it’s dinner time anyway, and you don’t know the city. Why don’t I pick you up and take you for an actual burger, and then we won’t have to worry about inventing anything? It can be relatively painless.”
I was hungry. My plan had been to gorge myself on room service while feeling sorry for myself in isolation, but suddenly that seemed pathetic. “I should warn you,” I said to Noah Pearson, “I have had the worst fucking day. I’ve just finished a shitshow of a meeting. Most men think I’m a ball-buster. And even when I’m not in this shit-tastic mood, I’m honestly a bitch.” I paused. “Oh, and I swear. A lot.”
“I love a dirty-talking woman,” Pearson said. “It’s music to my ears. Are you the hot redhead sitting on the bench, wearing two-inch heels?”
I turned toward the street. A silver BMW pulled up to the curb, slowing. Traffic behind it started to honk. The passenger window rolled down and in the depths of the car I could see a man with dark blond hair and aviator sunglasses leaning across the passenger seat, his phone still to his ear.
The cars behind him honked some more, louder this time. Noah Pearson grinned.
“Nice to meet you, Emma,” he said in my ear. “Get in.”