His Good Girl

Chapter 1

Avery Hale

By the ripe old age of twenty-five, I had become very good at explaining my life in ways that made everything sound like it was just a temporary problem.

I was between jobs. I was regrouping. I was taking a minute to figure out what I wanted.

I had a degree, thank you very much, from a perfectly respectable university with brick walkways, overpriced coffee, and really good professors.

I had done the internships, written the papers, passed the exams, shaken the right hands, smiled through the career fair small talk, and somehow, three years after graduation, my resume looked less like a ladder and more like someone had dropped it down a flight of stairs.

There were jobs on it, technically. There was the time I’d been hired as a marketing coordinator for a boutique firm that had gone under six months after I started.

Then I was an administrative associate for a luxury events company where my main duty had been pretending the owner’s emotional breakdowns were ‘vision meetings.’ Then I was a client liaison for a commercial interiors studio that paid me almost enough to keep breathing and panicking at the same time.

And, most recently, I’d been the executive assistant to a woman who had clearly watched The Devil Wears Prada and taken Miranda Priestly not as a warning, but as a spiritual mentor.

Her name was Marlena Cross, which sounded like a villain written by someone with no subtlety.

She wore bone-colored coats in winter and designer silks in spring.

She never yelled, which made it worse. Yelling at least gave a person something honest to react to.

Marlena only lowered her voice until every word felt like the cold edge of a knife placed carefully against your throat.

“Avery,” she would say, not looking up from her phone, “when I ask for coffee, I do mean drinkable coffee. Not whatever apology this is.”

Or, “Avery, I need you to anticipate me. If I have to explain the thing I need, you’ve already failed.”

Or, on my final morning, after I had worked until almost two that morning correcting a PowerPoint deck she had rewritten in the back of a car with the literary finesse of a ransom note, “I’m afraid you’re just not hungry enough.”

That was what she said right before she fired me. As if I had been lounging in a hammock somewhere, eating grapes, instead of answering emails from my bed at 1:17 in the morning because she had decided the word ‘innovative’ looked ‘visually needy’ on slide nine.

So, by Saturday evening, I was sitting across from Jules Voss in a wine bar too pretty for my bank account, drinking the cheapest red by the glass and pretending not to calculate whether I could make a bowl of cereal and a bag of frozen peas stretch until Monday.

Jules had ordered fries and was eating them like they had personally wronged her, one bite at a time.

She had a blunt black bob, lipstick the color of crushed cherries, and the kind of face that made strangers confess things to her in bathrooms. She was my best friend, which meant she loved me deeply and had no patience for my bullshit.

“You’re doing the thing,” she said.

I stared into my wine. “What thing?”

“The noble little orphan thing.”

“I am not doing a noble little orphan thing.”

“You are. You’re sitting there with your sad eyes acting like asking for help is the same thing as selling a kidney.”

I rolled my eyes because she deserved it, but the orphan thing struck a nerve in me anyway. My parents had been gone for five years, which was long enough that the grief had dulled a little bit, but was still sharp at the edges every time I stumbled into it.

They had died within nine months of each other, my mother first, then my father, as if his heart had simply looked around at a world without her in it and ceased surviving.

I had been twenty, which was old enough that people expected me to survive it, but young enough that surviving a mountain too high to climb.

There had been casseroles, sympathy cards, lawyers, bank forms, relatives using soft voices, and Callum Rowe standing in my parents’ kitchen in a black suit that fit him too well, one hand on the back of a chair, looking like the only load-bearing wall left in the house.

Callum had been my father’s best friend.

My godfather, technically, though my family had never been particularly religious.

The title had always felt more ceremonial than practical, like something people said over champagne and christening cake before going back to real life.

He had sent birthday cards. He had come to every one of my graduations.

He had known me when I had braces and a cowlick and a passionate, albeit embarrassing devotion to purple nail polish.

After my parents died, he had checked in with me, just enough that I knew if I ever fell completely through the floor, there was someone below who would probably catch me.

I had spent five years making absolutely sure I never tested that theory.

Jules dipped a fry into aioli and pointed it at me. “Ask him.”

I laughed immediately, because that was easier than reacting like she had reached across the table and pressed a thumb into a bruise. “No.”

“Avery.”

“No.”

“You have a godfather who owns half the skyline.”

“He does not own half the skyline.”

“He structurally supports half the skyline, which is hotter and more useful.”

I shot her a look.

“What?” she said. “It is. Men who understand how walls and foundations work should be taxed extra.”

“Jules.”

“Callum Rowe is the founder and CEO of Rowe Structural Group. They build skyscrapers, stadiums, and glass towers for billionaires. He probably has an office with a view of other offices he built.”

“He’s not some random LinkedIn connection I can harass because I got fired.”

“No, he’s your godfather. That’s the point. It’s nepotism at its finest.”

“It’s humiliating.”

“Being employed is humiliating. Existing under capitalism is humiliating. At least be humiliated with health insurance.”

I looked away, toward the window. Outside, the city was glossed with early spring rain, all the headlights and wet pavement blurring together.

People hurried past under black umbrellas.

Behind them, the buildings of Seattle took over the skyline, all steel and glass and money.

Somewhere among them was Rowe Tower, though I couldn’t see it from where we sat.

Standing at forty-something stories of dark glass and architectural arrogance, its crown cut at an angle that made it look like it had leaned into the wind and won.

Callum’s company had designed it before moving in as the anchor tenant, which had always struck me as an incredibly Callum thing to do.

Build the impossible thing first. Then sit calmly inside it.

“I can’t just email him and say, hi, remember me, your dead best friend’s underachieving daughter? Do you have a pity job lying around?”

Jules’s face softened for half a second. It never lasted long with her though because she considered tenderness most effective when administered quickly, like a shot. “You’re not underachieving. You’ve just had shitty luck.”

“I’ve had shitty bosses.”

“You’ve had two monsters in a row.”

“Three, if we’re counting Lydia from the events place.”

“I always count Lydia. Lydia once made you reorganize orchids by emotional tone.”

“She said the centerpieces felt defensive.”

“They did not. They felt like flowers.”

I laughed in spite of myself, and Jules smiled with satisfaction, like she had cracked open a safe.

Then she leaned forward. “Listen to me. You are smart. You are organized when someone isn’t actively setting fire to your calendar.

You learn fast, have taste, and you’re good with people.

You have a degree. You also have a creepy ability to remember everyone’s coffee order.

You are not some helpless little orphan Annie asking Daddy Warbucks for soup. ”

“Please never call Callum Rowe Daddy Warbucks ever again.”

“Oh, interesting. That hit weird.”

“It did not.”

Her eyes narrowed and I just drank my wine.

Jules, being Jules, noticed my silence and pounced on it like a cat on a laser dot. “Wait.”

“No.”

“I didn’t even say anything.”

“You were about to.”

“Avery Melissa Hale, do you have a thing for your godfather?”

“No.”

“Oh, my God.”

“I said no.”

“You said no like a woman who has absolutely pictured that man taking off a watch.”

Heat flashed up my neck so fast I nearly choked on air. “Jules.”

She slapped a hand over her mouth, delighted and horrified.

“It’s not like that.”

“It is precisely like that. That was the guiltiest blush I’ve ever seen. That blush has illegal documents in a locked drawer.”

“He was my father’s best friend.”

“Blech.” She picked up her phone, tapped theatrically, and a second later my screen lit on the table.

Jules:

I snatched my phone up. “You’re sitting two feet away from me.”

“I needed the emoji to carry the full weight of my concern.”

“There’s nothing to be concerned about. I haven’t even seen him in person in, I don’t know, maybe eight months.

It’s not a thing. It’s just…” I trailed off because I had no dignified end to that sentence.

Just what? Just that Callum Rowe had aged in some unfair masculine direction after forty, all broad shoulders and salt at the temples?

Just that the last time I had seen him at a charity dinner, he had put his hand at the small of my back to guide me through a crowd, and my entire nervous system had behaved like an old fuse box in a thunderstorm?

Jules watched my face and slowly grinned. “Oh, this is terrible.”

“It’s not terrible because it’s not real.”

“It is real enough that you’re doing math in your head about whether you can ask him for a job without also wondering what his hands look like on a steering wheel.”

“Everyone notices hands.”

“Sure. Weak people notice hands. Perverts catalog them.”

“I hate you.”