Chapter 2 Ethan
Ethan
The elevator doors chime in the distance, even though the building has been empty for hours. I look up through the large glass wall that separates my office from the rest of the top floor and see my assistant, Margot Higgins, rounding the corner towards her desk.
My eyes go wide when I notice what she’s wearing: a black dress that hugs her curves and a pair of high heels that add four inches to her short frame.
Her dark hair is down in soft curls around her pale shoulders.
It’s a far cry from her normal librarian look, but there’s still a distinct Margot-ness to the ensemble.
She’s wearing her cat eye glasses, and her giant handbag has an obvious heft to it.
She’s probably packing at least two books plus an e-reader in there.
She doesn’t see me until she walks over to her desk and notices the dim light coming from my office. Her eyes flick up to meet mine, and she gives me the saddest attempt at a smile I’ve ever seen.
Margot looks back toward the elevators like she is considering fleeing. I watch curiously as her chest rises and falls with a sharp intake of breath. She hesitates before straightening up a little and walking into my office.
“Hey, Margot,” I say as she enters. “Forget something?”
Neither of us are strangers to working late, but Margot slipped out early tonight for a date with her boyfriend. I can’t imagine why she would come back to the office.
She nods vaguely and stumbles over her words. “Yeah, I forgot, um… I mean, I just needed…”
It catches me off guard. Margot can be a woman of few words, but those words are usually sharp and to the point. She always has some smartass reply ready to dole out.
Then she sniffles.
My gaze narrows, taking in her red-rimmed eyes and the smudged makeup under her glasses.
“Is everything okay?” I ask.
“Yes,” she responds too quickly. “I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”
She reaches up and wipes away a tear with her fingertips.
She certainly doesn’t seem fine. I motion to the chair across the desk from me. “Come sit down for a minute.”
Margot and I are friends, as much as a boss and an assistant can really be friends without crossing any professional lines.
We laugh and joke in the privacy of my office, but it’s always innocent, nothing I wouldn’t say in front of my own grandmother.
Things have always been easy between us, but that’s because we both know how to balance our friendly rapport with a hefty dose of detached professionalism.
We steer clear of anything personal and have zero contact outside of office hours.
It’s a dynamic that’s served us well over the past two years.
Margot wobbles on her high heels as she walks over to my desk and takes a seat. I pull a few napkins from my favorite lunch place out of my desk drawer—the closest thing I have to a tissue—and pass them to her. She gives me another tiny, weak smile and blots her eyes.
“What happened, Margot?” I ask.
She stares down at her lap and pulls her brows together as she ponders her answer. After drawing a choppy breath, she replies, “Jeremy and I broke up.”
Good. I’ve met the guy a few times and never got a good impression. He’s your standard finance bro: generic, smug, and egotistical. Margot is way too good for a guy like him.
But that’s not what she needs to hear right now, so I opt for a more neutral response. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“It’s okay.” Her voice is barely a whisper.
“Can I ask how you ended up here?”
Returning to the office is an unusual choice.
“We were down the street at Sapori. I just needed to get as far away from him as possible, and this was the first place I could think of within walking distance.”
A long silence stretches out between us. I’m not really sure what to say. It’s been a long time since I’ve been through a breakup. It was brutal, and nothing anyone said really made any difference.
I slide open the bottom drawer of my desk and pull out an expensive bottle of scotch one of our suppliers sent me for Christmas.
Perks of being the new CEO of True North Outfitters, I guess.
Ever since I took over running the national chain of outdoor recreation stores that my brother founded, I’ve been swimming in gifts like this.
The ones that didn’t get regifted are collecting dust in my drawers.
Margot’s eyes flare slightly when I set the bottle down on the desk. “I’ve never seen you drink at work,” she says.
“That’s because this isn’t Mad Men,” I say with a smirk. “I’m going to grab some cups.”
A minute later, I return from the nearby breakroom with two small paper cups and fill them halfway full of scotch. When I pass one across the desk to Margot, she looks at it for a second then downs the entire thing in one gulp. Her face contorts and she visibly shivers.
“That’s strong,” Margot sputters.
“Yeah, well most people don’t take shots of twelve-hundred-dollar scotch.”
The flicker of shock on her face quickly gives way to sarcasm. “That’s because most people aren’t stupid enough to spend twelve-hundred-dollars on something that’s just going to make them feel like shit in the morning.”
“It was a gift.”
This doesn’t seem to change her opinion on the matter at all. She sets her empty cup back down on the desk, nudging it my way with her fingertips. Wordlessly, I fill it back up for her.
“Sip on this one,” I tell her.
She takes a tiny sip then sets the cup down on the desk.
“So, do you want to talk about it?” I offer.
A long pause follows. I watch Margot’s expression transform several times as she wrestles with the answer. “Would that be weird?” she eventually asks.
“It’s not weird for me if it isn’t weird for you.”
This topic falls squarely outside the realm of our normal conversations, but I think we can handle it.
There’s nothing that Margot could say that would shock or offend me.
I’ve seen it all. Done it all. After my last relationship ended, I swore them off entirely.
One-night stands just suit me better, and I’ve had more than my fair share of interesting ones.
Margot’s green eyes flick up to meet mine, looking unsure. She gnaws at her bottom lip for a second. When she finally releases it and starts to speak, the words sound wobbly and strained.
Over the next hour, Margot regales me with the tale of Jeremy and his brilliant idea of proposing an open relationship to a woman who’s probably never even looked at another man.
Apparently, my first impression of him was correct: he’s an idiot.
Margot is restrained and teary-eyed when she starts telling the story, but halfway through the second cup of scotch, she’s fired up and no longer holding anything back.
Her hands wave around wildly as she tells me how happy she was that he had asked her out on a nice date.
How she even thought he might propose. She tears up again as those words leave her mouth.
I pass her another napkin, and she quickly blots her eyes.
“And the worst part is that he didn’t even wait to ask me,” she says. “He just downloaded some app and started screwing other women. As if I was just going to accept it and start fucking other men.”
Her mouth clamps shut, and her cheeks turn pink. She glances up at me with an apologetic, albeit unnecessary, grimace then polishes off her cup of scotch.
“He cheated on you?” I grit out.
Margot gives me only the smallest of nods.
Her cheeks deepen a shade, as if she has anything to be embarrassed about in this situation.
Jeremy is the one who should be fucking mortified by his actions.
He’s lucky she didn’t punch him in the face on the way out of the restaurant.
Even luckier that I don’t march down the street to Sapori and take care of that myself.
Monogamy might not be for me, but I still respect it. I’m always upfront with women about my intentions. I’m not looking for anything serious, and the women I date are well aware of that.
“He says it was just one woman, just a couple times, but…” Margot trails off and shrugs, averting her watery gaze.
“I’m sorry, Margot,” I say, my voice thick and coarse.
She gives me a sad little smile, more a shrug of her mouth than anything else.
There’s nothing I can say to make it better. When she nudges the empty cup my way, I fill it with scotch. It’s all I can do for her right now.
An hour and another refill later, I realize that I miscalculated. Badly.
Margot is a small woman. No taller than five-foot-two with a small but curvy frame. Four paper cups of scotch on an empty stomach are apparently enough to get her drunk.
On the plus side, Margot has transitioned from sad to angry. Anger is good. It means she won’t fall for her ex-boyfriend’s groveling when he inevitably realizes that he made a mistake.
“You should have seen the ravioli hats,” Margot says while making a strange motion with her hands that is obviously meant to clarify her statement.
It does not.
“Oh yeah?” I ask, unable to contain a smirk.
“And the tablecloths,” she adds. “Like spaghetti is illegal.”
This time, when she passes her little paper cup back to me and eyes the bottle hopefully, I shake my head. “I think it’s time to switch to water.”
Margot looks utterly betrayed, but she’ll thank me in the morning.
“But I’ve only had…” she narrows her eyes at the bottle then at the little paper cup, trying to calculate exactly how much scotch she’s consumed. “Fifty.”
I’m not sure if she means fifty ounces or fifty dollars’ worth. Either way, she’s wrong.
Leave it to Margot to crunch numbers when she’s drunk.
When she started as my assistant two years ago, I was the CFO of the company and Margot was freshly out of grad school.
She lacked experience, but I took a chance on her, and it paid off.
She’s brilliant when it comes to numbers.
With a little more experience—and some convincing of my brother, who still owns a sizable share of the company—I’d like to see Margot running our entire finance department.
“Can we order spaghetti?” she says, eyes twinkling with hope.
“We’ll get you something to eat on the way.” I don’t have the heart to tell her it’s past ten o’clock now, and nowhere that serves spaghetti is still open. Hopefully, her face will light up just the same for a burger and fries. She needs something to soak up all that alcohol.
“Do you have somewhere to stay tonight?” I ask.
Margot’s eyes lose their glimmer as she ponders the answer to my question.
Normally, I’d take her to Emma’s house. Not only is she Margot’s best friend, but she’s also my brother’s fiancée.
Their house is just a few doors down from mine.
It’s the obvious choice. Unfortunately, Emma is currently leading a wilderness excursion in New Zealand with my older brother, Garrett, and there’s no way I’m leaving Margot alone at their house in her current state.
As far as I can tell, Margot doesn’t have a very wide social circle here in Denver. Her parents live in Utah, and her siblings seem to be scattered all over the country. I’ve never heard her mention anyone else.
“Home is fine,” Margot answers quietly.
Nope, not a chance. She’s way too intoxicated to deal with her ex-boyfriend right now.
“I have a better idea,” I tell her.
She perks up slightly. “Spaghetti?”
“Yes, spaghetti.”