3. Violet
THREE
VIOLET
I sat at my desk, my pen gliding across the open notebook.
The building was busy, every floor running on ringing phones, clattering keyboards, and heels striking tile, a corporate morning already at full speed.
I'd wrapped the Tuesday close at eleven the night before and showed up with the notebook already open in my tote, the next chapter spinning in my head.
I didn't write actual prose at the office.
I wrote beats. Shorthand. The bare skeleton I'd flesh out later with the kettle whistling on the stove.
That morning, I'd flipped to a fresh page and spent ten minutes scribbling lists and fragments, a private language that looked like administrative notes to anyone glancing over.
The Assistant hadn't started as a decision. It started as a pressure building inside me until it had nowhere else to go. The disastrous dinner with the investors had lit the fuse. That was the night I finally understood I was in deep trouble.
So I'd opened the notebook. The Assistant was basically my reality, padded with fiction.
My female lead reported to a man with the same dry humor, a man who wore the same intoxicating cologne.
She wanted him with a heat that had no business existing inside a professional dynamic.
In real life, those urges were strictly mine, carefully managed and fiercely unspoken. On the page, things went differently.
The crucial split was in the male lead.
In my manuscript, he wanted her back. Not in the open, and not pitched at a register that would land a corporate executive in HR's crosshairs.
He wanted her in every muscle he held still, every word he weighed before it left him, because he'd decided he shouldn't, a quiet, near-religious restraint barely holding.
I hadn't written him cold. I'd handed him Simon's warmth, his sharp humor, the easy banter we shared on the forty-seventh floor.
Underneath that polished surface, though, I'd given him an obsession the real Simon Beckett would never carry for me.
A possessive, simmering hunger tucked in the negative space between their professional exchanges.
My oblivious heroine had no clue. She took every exchange at face value, telling herself it was nothing, because she was too practical to see phantoms where nothing existed.
I exhaled and dropped my gaze back to the handwritten pages.
In the scene I was drafting, she was waiting for him.
The elevator would chime, she'd rise to her feet, and her heart would leap into her throat before he even rounded the corner.
She'd learned the cadence of his footsteps by heart.
I had her pulse racing the moment his eyes locked onto hers.
Loud. Like a criminal bracing to get caught.
I paused and read the line back.
If only real life handed me the same thrill in return. I didn't want the dread of getting caught. That could stay safely in the fiction. But I wanted the male lead to want me back with the same senseless intensity I dragged to this desk every morning.
I set my pen down, stared at the blank wall past my monitor, and let myself sink into the fantasy for three seconds. That was my rule. Three seconds, and then the longing went back in its mental box. I picked up the pen and kept writing.
I was mid-sentence—Sandra waited with her heart in her mouth, her pulse banging a frantic rhythm against her ribs whenever his gaze fell on her—when the elevator at the far end of the corridor dinged.
I kept writing.
The steps coming off the elevator belonged to him. I knew them at once without looking up. My fingers kept flying across the paper as he rounded the corner and strode down the aisle toward my desk. Finally, I lifted my head.
His eyes were already locked onto me.
My heart slammed against my chest. Loud. Just like the guilty criminal I'd written about a minute ago. He wore a beautifully tailored gray suit, holding my gaze in a way that made it near impossible to look away.
I kept scribbling blind, clinging to the pen and page like they were my only safe harbor. The space between us shrank with every step. Sweat slicked my fingers against the plastic barrel of my pen. I took in nothing but his sharp gray suit, his steady stare, and the closing distance.
When he was five steps away, I flipped the notebook face-down and scrambled to my feet.
His gaze dropped from my flushed face to the closed notebook on my desk, then drifted back up.
"What were you writing?" Simon asked.
"Nothing important, sir." I slid the notebook into my top drawer and shut it with a firm click.
He watched me, his face giving away nothing. Slow, his eyes swept down for a brief but thorough survey of my outfit before he tilted his head.
"Your burgundy dress goes rather well with my gray suit," he said.
I glanced down at myself. The dress was simple, fitted at the waist, the kind of tailored cut that knew what it was doing without shouting about it. Deep burgundy, good fabric. It had been the first thing I reached for that morning. I hadn't thought about why until now.
With my wider hips and fuller figure, I leaned on this dress to keep my proportions looking deliberate. Standing at my mirror at dawn, I'd thought, yes. Now he was looking at me like he agreed.
"It's a beautiful dress." Simon's voice dropped low. "Good for a date."
A wry smile spread across my lips. "Unfortunately, I have no one to go on a date with. So I can only wear it to the office."
He scoffed, a half-smile playing on his mouth. "Isn't that much better?"
"That you like the dress?" I challenged.
He nodded, without a trace of embarrassment. "Yeah. I like that you have no one to go on a date with, so you had to wear it here for me to see."
My breath hitched. "Sir, if anyone heard you say that, they'd think I dress for you."
Simon swept his gaze around the vast, empty floor. Just the two of us.
"I mean." His voice dropped a notch. "We're the only two people out here. I'm pretty sure the staff already has an idea about us."
I swallowed hard.
Rumors about the two of us had run through the veins of Beckett Media for months.
While Elena was alive and kept an office on this floor, there'd been no whispers.
Her bright presence warmed the place, and any idle chatter got squashed by the obvious, strict professionalism we kept in front of her.
But Elena had been gone for months. The floor narrowed back down to just us, and people were connecting dots that weren't there.
It was funny in the worst way.
Because nothing had happened, and nothing ever would.
Simon Beckett used to have a girlfriend, a stunning woman who could've modeled if her schedule allowed, the type who made the whole room shift when she walked in.
While they were together, Simon's casual banter stopped cold.
He was respectful like that. He knew exactly where the line sat, and he stayed behind it.
That girlfriend had hated me. She'd march onto the floor and look at me like she was solving a math problem, adding up columns and hating the final number.
I'd told myself she was just paranoid, and I believed my own lie the whole time they were together.
But when they finally split, the easy banter came back, and the only real change was the three new chapters that showed up in my notebook starring a gray-eyed publishing CEO.
His gaze never lingered too long. He never touched me unless work called for it.
Nothing about him gave me solid ground to take the flirting seriously.
I knew the difference between a man being warm and a man wanting something.
I wasn't his type. Wide-hipped, full-bodied, a size large. I knew my place.
"I'm so sorry, sir." I took a step backward.
He frowned and shook his head. "Why are you apologizing for what other people are whispering about?"
I opened my mouth to answer, but he cut me off.
"And if it's just a secret relationship," he went on, the corner of his mouth tugging up, "there's nothing so scandalous about it. We're both single adults. We're not disrespecting anyone." He paused, his face softening. "What I mean is—"
I let out a bright laugh, breaking the tension. "You don't have to worry. I know what you mean. We both know this is just friendly banter. Nothing more."
Simon gave a tight nod. "Right. So stop listening to the gossip."
My lips pressed into a smaller, fragile smile. "Right."
He studied my face a moment longer before his posture straightened, sliding back into executive mode.
"I need you to schedule an emergency board meeting for today," he said. "Yesterday, the strategy team brought me a platform proposal I think is worth the board's time. Loop in Devika's team and have whoever's presenting prep their materials."
"Of course." I was already reaching for my keyboard. "I'll get the invites out within the hour."
He gave one last nod and walked past my desk without a word. The heavy oak door to his office clicked shut behind him.
I stared at my glowing monitor.
I held the polite smile a few seconds longer, then let it drop.
I sent the calendar invite to the board, then a heads-up email to the strategy team.
The meeting locked in for that afternoon.
I worked through the prep one piece at a time, drafting the executive briefing, booking the boardroom, confirming attendance.
For high-stakes meetings like this, my job was to sit quiet against the wall with my notebook.
Simon rarely needed me in standard team huddles, but formal board meetings were the exception.
I was halfway through a sentence in the briefing when my cell phone rattled against the wood.
I picked it up and checked the notification.
A calendar reminder blinked on the screen.
Mom—birthday—tomorrow.
I sighed and set the phone face-down on the desk.
It had been months since I last called home.
My mother and I were not best friends. We never had been, at least not in any way that counted.
She was a woman armed with fierce opinions about my life, and she delivered them in the steady, helpful-sounding tone of someone sure she was doing me a favor.
The friction had caught fire the day I graduated.
My GPA hadn't been a disaster by any reasonable measure, but it hadn't matched my brother Xavier's flawless record, and in my family, falling short of Xavier was the same as outright failure.
Her passive-aggressive comments started small and snowballed.
She compared me to my brother. She compared me to her own wins at my age.
When I took the assistant role at Beckett Media, she wrote it off as a "stepping stone.
" When a full year passed without a promotion, she dropped the polite word for it.
She'd ask if I needed money in a tone that already assumed I was broke.
My father was more efficient. His heavy, judging silence said everything his wife spent hours putting into words.
Neither of them knew about my writing. I'd walled my fiction off to the side, thriving in the cover of their ignorance.
If they ever found out, my mother would unload a barrage of measured opinions, and I'd have to swallow the fact that the greatest thing I'd ever done—a serialized story with five million readers, hungry publisher interest, and a Sunday-midnight slot that hit every single week—was something they'd brush off as a flimsy, embarrassing hobby.
My greatest, most pathetic wish was for her to be proud of me. I'd carried that hope for as long as I could remember.
I shoved the phone into my drawer and made myself finish the briefing.
Soon enough, it was time for the meeting.
I walked over to Simon's door and rapped my knuckles against the wood. "Meeting in five."
He was already shrugging into his suit jacket. "I'll be right there."
We headed down together to the conference room on the floor below. I claimed my usual chair against the far wall, balancing my notebook on my knee, while Simon took his place at the center of the long table.
Marisol, one of the senior executives, kicked things off. "Let's get started. Devika, the floor's yours."
Devika stood and put her first slide up on the screen. "Thank you. Today we're presenting a new platform initiative, the Reader Bridge project. The premise is straightforward, but the market differentiator is huge."
She walked the board through the core mechanics, the hybrid publishing model, the serialization format, the reader subscription structure. Simon sat still, his hands steepled on the table, taking in the pitch without a word. I kept my pen moving across the page, recording the minutes.
Marisol leaned forward, curious. "When you say 'signed hardcover,' you mean the physical book lands in the reader's hands?"
"Signed by the author's own hand, yes," Devika confirmed. "When the online serialization wraps, every reader who's subscribed since chapter one gets a premium copy."
"What's the fulfillment timeline on that?"
"We're building the print-partner relationships alongside the app development," Devika said. "We estimate an eight-to-twelve-week window from completion to delivery."
A remote board member unmuted. "And the author keeps their creative rights through all of this?"
"All of them," Devika assured them. "The platform just hosts the serialization. We carry the load on print and distribution. The author keeps total ownership of the work."
The screen muted again.
Marisol tapped her stylus against her tablet. "I like this. The physical book is an angle nobody else in the digital space has right now. What's the launch strategy?"
Devika clicked her remote, advancing the slide.
"We need a strong anchor. One established, heavy-hitting name in serialized fiction who brings a built-in, rabid readership.
Someone big enough that other writers take our platform seriously on day one.
" She paused for a beat. "We know who that should be. "
She advanced to the final slide.
The name flashed across the screen in bold text.
V.M. ASHBY.
The pen in my hand stopped moving.