12. Simon
TWELVE
SIMON
Footsteps echoed down the main staircase.
The sound reached us both at once. Violet stepped back.
The warmth that had been hovering right there, close enough that I'd felt it coming through the thin fabric of her dress, vanished in a split second.
She looked up at me for half a panicked beat.
"Goodnight," she blurted, the word out before the thought was fully formed.
Without waiting for a response, she spun on her heel and hurried up the stairs, never looking back.
I stood frozen in the middle of the kitchen.
A moment later, Olivia sauntered around the corner. She stopped squarely in the doorway. A slow, wide smile stretched across her face, one dark eyebrow arched higher than the other.
"What just happened in here?" she asked, her voice dripping with amusement.
"Nothing," I lied.
She looked around the empty kitchen, then back at me. Her triumphant smile stayed put. "Right. Nothing."
"Go to bed, Olivia." I rubbed my temple.
She turned away, but that knowing smile went with her up the stairs. I stayed planted on the kitchen floor another full minute before I could make my legs move.
I retreated to my bedroom.
I wasn't a man who lost control. That was one of the few things I'd always known about myself for certain.
I assessed situations, I made calculated decisions, and I acted, or I chose not to.
I didn't lean toward women who worked for me.
I didn't let casual conversations in my kitchen escalate into something that needed a thirteen-year-old's footsteps on the stairs to break it.
I'd always had a ruthless talent for drawing firm boundaries and staying on the right side of them.
What I'd done tonight with Violet was none of those things.
I sank onto the edge of my mattress and went over the scene.
Her wrist had been wrapped in my hand. Her face had been close, her wide eyes watching and waiting, and I'd gravitated toward her like the decision was already made, like two years of careful professional distance simply hadn't existed.
The impulse hadn't been calculated. It hadn't been weighed.
Olivia's footsteps had been the only thing that stopped the moment before it tipped over into something I couldn't take back.
I never should have done it.
Not because I didn't want to. I'd been ready to cross that line long enough that tonight came as no surprise to any logical part of me, except maybe the part now sitting in the dark dealing with the fallout.
But she was a vulnerable guest living in my house.
She was my executive assistant. Yes, something had sparked in that kitchen, but she still hadn't asked me to lean in.
I'd moved without a word, without any acknowledgment of what crossing that line would mean.
Too forward. Too fast. I'd assumed, the one thing I'd always trained myself never to do.
I wanted to rewind the clock by an hour and keep my hands to myself.
It took me a long time to fall asleep.
Morning came too fast and too bright. I heard her moving in the hallway long before Marta started prepping in the kitchen, the click of her bedroom door, her footsteps on the hardwood, the brief pause outside the shared bathroom. I dressed in a suit and headed downstairs.
She was already at the kitchen island, gripping a mug of coffee. She glanced up the second I walked in.
"Good morning, sir," she said, clipped.
"Morning," I answered, stiff.
She dropped her gaze back to her mug. I poured my own coffee. Marta set a plate of breakfast down between us, and neither of us said another word. This silence had none of the easy comfort we usually shared. It sat between us, pulled taut like a wire about to snap.
Manuel drove us to the tower in silence.
In the backseat, she kept her phone out, and I kept my eyes on my tablet.
Neither of us spoke the whole commute. I stared at the back of Manuel's headrest, debating whether to say something to clear the air.
I debated it for twenty city blocks. In the end, I said nothing.
The moment we reached the executive floor, she went straight to her desk, and I escaped into my office.
I read through the morning briefs. I cleared the overnight queue from the London division. I tried to focus on the work, but my mind kept circling back to the kitchen instead, playing the moment on a loop until nine-thirty, when I finally heard her chair roll back.
She knocked twice on my heavy oak door and marched in, her leather notebook already open.
"I have your daily schedule," she said, crisp.
Standing in front of my desk instead of taking her usual seat, she ran through the itinerary without needing a prompt.
The Beatrice Holm fansign was locked in for two o'clock; my presence was technically optional, but the marketing team had flagged that it would mean a great deal to the author to have the CEO there.
Later, the app development team wanted a mandatory forty-five-minute session in the late afternoon for a progress update on the V.M. Ashby outreach and the software build timeline. A strategy call with London had been pushed from ten to eleven.
"Violet, are you okay?" I asked, cutting through the rundown.
She froze mid-sentence. Slow, she looked up from her notes. A bright smile plastered itself across her face, a fully formed, polite expression, but her dark eyes stayed flat and guarded behind it.
"I'm fine, sir," she said. "Did you need anything else prepared before the London call?"
"No." I sighed. "Thank you, Violet."
She snapped the notebook shut and walked out.
I'd leaned into a dynamic she hadn't invited, and now she was using the same hollow, professional smile she gave everyone else in the building.
I was the one who'd forced her to put that armor on.
I'd taken a working relationship that had been warm and easy for two years and poisoned it with caution.
I'd turned myself into a complication she now had to manage.
The day dragged forward. The London strategy call. The crowded fansign. Beatrice Holm shook my hand and offered a generous compliment about Beckett Media's upcoming catalog, and I recited the polite, correct responses.
Later, the development team ran through the new serialization app timeline; I asked the necessary questions and pushed the project forward. I did all of it while the image of Violet, sitting quietly at her desk outside my door, took up the entire back half of my mind.
It had never been this hard with Lara.
Lara and I had ended things cleanly, without much emotional damage.
We were two pragmatic people who'd kept each other good company for a while and eventually ran out of the spark that brought us back for more.
I'd been mildly sorry when it ended, but I hadn't lost a single night of sleep over it.
I'd never sat through a board meeting distracted by thoughts of her.
What I felt for Violet Paige was something else.
Heavier, a gravity that had been building without my permission for a long time.
That night in the kitchen hadn't been a fluke.
It had been the moment the glass finally overflowed.
After the last meeting, I walked out to her desk to tell her we were heading back to the house.
She wasn't there. Her chair was pushed in, her laptop bag gone, her leather notebook closed on the far corner of the desk.
I stood in the empty hallway a long moment.
In two years, she'd never once left the building without saying goodnight.
I'd never demanded that she wait for me, and she'd never set the expectation that she would, but that quiet farewell had always been there, a warm word and a nod on her way to the elevators. Not tonight.
I had Manuel drive me home alone.
I found her curled up on the living room couch.
Her personal laptop was open, her wire-rimmed reading glasses perched on her nose, her bare feet tucked under her thighs.
A half-empty mug rested dangerously on the cushion beside her.
Hearing my footsteps in the foyer, she peered up over the top rim of her glasses, careful.
The second she saw it was me, she snapped the laptop shut.
I hung my suit coat in the closet. I chose the armchair across from her instead of a spot on the couch, keeping the heavy oak coffee table planted between us. She slid her reading glasses off, folding the arms and setting them on top of the closed laptop.
"Long day at the office?" she asked quietly.
"Reasonably." I kept my tone even. "You left the floor before I got out of the app development meeting."
She dropped her gaze back to her computer. "I'd already finished everything on my docket. I didn't think you'd need me for anything else after five o'clock."
"I didn't," I conceded. "You were right to leave."
We sat in the tense, loaded quiet a long moment.
"Violet," I finally began.
She looked up at me, her dark eyes guarded.
"About last night." I forced the words out, refusing to look away.
"In the kitchen. I owe you a real apology.
You're a guest living in my house. You work for me.
I never should have stepped toward you like that without the two of us having a clear, explicit conversation first. I'm sorry for crossing that line. "
She stayed quiet. She looked down at her own hands, resting tense on top of the closed laptop.
Then she spoke. "Simon." She used that flat, direct register, the one she deployed at work whenever she was about to correct a spreadsheet error without mercy. "You don't owe me an apology. Nothing actually happened." She paused, taking a slow, shaky breath. "And if it had… I wasn't unwilling."
Before I could process it, she stood up. She snatched her laptop and her glasses, whispered a hasty goodnight, and bolted out of the living room and up the stairs.
I sat frozen in the armchair, my heart pounding.
I wasn't unwilling.