Chapter 5 Gwen
GWEN
“You did what?”
I placed the framed photo of me and my sister Sarah on the small table by the front door and frowned at her. “I quit. Obviously. What choice did I have? Alan humiliated me in front of everyone, including that asshole Harrison Ashford.”
“Right, agreed that he’s an asshole, but seriously Gwen?
You quit without a safety net.” She frowned, eyes narrowed with worry.
Sarah had inherited our mother’s bright blonde hair and blue eyes.
We didn’t really look alike unless you noticed our identical smiles.
And we laughed the same too. Not that either one of us was laughing right now.
I brushed past her so I could avoid meeting her eyes when I admitted the last bit of news. I knew it would push her over the edge.
“No, I have a safety net.”
A solid gold, diamond-encrusted net, thanks to my magnificent negotiating skills.
But that wouldn’t matter to my sister because she was a rule follower.
Sarah believed in protocol and being careful when it came to big life decisions.
I mean, I did too, but Sarah was a scientist who’d worked for the same research aquarium since graduation, so compared to her I was the equivalent of a nomad wandering through life in a van.
She loved me, supported me, was the biggest cheerleader I’d ever had—but she was also a worrier to the core who believed that coloring precisely within the lines was the best way to prevent disaster.
She was probably scandalized I’d neglected to give two weeks’ notice to the firm that had been putting me in a corner since day one.
“Well?” Sarah asked, splaying her hands in front of her. “What are you going to do now?”
She sounded like a concerned parent. Honestly, she was better at mothering than our actual mom, but in moments like this the tendency bugged me. She was only three years older than me, a fact she liked to hold over my head as if those three years equated a lifetime of experience.
“Give me some credit,” I said. “I listen to my gut, and it’s rarely wrong.”
Minus some choices I made in my personal life, admittedly. But when it came to my work life, I was rock solid.
“Okay, so you have a plan. Good,” Sarah said as she followed me into our small living room. “Spill it.”
We’d outgrown the space ages ago, but we agreed that we couldn’t beat the five-minute walk to the beach.
And we’d made it our own, doing as many DIY home improvements as we could without breaking the tenancy rules.
The Ikea shelves looked built-in thanks to our handiwork, and the painted floor was a masterpiece.
Every time I cursed our tiny kitchen and crap appliances that ruined my baking experiments, I reminded myself we stayed for the beach.
I plopped down on the couch. Sarah perched on the edge of a chair opposite me expectantly. The freezer fan wheezed on in the next room, filling the silence between us with the most grating white noise ever.
“I’m going to work for Ashford Jets.”
Sarah jerked backward and frowned at me. “Wait…Ashford as in Harrison Ashford? The man who poured a gallon of water on your boobs before a big meeting and didn’t apologize?”
I nodded, grimacing a little as I waited for her to freak out in one of two ways: silent judgment or screaming.
“Gwendolyn Meredith Ackland!”
Full mom mode. I kept my mouth shut and waited for the rest of her tirade.
“This is so unlike you! Why in the…how do you think…” she sputtered.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket—because of course my dress had pockets, as God intended—navigated to the notes app, typed out my new salary and held it up to her.
“That’s why.”
Her mouth snapped shut.
“Oh.”
“Yeah,” I said. “How could I not?”
She finally relaxed a little and pulled her feet up beneath her, ready for a full rehash.
“But how are you going to deal with your…history?”
I shrugged. “We’ll figure it out. He’s a much bigger a-hole in the real world, which helps, believe it or not.
The man I met in Aspen was the fanfic version of Harrison Ashford.
Now that I’m dealing with the actual personality rather than the Photoshopped one, I’m definitely not going to be swooning over him. ”
I think we both knew I was lying.
“What about the Jetliner Jackass stuff?”
“That’s exactly why he hired me, to help him craft a PR strategy that’ll shift the narrative back in his favor.”
Sarah nodded. “You do know your Scarlet lore. I think if you had more spare time, you’d be a super fan. As it is, it’s more like you…microdose super fandom.”
I wrinkled my nose, not sure if I liked that comparison. But given that I regularly played her full catalog on repeat on Spotify, maybe I didn’t have room to argue.
“Honestly, that’s one of the main reasons why I agreed to do it. I know how to fix what’s wrong.”
“I’m sure you do, but why do you want to help him? You hate him.”
I smirked and held my phone up to her again. “Gimme six months of this salary and I’ll be ready to launch my own boutique agency, three years ahead of schedule.”
“True,” Sarah agreed. “Okay, now I get it. Working with the Jetliner Jackass is a means to an end.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Trust me, I know what I’m doing.”
Sarah snorted at me.
“Come on. Give me some credit.”
“I’ll do better than that.”
Sarah popped up and jogged to her room, then came back clutching a black bag from an exclusive boutique grocery store where I window shopped when I’d had a bad day. I couldn’t afford anything there, but fantasies were free.
“Presents!” she said as she sat down next to me on the couch. “I’d planned to give these to you the next time Alan got on your case about something and you needed cheering up, but since he’s out of the picture now consider them preemptive presents for dealing with JJ.”
She handed the bag to me while I stared at her with my mouth open. “The flake salt costs sixty dollars a pound there.”
“Good thing I didn’t get you the flake salt, then,” she said, nodding toward the bag. “It’s a selfish gift since I’ll benefit too.”
I finally dug into the bag and pulled out a tiny, perfect jar of amber. “Sarah! You got me the acacia honey?”
“For when you finally bake Bubbles. Warm sourdough drizzled with salted butter and honey? Perfection! And there’s one more thing in there.”
I peeked in the bag and froze. “Oh my God! The Ecuadorian dark chocolate? Are you kidding me? This stuff has a market price that changes every day, like fresh lobster!”
“It was on sale,” Sarah said. “Plus my latest research paper made it into the Western Journal of Marine Science, and my department gave me a little bonus, so I decided to share the wealth with my favorite person.” She paused. “As long as she shares her baked goods.”
“They’re publishing it?” I shrieked. “Sarah, congrats!”
I jumped on her and hugged her tightly, making her laugh and swat me away.
“It’s no big deal; it’s a regional publication, but it’s a great résumé builder.”
I looked at my treasured ingredients in front of me. “I definitely need to do some celebratory baking, then. Bubbles isn’t quite ready yet, but I can do something fun with the chocolate. What about salted caramel and dark chocolate chunk cookies?”
Her eyes went wide. “Yes! Right now, please.”
I was tired, but baking was my favorite de-stressor, and I wasn’t about to deprive my sister of sweet treats. I ran to my room to change and met her in the kitchen.
Sarah knew better than to get in my way when I baked.
Our kitchen was ridiculously small, and the appliances were way past their prime, which meant I usually needed to improvise and get creative with my desserts to compensate for things like an oven that didn’t heat evenly, knobs so worn that you couldn’t read the markings on them anymore, and a refrigerator door that refused to fully latch and required a hip check to close. Despite the challenges, I made it work.
I held up the gleaming brick of chocolate to show Sarah before I destroyed it. “Gorgeous, right?”
She shrugged. “Looks like chocolate to me.”
It was one of the many differences between us.
I could appreciate the beauty of the ingredients I used, like the bright red of a saffron strand and the aroma of roux as it darkened, but it was lost on Sarah.
Meanwhile, she was deeply enthused about tidal pools and driftwood, which to me were things to step around when I saw them at the beach.
“So how did he look?” Sarah asked. She licked her finger and pressed it into the shavings that were accumulating as I chopped up the chocolate.
“It doesn’t matter,” I replied quickly. “We’re colleagues now.”
“He’s your boss,” she corrected as she popped her finger in her mouth. “And your hot vacation fling. So don’t act all prim and proper. Spill. How good did he look?”
I paused, frowning at my sister. “So good. So damn good it was hard to focus on anything else. But then again, he was a total jackass to the receptionist in my building—”
“Oof,” Sarah interrupted. “That’s shitty. That’s, like, unforgivable in my book.”
“Exactly, so you see why lusting after him is absolutely not going to be a problem? I’ve got no time for jerks.”
My chopping became more vigorous as I thought about everything that had gone down.
“Is that who he really is?” Sarah asked. “Was Aspen a catfish?”
I stabbed the chocolate.
“Yeah, I think so. It wasn’t like he was a sweet, outgoing guy while we were there, but he was definitely more relaxed than what I’ve seen lately. I think he left his smile in Colorado. But again, that was him in vacation mode. It’s easy to seem like a decent person when you’re relaxing.”
“Yeah, but being kind is much harder when you’re dealing with an international incident with America’s sweetheart, and her army is after you,” Sarah added. “Hold on, do we need to cut the guy a break?”
I pulled a face as I finished chopping. “Absolutely not. Rough roads don’t excuse shitty behavior. You can deal with adversity and still be decent to the people around you.”
“All I’m saying is maybe the pressure is getting to him.” Sarah reached for a chocolate chunk, and I slapped her hand away. “Who knows, maybe there’s a chance that deep down he’s a decent guy?”
I considered it as I scraped the chocolate off the cutting board and folded the chunks into the dough. The version of Harrison Ashford I’d gotten to know in Aspen was a one-of-a-kind catch that had me swooning from the first moment I saw him.
Our casual fireside flirtation was just silly fun at first. A handsome guy sitting down next to me and asking if I knew what a hot toddy was? A lark! A moment of connection and nothing more.
I never assumed our double entendres would lead to a week in the presidential suite with him.
Or the fact that I’d wake up after six glorious days and nights together to find his luggage gone without any explanation.
Was Harrison Ashford a decent guy? Nope. But he was paying my hefty salary, and in time I’d be able to walk away from him, just like he did to me.
To my very own brighter future, without the shadow of a stupid-hot bosshole looming over me.