Chapter One
New York City
If impelled to identify some of the skills she had mastered since graduating summa cum laude from Barnard College and coming to work at Lenox not if she wanted to keep her job.
So, she kept silent as she watched his mouth moving.
Watched his eyes scanning—and not just her face either.
And she thought about how for the last biennium, she’d been charged with getting his coffee, then for what felt like longer than just a few years, taking his shirts to be laundered when he inevitably spilled his dark roast down the front because he was a cloven-hoofed artiodactyl of the Suidae family. In other words, an utter swine.
She’d learned from her veterinarian father all the correct biological genera, and she enjoyed tacking them onto human behavior.
Although, that wasn’t really fair to pigs, now was it?
The ones she’d grown up with on her family farm had been adorable, even when covered in muck.
Especially Amaranth, who’d been her pet named after her favorite color—though obviously a pig could never be quite as pink, but she’d always been a lover of big words, squeezing them in wherever she could, even if on a beloved swine.
To be clear, Mr. Wall was never adorable.
Meaty fingers snapped in her direction, yanking her back to reality. “Miss Swift? Did you hear me?”
Unfortunately.
Bernadette glanced around the bustling copyediting room at the typewriters clacking, men sporting Beach Boys floppy hairstyles bent over stacks of galley pages with their red pencils in hand, pages of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary being flipped, everyone busy and not looking in her direction.
Maybe they were blissfully unaware of what was transpiring.
They dedicated a lot of time to pretending she—the sole female junior copy editor—didn’t exist. Her male colleagues were never asked to perform such menial tasks for their boss.
Tasks that were not part of the job description of a copy editor.
Which she was. A fact that Mr. Wall often disregarded.
One day, he would not dismiss her so easily, when it was her name on the placard outside the CEO’s office and her desk pristine on the inside.
Bernadette met her superior’s eyes, watery blue like a child who’d been overzealous in dowsing their watercolor paints in an attempt to bring the pigment back to life.
She wanted nothing more than to grab on to each end of his waxed, dark handlebar mustache and yank the smirk off his face.
Instead, she sat on her hands, with their neatly trimmed and pink-painted nails, and said, “Yes, Mr. Wall.”
Generally, Bernadette had a nearly infinite amount of patience.
Working in an office surrounded by men who treated the copyediting department like a boys’ club meant she needed it.
But there was something about her boss that had the power to bring up what her female friends called her “nicey-nice shield.” That deactivated a part of her that wanted to rebel against being asked to perform tasks her male colleagues were never subjected to simply because of their gender.
So far, she’d tamped that urge down and allowed herself to be a doormat. Once a precedent was set, it was hard to change.
Besides, she could push back against injustice, or she could keep her job.
And she liked her job, except when she was dealing with Mr. Wall or others of his ilk.
So, she rose from her chair, the creaking sound drowned out by the work carrying on around them.
Her fingers brushed Mr. Wall’s as she reached for the shirt, and it was hard to keep a shudder at bay.
“I need it back by lunch. I’ve got a meeting.” Mr. Wall’s gaze traveled toward her lips, and she pressed them inward as if to ward him off.
“Try smiling a little more.” He gave her a lascivious grin. “Women are prettier when they smile.”
What a cliché. She’d have drawn a fat red line through that quip in a manuscript and written, “Try to be more original.”
Wall turned away without so much as a thank-you. “And get me your pages by four o’clock,” he said over his shoulder as he headed to the door and the corridor beyond.
Bernadette frowned as she held the sullied garment out in front of her.
Any outsider seeing her bustle off to handle the coffee stain would assume she was Mr. Wall’s personal assistant.
Although even secretaries weren’t in charge of laundering garments.
At least according to their written job descriptions.
All these tasks seemed to be excused by one little line that someone, undoubtedly a man, seemed to have added to every description: “and other duties as assigned.”
The line would be more accurate if it said, “and other duties as assigned, provided the employee in question is a woman.”
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