3
Spencer
I come down the stairs already two hours into my day, whey protein digested, shower done, calendar skimmed. Six a.m. sets are non-negotiable, offseason or not, and I’ve got a brand consultant at nine who’d better bring numbers instead of apologies.
Halfway down the hall, I smell butter browning in a pan. My kitchen has never smelled like anything since the day I moved in.
I round the corner and stop.
The marble I’ve never seen a knife touch is covered in a scatter of eggshells, sitting in a smear of yolk nobody’s wiped up.
Butter wrappers, balled up, one on the floor by the trash can where it missed.
Two pans on the stove, both going, and a third stacked dirty in the sink.
It looks like six people cooked breakfast and every one of them left before cleaning up.
Milo’s at the stove with his back to me, a spatula in one hand, hip cocked against the counter, and he’s wearing the outfit he threatened me with yesterday.
Cropped top, hot pink and sequined all over, stopping a good four inches above the waistband of shorts so short I can see most of both thighs.
His back is a long clean line down to a waist that dips in sharp before it flares out again, and I catch myself tracking it before I’ve decided to.
I put my eyes on the back of his head instead. His curls are still damp at the edges. That, I can look at.
“What is this?” I ask.
He turns, smiling, and a plate lands in front of the barstool at the island before I’ve pulled it out. Eggs, soft-scrambled, bacon laid across the top in a fan, browned toast cut on a diagonal.
“Good morning to you too, boss.” He sets a fork down next to the plate and steps back with the spatula still in hand. “Sit. Eat. Tell me I’m a genius.”
I look at the plate, then at him. “I didn’t hire a cook.”
“No,” he agrees, easy, no dent in the smile. “You hired a PA who can’t sleep in new places and was up at five thirty staring at your ceiling, so I figured I’d make myself useful instead of lying there doing math about how many track lights you have in the guest suite. Six, by the way. Excessive.”
I sit down without meaning to and pick up the fork.
The eggs are good, salted just right. The bacon’s got a little char on it, and the toast is buttered to the edges. I eat every bite and don’t say a word, because saying anything makes this a thing that happens again.
Milo watches me eat, leaning against the counter, arms crossed loose over that strip of bare stomach, waiting me out.
I set the fork down. “It’s good. You cook?”
“Yeah, kind of.” He tips his head. “Pastry’s the dream, though. Was the dream, but I never got to chase it. There was always rent, or my mom, or a shift somebody needed covered. So I carried other people’s plates instead of making what goes on them.”
He keeps it light, but the grin slips on the last part.
“I see. Well, the cooking’s not necessary,” I say flatly. “I normally have breakfast out. There’s a place nearby, they know my order, it takes four minutes.”
Disappointment crosses his face, there and gone. I only see it because I’m trained to read men trying to give nothing away before the snap.
“Okay,” he says, and the smile’s already patched back over the gap. “Noted. Four-minute breakfast guy.”
I stand, and my eyes go over the counter again. “Get dressed. We’re going to be late.”
“I’ve gotta clean this first.” He gestures at the wreckage with the spatula. “I can’t just leave it like this, it looks like a crime scene.”
“I have a cleaner for that.”
He blinks. “A cleaner?”
“Comes every afternoon. Leave it.” I’m already moving toward the hall, checking my watch, running drive time against the meeting that Amanda will not let me miss for the third time. “Fifteen minutes. Go.”
He salutes me with the spatula, which I choose to ignore, and disappears toward the stairs, bare feet slapping the hardwood all the way up.
I spend the fifteen minutes checking email on my phone at the island, standing in the middle of the mess, and somewhere around minute eleven I’m glancing at the staircase more than the screen. I put that down to impatience about the schedule and nothing else.
When he comes back down, it’s the outfit he showed up in yesterday.
Cream cropped knit, high-waisted shorts, the white socks, the beat-up sneakers he clearly loves more than is reasonable for a shoe with visible stitching coming apart at the toe.
It’s marginally more coverage than the crop top and the tiny shorts, technically, if you’re grading on square inches of fabric.
I look at him for a second, remember this is the only work-appropriate outfit he owns, and decide that’s a problem for later, not this morning, not with the clock against me.
“Let’s go,” I say, and turn for the door before he can read anything else off my face.
***
The elevator doors haven’t fully opened before Milo’s already leaning to see past them.
“Cornerstone,” he reads off the wall lettering, drawing the word out like he’s tasting it. “Very serious. Very we-have-a-mission-statement.”
“We do have a mission statement.”
“Obviously.” He falls into step beside me. “Bet it’s something like ‘fueling greatness’ or ‘built different.’ Am I close?”
I don’t answer that, because I am not telling him he’s dead on, word for word, off a deck Amanda made me sit through four times before I signed off on it.
The reception desk sits in the middle of the floor, glass and steel, two women behind it who both look up when we step off the elevator.
Georgia’s the one who smiles first, professional except for the half-second where her eyes drop to Milo and stay there a beat too long.
Kirsten’s more discreet about it, but she’s cataloging him too.
“Morning, Mr. Rhodes,” Georgia says, then, “And who’s this?”
“My PA,” I say. “This is Milo.”
Milo gives them the full-wattage version of his smile, the one I’ve clocked by now as his default setting, no extra charge. “Milo Shaw. I’m the new best thing that’s happened to his schedule.”
Georgia laughs, and Kirsten’s mouth twitches at the corner like she’s deciding whether to allow it.
Milo’s phone goes off in his back pocket before either of them can say more, and he checks the screen, his mouth thinning, and holds up a finger.
“Sorry, one sec, gotta take this,” he says, walking off toward the window with the phone at his ear, voice dropping low the second he’s out of easy earshot.
I watch him go a beat longer than I should.
“Okay,” Georgia says once he’s out of range. “Where did you find him?”
“Long story.”
“Is that code for you’re not telling me?” She leans in. “At least tell me if he’s single.”
I open my mouth, because the honest answer is I have no idea, I’ve known him about a day, but Kirsten cuts in before I can say anything.
“He’s not going to be interested in you like that,” she tells Georgia, like she’s saving her the trouble.
“You don’t know that. You can’t tell that from looking at somebody.”
“It’s not the looks. It’s the way he—”
Kirsten stops, because Milo’s already turning back toward us, phone tucked away.
“That was fast,” I say to him, mostly to cut the silence Kirsten just left hanging.
“Fastest hands in the East,” Milo says, and gives the desk a little wave goodbye. “Where to, boss?”
“This way,” I say, and don’t look back, though I know the women are still watching us go.
The office space past reception is open-plan, exposed brick on one wall, glass-walled conference rooms lining the other side. Milo’s got my calendar pulled up on his phone, thumb scrolling, brow furrowed at the screen.
“Okay, so it says nine-fifteen, Sustenance,” he reads, then looks up at the row of glass doors, each one labeled in the same clean sans-serif. “Which one’s Sustenance?”
“Third door.”
“Why would you name a room Sustenance?” He’s already moving toward the second door, hand halfway to the handle. “Why not just call it Conference Room Three like a normal company? This one says Performance, that one over there says Energy, and none of them tell you anything.”
“Third door,” I say again, and he course-corrects, muttering something about how a number would kill nobody, and I don’t tell him I fought this exact fight in the branding meeting and lost.
I reach past him to open the third door, and he steps through ahead of me. Andy, my business partner, is there, sleeves rolled, laptop open, the brand consultant beside him, and our finance guy on a video call from Chicago, up on the screen at the head of the table.
“There he is,” Andy says, not looking up from his laptop. “Thought Amanda finally buried you somewhere.”
“Traffic,” I say, and take my seat, and Milo drops into the chair just off my shoulder, phone face-down on the table in front of him.
Thankfully, the meeting starts on time. Packaging schedules, a co-packer complaint about the protein powder clumping in humidity, numbers on a slide Andy’s narrating with more energy than the topic deserves.
I’m three minutes into a discussion about shelf-stable formulations when Milo’s phone buzzes against the table, but he ignores it.
Four minutes later, it goes again.
He ignores that one too. But the third time it buzzes, right as the brand consultant is walking us through a chart, his hand twitches toward the phone before he stops himself and pulls it back into his lap.
I scowl at him, and Milo sees it out of the corner of his eye and goes pink, color climbing up from his collar into his cheeks.
I wonder how far down that blush reaches, whether it stops at his collarbone or keeps going. As soon as I realize what I’m doing, I look away and clear my throat so loud that Andy glances over at me.
I make myself watch the slide.
During the coffee break, Milo excuses himself, phone pressed to his ear, voice low, as he goes out into the hallway. I stand by the window with a paper cup of coffee I don’t especially want, and Andy drifts over, eyes tracking the same hallway I’ve been tracking.
“So,” he says conversationally. “Who’s the eye candy?”
It takes me a second to answer, mostly because I’ve been thinking something along those lines myself since yesterday, but I don’t like the way Andy says it.
“He’s my PA,” I say. “Stop looking at him like that.”
Andy’s eyebrows go up. “Like what?”
“Like you want to eat him.”
“Okay, okay.” He raises both hands, laughing under his breath, but I know Andy well enough, three years of partner dinners and one very ill-advised bachelor party in Vegas, to know that laugh doesn’t mean he’s backing off. It means he’s filing it.
“Gee. No need to get so territorial, brother.”
“I’m not—”
Milo comes back through the door before I finish the sentence, phone vanishing into his pocket, smile reassembled, and I shut my mouth, because none of the available endings do me any favors.
The day keeps moving after that, meeting bleeding into meeting, a working lunch that’s mostly Andy talking with his mouth full and the finance guy arguing from Chicago about packaging costs.
Milo’s phone goes off in nearly every one of them, and every time, he silences it without looking, shoulders sitting tighter than they did this morning.
By four o’clock, we’re between the last two meetings, alone in the conference room labeled Performance, waiting on the next group to file in, and his phone goes off again.
“That phone’s been going all day,” I say. “I’m not paying you to take personal calls. Whatever it is, you can sort it out later.”
I expect an apology. What I get is Milo tipping his head to one side, studying me like I’ve handed him a compliment.
“You know,” he says, “you’re really hot when you’re angry.”
I recognize it immediately for what it is, deflection dressed up as flirting, the same reflex I watched him run in the parking lot when his smile snapped back on before I’d finished offering him a job.
“You shouldn’t talk to me like that,” I say, and I hear it land wrong the second it’s out of my mouth.
The grin falters at the edges before it can catch, and the blush from this morning comes back all at once, darker, and he looks down at his phone.
“Sorry,” he says quietly. “That was out of line.”
He doesn’t say what the calls are about, and I don’t ask. The next group is about to file in wanting decisions from me, and I don’t have the time to go looking for whatever’s sitting under that apology.