The CEO’s Assistant (Phoenix Ridge Billionaires #5)

Chapter 1

The server took their plates. Cordelia had eaten about half of hers—the fish had been good, but she set her fork down before finishing it anyway—and she caught Astoria’s gaze drop to the plate then move off it again. Astoria said nothing about it; she never did.

They had reserved this table at Elements on the first Tuesday of every month for the last twenty years, the back corner table with the window overlooking the harbor.

The top layer of the ocean had thinned to a bright haze by now, and past the glass, the water was glimmering from light, the boats small and gleaming against it.

Astoria asked about how the quarter was going, and Cordelia gave her the good parts: the civic fund was oversubscribed, and the east-side project was finally breaking ground after two years of permits.

She then asked whether Cordelia had done the harbor walk yet, and she said she had on Sunday, which happened to be the full truth.

And when Astoria asked about the novel she’d pressed on her three weeks ago, Cordelia supplied two sentences about the middle chapters, enough to sound like she’d read all of it.

As far as she could tell, Astoria believed her.

She was good at this; she'd had decades of practice. Astoria, who missed very little, never called her on it. Cordelia didn’t know whether that was out of kindness or if it was simply the easiest thing for both of them, and on the bad days, she was grateful for it either way.

The waiter brought Astoria’s second glass of red wine, and Cordelia took a long pull of her water; she still had the rest of the afternoon ahead of her then the evening after that.

After Astoria took a sip, she put the glass down and asked in the same easy voice she’d used with the other questions whether Cordelia had been sleeping.

It wasn’t a new question, and Cordelia was already prepared for it.

Astoria had been asking her that for two years—here, on the phone, in the back of a car at a funeral—and every time, Cordelia had given her an answer believable enough to be passable.

Astoria always accepted it without probing further.

Cordelia could have scripted the whole exchange by now.

“I’ve been sleeping fine,” Cordelia said. “I even slept in on Saturday.” She turned her water glass a quarter-turn against the cloth. “And I’ll take a few days at the coast once the deal closes. Properly off. No laptop or cell phone.”

Astoria looked at her a beat longer than normal, and Cordelia wondered if she had overdone it with the tech ban, but then Astoria nodded and reached for her wine. Cordelia let out a puff of air in relief and stopped methodically turning her glass.

They alternated paying the check, and it was Astoria’s turn this month.

She paid for it, then they both walked outside.

It was cold for spring, and the marine layer had fully burned off, the sunlight reflecting off the water, hard and white.

Astoria touched her elbow gingerly—two fingers, there and gone—and told her to call if she needed anything.

“I will,” Cordelia said, even though they both knew she wouldn’t. Cordelia loved Astoria for not calling her out on it or pushing harder.

After Astoria pulled out of the parking lot, turning south, Cordelia walked back to her office, to the folder waiting on her desk.

She shrugged off her coat when she got back to her office and draped it over her chair, purposefully ignoring the manila folder squared against her desk mat, exactly where she had left it that morning.

She felt it stare at her accusingly, but she didn’t open it.

She still needed to get through the rest of the day first.

Her corner office was on the top floor, with floor-to-ceiling windows on both sides—the harbor to the east and downtown grid to the south—where the afternoon light streamed in long and pale across the desk.

Along the wall was a bookshelf that only held books she’d already read, plus a horizontal stack of books she had picked up recently to read.

The rest of the office beyond her door hummed with low, conversational voices interspersed with the trill of phone calls.

Cordelia started on clearing what was in her inbox.

She asked that Lauren, who ran the civic infrastructure, be briefed by Friday on the Quincy meeting—one that Cordelia had decided she no longer needed to be in the room for—then pushed a board call to the following month before addressing the two calls waiting for her.

Finally, she opened the folder.

There were six candidates applying to be her executive assistant, though the title undersold the work by a wide margin.

Her head of HR had clipped a note to the front flagging the strongest three, but Cordelia looked at all six in order anyway.

The recommendation was someone else’s judgment, but the hire would be all hers.

Five were excellent, the kind of resumes that would run any other executive’s office without a wrinkle, but the sixth stood out in a way Cordelia couldn’t help but stop and notice. She noted that HR hadn’t starred this one, silently confirming her decision to do her due diligence.

Wren Davies. Despite only being thirty-two, she had spent six years at a top-tier firm, and the specialty line on her resume was the only one in the stack that matched what Cordelia actually needed done: confidential executive transitions and restructurings that could not be leaked.

Wren had left her previous job fourteen months ago without giving a reason, but no bridge burned that Cordelia could find.

Her one reference was a senior partner that Wren had reported to, and that her old boss had agreed to vouch for her told Cordelia more than anything on the rest of the resume.

Cordelia ran a search out of habit and turned up nothing on Wren—no publications, no panels, no conference bios, no quotes in the press—which was exactly the kind of anonymity she was looking for.

What Cordelia needed, underneath the line items, wasn’t complicated; it was someone she could teach the work to in three weeks then trust to run beside her without being told twice, someone with no particular reason to know her or a habit of trying.

The other five candidates would all, in their own way, have wanted to be brought in, made part of something bigger than them, and be told why.

Wren Davies had spent the last six years being paid to not pry.

Cordelia read through Wren’s resume a second time, and finding no reason to change her mind, she set the paper on top with two of HR’s picks beneath it—three names for the first round—then closed the folder.

She had hired a great many people in thirty years, but Wren Davies would be the first she was hiring to help her leave.

She left the office a few minutes after six and walked home, as she did most evenings.

It was only three blocks, past the shuttered florist and the wine shop and the cafe on the corner with the bright purple door, where the windows were already warmed by candlelight and a few women sat close together at the bar.

She realized she’d walked past it for years but had never once gone in.

She kept walking without breaking her stride.

The penthouse took up the top two floors of a building she and Eleanor had bought a long time ago and turned into a home. Eleanor had chosen the rooms, the lighting, and the long table they used to fill with people back when they’d host parties.

Eleanor had been gone for eight years now, but they shared twenty-two years before that. Cordelia had changed nothing in all that time—partly because she couldn’t think of anything she wanted to change, and partly because changing something would have meant deciding what to keep and get rid of.

She changed out of her pantsuit, poured a single glass of merlot from the wine rack she and Eleanor had filled together, and ate leftovers while standing at the kitchen island.

Her laptop was on the counter, and she found the thread with her head of HR, sent her top three names for the first round of interviews, and asked that they be scheduled across the week. She closed the laptop.

That only left the folder she had tucked safely in her bag.

The NDA had been signed on Friday across the table from the one competitor she trusted to take the firm and keep her people whole.

She’d been carrying the signed copy between the office and her home for the last several days, and she finally took it out and set it on the counter. She left it closed.

Eighteen months from now, there would be a clean handover, a press release, and a new name over the door.

And then the firm she had built since she was twenty-three would belong to someone else.

Every one of her people would land somewhere good; she’d spent six months making certain of it.

More than that, she had told no one. Not the board, who would know when they needed to, and not Astoria.

And after everything was done, there would be the house on the coast waiting for her, the house Eleanor had found two hours north of Phoenix Ridge that they had bought from a widow who only wanted the house loved.

She and Eleanor had only used it rarely, but now, she would fill it with all the time she’d never had before: reading, sleeping, learning at last to cook a proper meal for one.

She would be fifty-five and free and finally rested.

It was a wise plan. A responsible plan. She had built it carefully, closing every contingency, and Cordelia believed in it as completely as she believed in anything she had ever made, even on nights when it had stopped feeling like a real future at all.

Cordelia rinsed the glass and set it in the drying rank, leaving the folder with the signed NDA on the counter.

She switched off the lamps and went to get ready for bed.

The hallway was dark except for the bathroom light at the far end filtering out.

She brushed her teeth, washed her face, then turned off the light before walking down the hall in the dark to her bedroom.

She climbed into her side of the bed—she had not slept anywhere near the middle in eight years—and rolled over, trying to find sleep she knew would elude her.