“No.”
“You fucked him?”
“No.” Though I wanted to. The thought flitted through my mind, and I pushed it away again. “Jesus, Emma. I’ve never had sex with a client.”
“Fucked,” Emma corrected me. “It’s after hours, so you can say the word. It’s fucked.”
“I know the word, thanks.” And I wasn’t a prude. I just didn’t want to say it in reference to Aidan, because he was my boss and the visuals were way, way too hot. “Still, there was a bit of a problem today, and it’s bothering me. I’m not sure what the fallout will be.”
Emma looked serious. In the years I’d worked for Executive Ranks, I’d never given Emma a major problem. The worst was when I’d had to leave a job because my boss wouldn’t quit making sexual innuendoes at me. “Am I going to need more wine for this?” she asked.
“I wish I knew, but I don’t,” I said honestly.
I watched her take another sip, then square her shoulders. “Okay, go.”
I’d learned something today that I never knew before: the glassed-in meeting room at the Tower VC offices had a sound problem. If you stood right in front of the meeting room door, you could hear the people talking inside. Which meant that after I’d shown the Egerton brothers into the room and closed the door behind me, I’d heard exactly what they said.
Samantha, huh? Is she single or what?
She’s hot, man. Really fucking hot. I mean, that ass.
I hadn’t lingered. I’d kept walking away from the door, my back straight and my ears burning. It shouldn’t have bothered me—a couple of idiotic frat-boy lines, spoken by rich, spoiled men who meant nothing to me. I was a professional. It should have rolled off.
But it hadn’t, because Aidan was there. They’d said those things to Aidan, as if he would get it, as if he was one of them. As if that was something he was already thinking, and they knew it.
The office door I was heading for blurred as my eyes watered, and for a second I had felt sick. We had such a careful thing, Aidan and me. It wasn’t just the relationship of a boss and the underling he got to abuse. We treated each other with respect. His attitude to me was one almost of old-world courtesy, underlaid with—I had thought—genuine liking. In three months of working closely with him, I had never seen Aidan check out my tits or my ass. So I had let myself believe that he didn’t think of me as a piece of office meat.
So the words, even though he hadn’t spoken them, were like a slap. A reminder that I’d been an idiot. That was how men thought. All men. Even Aidan. Even about me.
Nine years of being the best executive assistant in New York City, possibly the country, and I was still that ass.
I was humiliated, and I was angry. Tears of rage blurred my eyes. If anyone had spoken to me as I did that walk of shame across the room to my office, I would have slapped them. I was used to the executive boys’ club, but this one hurt. It really did.
I had reached my office when I heard the meeting room door open. I turned to see the Egerton brothers come out, their postures stiff. Jared had a smirk on his face, and Rob had his hands jammed in the pockets of his Dockers. They kept it out of their expressions, but even I could see that they were both angry, boys who were being marched out of the principal’s office in front of their classmates.
Behind them was Aidan. His expression was icy and his body moved with its usual fluid grace, but he walked right behind the Egertons, as if daring them to slow down. His black suit was dark as an ink stain. He didn’t look left or right, and he didn’t look at me.
The Egertons were mad, but Aidan was fucking furious.
In that moment, I saw something different in Aidan. He wasn’t my rich, civilized boss, the CEO of a major company. He looked sharp edged, almost rough, even though he still wore the beautiful black suit. He looked like a man who was very, very capable of kicking another man’s ass.
The meeting had lasted less than five minutes. The entire office watched as the Egerton brothers walked stiffly past the reception desk and got into the elevator. When they were gone, Aidan turned and walked back to his office, still not looking at me. He was in there for only a few minutes, and then he came out again, closing the door behind him. I heard it lock with a fi
nal click. And then he walked to the stairwell and was gone.
The room was hushed and quiet. People were frozen in their cubicles, their jaws slightly open, their fingers hovering above their laptop keys. You could have heard a pin drop. And I still stood frozen in my office doorway, trying to understand what the hell had just happened.
Obviously the Egerton brothers had said something even worse about me, something I hadn’t heard.
Aidan had kicked them out of the building.
And then Aidan had left without a word to me, or to anyone.
I took a deep breath and tried to clear my thoughts. And as I did, three things came to the surface.
First: Aidan hadn’t slammed his door; he’d closed it softly, without a show of temper. Because Aidan Winters was a gentleman.
Second: I had somehow just derailed a multimillion-dollar deal by showing two men into a meeting room.