CHAPTER ONE
-Eight hours before -
Miranda
“Randi, hold up!” Cam, my assistant, called as he ran down the aisles of desks in the office, his new leather shoes creaking a bit with each step.
Cam and I had a horrendous shoe-shopping habit. We were good for each other in most ways, but not that. If we were on the way back from a meeting or a lunch, and I just needed to “pop in” to the store, we both knew we were going to be trying on damn near every pair of shoes the place had to offer. And buying way more than was reasonable.
I’d been with him when he’d bought those woven leather, flat heel, round moc toe, notched vamp, penny loafers with the strap in the color cognac that he had on.
Magnanni.
Eight-hundred-fifty dollars.
The Cam who’d walked into my office three years before dreamed of shoes like that, but was forced to wear ones he’d thrifted and tried his best to repair and keep in good condition.
He could afford them now because, quite frankly, I couldn’t function without Cam in my life. I wasn’t sure how I’d managed to keep everything from falling apart before him.
I mean, there had been other assistants. Almost a dozen of them, to be exact. Each of them wholly… fine. None of them, though, capable of anticipating my needs, of handling situations in the exact manner I would handle them, so I didn’t need to micromanage or breathe down his neck.
And, sure, it helped that he was happy to spend a huge chunk of his time with me, pulling late nights and obnoxiously early mornings, though I didn’t exactly require it of him.
That said, he got paid an ostentatious salary for a personal assistantbecausehe was happy to be there even without me demanding it of him.
I could afford it.
I wouldn’t miss the extra hundred thousand more he made than the average personal assistant.
That was why I needed him so badly.
When you ran your own multi-billion-dollar company, you didn’t quibble over money you needed to spend to make it operate as efficiently as possible.
“What’s up?” I asked as we both stepped into the elevator and I slipped my foot out of my heel and flexed it a few times in the air.
“Did I not tell you that the scalloped sides look sexy as fuck but would make you crunch your toes all day to hold them on?” he asked, clucking his tongue at me. “Those are sit-down-shoes. And you are always on the move.”
He wasn’t wrong.
“I’d mistakenly thought today was going to be a behind-the-desk sort of day,” I told him, trying to hold back a grumble as I slipped my foot back into my shoe as the elevator chimed.
“When do you ever spend the whole day behind a desk?” he asked as he checked his little clipboard that had a compartment for storing papers. I’d never seen one before in the office, which meant when he’d shown up with one on his first day as my assistant, he’d brought it with him, knowing he would need it.
That was the kind of attention to detail that made me immediately know he was a keeper.
“Okay, so, I handled that little shitstorm the girls on the second floor created,” he said, meaning that one of them had been trash-talking another one on the employee chat and it had accidentally gotten out and created absolute chaos. “Let’s just say that we will not have to worry about bullshit like that again.”
Cam emanated Golden Retriever Energy most of the time. He was upbeat, energetic, outgoing, and friendly. But, man, if you pissed him off, the man could slice your flesh off your bones with just a glare.
It was hard to believe if you looked at him with his golden-brown hair and his big blue eyes, his handsome face that wasn’ttoohandsome, his tall and lean body clad in meticulously thought-out outfits.
But if he said that he’d scared the bejesus into the girls on the second floor, then I believed him.
“Thank you. You’re amazing,” I said. “But—“
“But we still need to bring in Gabby to do a lecture about company morale and appropriate topics of discussion in the workplace,” Cam finished for me.
“I think, when I was born, they took a chunk of my brain out and put it in your head,” I told him, shaking my head. It was almost eerie how in tune we were at times.