“Hey.” He leaned his hip against the edge of my desk like he owned it. “I’m Clark. Got a two o’clock with Kingsley.”
“You’re early. He’s on a call. Coffee or water?”
“Nah, I’m good.” He didn’t sit. Stayed leaning, arms crossed, head tilted, looking at me like I was more interesting than whatever meeting he was here for. “So you’re the one behind all those emails.”
“I’m his assistant.”
“That’s not what I meant. I’ve been emailing this office for three weeks and every response was perfect. Timing, tone, follow-up. Told my partner, whoever’s running Kingsley’s calendar is sharper than half the execs we deal with.”
“Flattery before a business meeting.” I leaned back in my chair. “Bold strategy.”
He grinned wider. “Depends. Is it working?”
“Coffee machine’s to your left if you change your mind.”
He laughed and stayed put. Kept talking, easy and relaxed, like a guy who was used to filling silences and enjoyed doing it. Asked how long I’d been here, whether Finneas was always this hard to pin down for a meeting, whether I was the reason the quarterly reports had gotten so much cleaner in the last two years. That last one was flattering enough that I almost told him yes, but I kept it professional because that’s what I did. I was good at my job and part of being good at my job was not letting clients think I was the one making the decisions, even when I was.
“I just organize things,” I said. “The decisions are all Finneas.”
“Sure they are.” He grinned, and it was charming in a no-strings way, the grin of a guy who flirted with everyone from baristas to board members and didn’t mean anything serious by any of it.
He told me about a pitch meeting last month where the projector died mid-presentation and he had to draw his entire slide deck on a whiteboard in front of twelve investors. “By slide six I was freehand drawing a bar graph and one of the investors asked if the dip in Q3 revenue was real or just my artistic interpretation.”
I laughed, genuinely, because he told it well and the image of a guy in a suit frantically sketching pie charts while investors squinted at his handwriting was objectively funny.
He put his hand on my shoulder while he was hitting the punchline. His palm warm, fingers curling over the top of my shoulder. Casual, automatic, the way some people talked with their whole body and didn’t think about where their hands landed.
Behind me, a door slammed open.
Finneas was at my desk in three strides. I didn’t even get to turn around before his hand closed around Clark’s wrist and lifted it off my shoulder. Firm, deliberate, jaw locked and eyes flat and dark in a way I’d never seen directed at a client before.
Clark blinked. “Hey, I was just-”
“I’d appreciate it if we kept things professional in this office,” Finneas said, and his voice was low and controlled but his eyes were absolutely not.
He let go of Clark’s wrist and stepped back. “Come inside.”
Clark glanced at me. I was sitting very still at my desk with my hands in my lap and my face on fire, my heart doing something fast and confusing that I refused to examine. He straightened hisjacket, cleared his throat, and followed Finneas into the office. The door shut behind them.
I stared at my screen. My pulse was still going and my cheeks were burning and I couldn’t tell if it was from anger or embarrassment or something else entirely, something that felt a lot like a rush, which pissed me off even more.
Professional. He said professional. As if I was the one doing something wrong, as if I was out there flirting on company time instead of literally sitting at my own desk doing my job while a client talked to me. Clark was being friendly and maybe a little handsy but I was handling it fine, had been handling men like Clark since I was old enough to work, and I didn’t need my boss to come charging out of his office like I couldn’t manage a goddamn palm on my shoulder. And I sure as hell didn’t need him saying “keep things professional” in that voice, in front of a client, like I was the problem here.
My hands were curled into fists in my lap. What the hell was that?
The meeting ran for an hour. I sat at my desk the entire time pretending to work while replaying the last three minutes on a loop in my head. His hand on Clark’s wrist. The grip, the speed, the way he crossed the floor like Clark’s hand on my shoulder was a personal offense.
Clark came out at three, gave me a polite nod and a much smaller smile than the one he’d walked in with, and headed straight for the elevator without stopping. No leaning on my desk, no joke, barely a glance in my direction. I felt a hot flush of humiliation because a client now thought I’d been reprimanded by my boss for flirting at work, which I was not doing, had neverdone, and was too goddamn professional to do. The irony was physically painful.
I was angry and confused and angry that I was confused, because underneath the embarrassment there was something else I didn’t want to look at too closely.
After the meeting, Finneas didn’t settle back down. If anything, he got worse.
He came out of his office to hand me a file he absolutely could have emailed. His fingers brushed close to mine on the paper and he held it a beat too long before letting go, his eyes on my face the whole time. I pulled the file toward me and our hands touched and a jolt went up my arm so fast I almost dropped it.
“Thanks,” I said, too quickly.
He didn’t move. Just stood there beside my desk, close enough that I could smell his cologne, looking at me with an expression that had no business being on a man who just lectured me about professionalism.
