ONE NIGHT ONE BOSS

Chapter four

She used them to confirm what some cold, certain part of her already knew the moment the door opened, and she felt the particular quality of the air in the room change.

Aiden Thomas looked up from his desk.

He looked directly at her.

Nothing.

Not a flicker. Not a pause. Not the smallest thing behind his eyes that said I know you.

He stood and extended his hand across the desk.

“Miss Henry.”

Sophie Henry shook the hand of the man she had spent one night with three weeks ago, and smiled, and sat down, and answered every question he asked her with complete composure.

She got the job.

She took it.

And she told herself, riding the elevator down with her heart somewhere in the vicinity of her throat, that this was practical. That this was survival. That she was an adult making a sensible decision.

She told herself this all the way home.

She told herself this while she called Dara and gave her the edited version.

She told herself this while she lay in bed that night staring at the ceiling, holding a hotel notepad card she should have thrown away three weeks ago.

Thank you for your honesty.

She put it in her bedside drawer and turned off the light.

Or way, she walked through it with her spine straight and her face arranged and her pulse doing something she chose not to acknowledge.

Janet was waiting for her on the executive floor. She was a small woman in her late fifties with sharp eyes and a manner of moving through the office that suggested she had outlasted many things and intended to outlast many more. She shook Sophie’s hand briskly and began the tour without preamble.

“The CEO arrives at eight-thirty every morning without exception. He takes his coffee black, no sugar, made in the machine on the left, not the right. The right makes it too hot, and he won’t say so, but he won’t drink it. He doesn’t like email marked urgent unless it is actually urgent, and his threshold for actually urgent is higher than most people’s. He will not tell you when you’ve done something right. He will tell you when you’ve done something wrong, and he will do it once, and after that he expects it not to happen again.”

Sophie nodded and took mental notes.

“He’s not a bad man,” Janet said, in the tone of someone who had considered the matter carefully. “He is simply a very particular one. Most assistants find that difficult.”

“I’m not most assistants,” Sophie said.

Janet looked at her for a moment with those sharp eyes. “No,” she said. “We’ll see.”

She saw Aiden three times in the first hour.

The first time was at eight-thirty precisely, when he came through the glass doors with the energy of a man who had already been working for hours and found the rest of the world slightly behind. He acknowledged Sophie with a brief, professional, impersonal nod, the nod you give to a piece of office furniture that has been correctly placed.