ONE NIGHT ONE BOSS

Chapter six

She looked at Sophie the way you look at something new in a space you consider yours.

“You must be the new secretary.” Her voice was pleasant. Her eyes were doing something entirely different.

“Sophie Henry.” Sophie offered her hand. “Can I get you anything before the meeting?”

Vivienne shook her hand a half-beat with a smirk on her face after it was offered, not rude enough to comment on, just enough to land. “Just let Aiden know I’m here.”

Sophie picked up the phone.

In the thirty seconds between the call and Aiden appearing at the boardroom door, she felt Vivienne’s gaze move over her with the brisk efficiency of someone conducting an assessment and reaching a conclusion she’d already half-formed walking in.

Then Aiden came through and Vivienne’s face changed. Not dramatically. Not in a way that anyone not paying close attention would have caught. Just a shift into something warm and proprietary that she wore without appearing to notice she was wearing it.

“Vivienne.”

“Aiden.” The way she said his name was a different language than the way she’d said anything else. He held the door. She went in. It closed behind them.

Sophie went back to her desk and answered four emails and reorganized the afternoon schedule and did not think about the tone of Vivienne Cole’s voice wrapping itself around a single syllable. She was almost entirely successful

The meeting ran past six. Sophie stayed, she always stayed and at seven-thirty Vivienne’s voice was still audible through the boardroom door in the way that voices carried when someone was used to filling rooms. At eight o’clock exactly the door opened and Vivienne emerged alone, pulling on her coat with the practiced ease of someone who was never hurried. She stopped at Sophie’s desk.

“He’ll need coffee before you go.” She said it simply, without looking up from the buttons of her coat. “He always forgets when he’s in there.”

It was small. It was deliberately small. A domestic detail, placed with precision I know things about him that you don’t and I know them so well I mention them casually.“Of course,” Sophie said pleasantly.

Vivienne left without saying anything else.

Sophie made the coffee left the machine, not right, and knocked twice on the boardroom door, and went in and set it down on the table beside the papers.

Aiden looked up. He looked at the coffee. Then at her, in that way, she was cataloging the look that was two seconds when one would do.

“You didn’t need to stay,” he said.

“The Morrison contracts needed attention.”

“That could have waited.”

“It could have,” she agreed.

Something moved behind his eyes. He looked back at the papers.

“Thank you,” he said.

Sophie went back to her desk. She sat down.

She thought about Vivienne, saying he always forgets with the ease of long knowledge.

She thought about the fact that she already knew it. She’d worked out his patterns in week one without being told.

She gathered her things and left. The elevator went down, and the lobby went past and the city received her, cold and enormous and completely uninterested in any of it.

The Marcus problem started with two missing pages. Sophie had prepared the Kellerman file with the thoroughness she applied to everything important, checked twice as standard, then a third time because the Kellerman contract was the kind of thing that didn’t forgive errors. She had printed it herself. Collated it herself. Placed it in the folder and the folder in the boardroom for the Monday morning meeting.

Pages seven and eight were missing from the printed copy.

Aiden noticed within four minutes. The way he looked at Sophie across the conference table was not angry, it was something quieter and more controlled than anger, which was worse. She held his gaze and said she would reprint and bring them in, and she did, and the meeting continued, and afterward nothing was said.

But Sophie sat at her desk and thought about those pages.

She had printed that file. She had checked it. She had done everything she always did, and she was certain of it with the particular certainty of someone who paid close attention to the things they did.

She looked up from her desk.

Marcus Webb was on his way back from the boardroom. He caught her eye and smiled the warm, consistent, perfectly calibrated smile he produced every time.

“These things happen,” he said, easily, without her having said anything at all.

She smiled back. “They do,” she said.

She watched him walk back to his office. She watched the way he moved — unhurried, comfortable, a man with nothing to prove and no reason to feel watched.