MY CEO IN DISGUISE

Chapter Five: The Accident

The board vote was still two days away when Sebastian found himself standing outside Nora's cubicle at six in the evening, holding two coffee cups and an excuse he hadn't fully thought through.

"Ashford wants to meet in person," he said, which was true, if not the whole truth. "Tonight. He's three hours away and won't do it by phone. Mitchell's out sick and asked if one of us could go."

Nora looked up from her monitor, one eyebrow raised in a way that told him she suspected there was more to the story than he was offering. "One of us."

"You know the account better than anyone in the building. I know how to drive."

"That's your entire qualification."

"It's a strong qualification," he said, and something in his voice, some flicker of dry humour he rarely let show, pulled the corner of her mouth up despite herself.

She agreed. He told himself it was purely professional, the two of them in his car an hour later, headlights cutting through an early dark that had rolled in with a storm nobody had forecast, rain starting somewhere around the second exit and thickening steadily after that. He told himself a lot of things during that drive that weren't entirely true, including that the reason his hand kept finding an excuse to brush hers on the console between them was an accident every single time.

"You didn't have to come," Nora said, watching the rain streak sideways across the windshield. "I could have handled Ashford alone."

"I know."

"Then why."

He didn't answer right away, eyes on the road, on the water pooling faster than the wipers could clear it, on the taillights ahead going hazy and doubled in the wet dark. "Because I didn't want you driving three hours alone in this," he said finally, quieter than he meant to. "That's all."

"That's not an operations answer."

"No," he admitted. "It isn't."

She was looking at him when it happened. He'd remember that detail longer than almost anything else about that night, that she was turned toward him, some question half formed on her lips, when the truck coming the other direction hit a patch of standing water and crossed the center line all at once, no warning, no time for anything but his arm snapping out across her chest a half second before impact, an instinct faster than thought.

The sound was the worst part. Metal and glass and her gasp, sharp and short, cut off before it finished.

Then quiet. Rain on the roof. The hiss of the engine somewhere under the crumpled hood.

"Nora." His voice didn't sound like his own. "Nora, look at me."

She turned her head slowly, dazed, a thin line of blood at her hairline where she'd caught the edge of the window frame, and his heart did something violent and painful in his chest at the sight of it.

"I'm okay," she said, though her voice shook. "I think I'm okay."

He didn't believe her, not fully, until the paramedics confirmed it twenty minutes later. Concussion, they said. Some bruising along her ribs from the seatbelt, a cut that would need a few stitches. Lucky, all things considered, given what the front of the truck looked like. Sebastian had walked away with a bruise along his forearm from where he'd thrown it across her and nothing else, and he spent every second of the ambulance ride to the hospital more afraid than he had been in years, watching her hold an ice pack to her head and insist, over and over, that she was fine.

She wasn't allowed to leave the hospital until nearly three in the morning. He stayed the entire time in a plastic chair that did nothing for his back, refusing every suggestion from the nurses that he go home and rest.

"You should sleep," Nora murmured, somewhere around two, her eyes heavy from whatever they'd given her for the pain.

"I'm not tired."

"Liar."

"Maybe," he said, and reached over without entirely deciding to, brushing a strand of hair back from the bandage at her temple, his thumb grazing her cheek the way it had that night at her desk. She turned into the touch slightly, barely, but enough that he felt it in his chest like something breaking open.

"You don't have to stay," she said.

"I know."

"But you are."

"I am," he agreed, and didn't explain why, because he wasn't entirely sure he trusted himself to say it out loud without saying considerably more than he meant to.

The doctor released her the next morning with strict instructions: rest, no screens, no stress, at least a month before returning to anything resembling a desk job, given the concussion. Sebastian sat across from her in the recovery room while the doctor explained it and watched the colour drain slowly out of Nora's face as the words sank in.

"A month," she repeated once the doctor had gone. "I can't take a month off. I'll lose my job."

"You won't lose your job."

"You don't know that. You don't know what kind of leave policy they have for someone who's been there three years and isn't exactly a top earner. They could replace me in a week and call it restructuring."

"Nora."

"I need that job, Sebastian. I don't have some backup plan sitting around if this goes wrong."

"Nora." He said it firmly enough this time that she stopped, startled by the change in his voice, and looked at him properly, some of the fear in her expression giving way to confusion at whatever she saw in his face.

"What."

He exhaled slowly, and for the first time in three months, let the careful, constructed version of himself fall away entirely, sitting there in a hospital recovery room at seven in the morning with dried blood still on his collar from where he'd held pressure on her cut the night before.

"You're not going to lose your job," he said. "Because I'm not Operations. I never was. My name is Sebastian Cole. I own the company. I own the building. Every desk, every floor, all of it. I've been working undercover for three months because someone I trusted stole from me, and I needed to know who else I could trust before I let anyone close again."

Nora stared at him. For a long moment she didn't say anything at all, and he watched her mind work through it, piece by piece, the fast reading, the corrected spreadsheet, the Ashford file he'd somehow already known cold.

"You're the CEO," she said finally, flat, like she was testing the words for weight.

"Yes."

"You've been lying to me for three months."

"Yes."

She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, there were tears in them that he suspected had less to do with the concussion than with him. "Take your month," he said before she could say anything else, his voice low and steady. "Full pay. Your job isn't going anywhere, Nora, and neither, for what it's worth, am I."