MY CEO IN DISGUISE

Chapter Two: Learning the Building

By her third week of watching Sebastian pretend not to know where the break room was, Nora had developed a working theory: whoever hired him for Operations had made a mistake, because the man knew nothing about operating anything.

He didn't know how the coffee machine worked. He didn't know that the elevator on the east side skipped the third floor on odd hours for maintenance. He'd asked Mitchell, in complete sincerity, what a P.O. number was, and Mitchell had looked at him the way people looked at large dogs that might or might not be friendly.

And yet.

He read faster than anyone Nora had ever watched read anything. She'd caught him once, waiting for a meeting to start, flipping through a financial report that should have taken him twenty minutes, and he'd finished in four, and when Mitchell had quizzed him on it afterward, half joking, he'd answered every question without looking back at the page.

She'd filed that away with all the other things about him that didn't quite match.

"You're doing it again," Priya said, sliding into the seat across from Nora at lunch.

"Doing what."

"The face. The one where you're solving a math problem, except the math problem, is a man."

"I don't have a face."

"You have several faces, and that one's my favourite." Priya unwrapped her sandwich with the efficiency of someone who took lunch breaks seriously. "What's the theory today?"

Nora hesitated, which was answer enough.

"Oh my god, you have a theory."

"I don't have a theory."

"You absolutely have a theory. Tell me the theory."

Nora glanced toward the door, an old habit she couldn't seem to unlearn even though Sebastian never ate in the cafeteria and lowered her voice anyway. "He's too smart to be doing what he's doing. He reads reports like he wrote them. He asked me last week what a P.O. number was and then two days later corrected Mitchell's math on a spreadsheet in about six seconds."

"Maybe he's a genius who's bad at printers."

"Nobody's that specific kind of inconsistent."

"Maybe he's independently wealthy and doesn't need the job and is just doing it for fun." Priya said it like a joke. Nora didn't laugh because some small, traitorous part of her brain had already considered it and filed it as plausible.

"Or," Priya went on, warming to the theory now that she'd built it, "maybe he's undercover. Secret shopper for corporate. Testing us all."

"That's ridiculous."

"You started it."

"I said he was smart. You're the one who invented a spy plot."

Priya grinned around a bite of her sandwich. "Sure. Anyway, speaking of the mysterious Sebastian, Mitchell wants the two of you on the Ashford file together this afternoon. Something about him needing to learn client relations before they move him somewhere permanent."

Nora's stomach did something complicated. "Together. As in, alone. In a conference room."

"As in exactly that, yes." Priya's grin widened. "Try not to undress him with your eyes across the table. It's harder to disguise at close range."

The Ashford file, it turned out, was three inches thick and represented an account Nora had personally managed for two years, a mid-size logistics company whose owner called twice a week with complaints that were rarely about logistics and mostly about being listened to. She'd learned to handle him the way you'd handle any client who mostly wanted to feel important, and she was good at it, better than good, and she'd expected to spend the afternoon explaining the basics to someone who still asked what a P.O. number was.

She had not expected Sebastian to already know who Ashford was.

"He called corporate directly last spring," Sebastian said, flipping through the file with the same unnerving speed he'd shown with the financial report. "Threatened to pull the account over a shipping delay that wasn't actually anyone's fault."

Nora blinked. "How do you know that?"

Something flickered behind his eyes, gone almost before she caught it. "I read the file this morning," he said. "Before you got here."

"The whole file."

"I'm a fast reader."

"Nobody's that fast a reader."

"You'd be surprised what you can do when you're motivated," he said, and there was something in the way he said it, low, almost private, that made her chest tighten in a way that had nothing to do with the Ashford account.

She made herself look back down at the file. "Well. Since you've apparently done my homework for me, what's your read on him?"

"He doesn't want a solution," Sebastian said. "He wants to feel like the most important person in the building for fifteen minutes. Give him that, and he'll sign anything you put in front of him."

It was, word for word, almost exactly what she would have said herself, and she looked up at him properly for the first time since he'd sat down, something unguarded in her expression before she could smooth it away.

"That's exactly right," she said.

"You look surprised."

"I am surprised. Most people who've never sat across from him think the solution's in the numbers."

"The numbers are never the problem," Sebastian said. "They're just what people hide behind when the real problem's something they don't want to say out loud."

There was a silence after that, the kind that stretched a beat too long, and Nora was aware, suddenly and completely, of exactly how close his knee was to hers under the conference table, close enough that if either of them shifted even slightly they'd be touching, and she was equally aware that neither of them had moved to close that distance or widen it, which felt, somehow, worse than either option would have.

"You're staring at me," Sebastian said, quiet, almost amused.

"I am not."

"You are. It's fine. I'm staring back."

Her face went hot in a way she couldn't blame on the conference room's terrible air conditioning. "That's not appropriate."

"Probably not," he agreed and didn't look away.

The door opened.

Mitchell stuck his head in, oblivious to whatever had just been happening in the three feet of air between them, waving a phone in one hand. "Nora, sorry to interrupt, Ashford's on the line, and he's asking for you specifically. He says he doesn't trust anyone else with his account."

Nora stood up fast enough to knock her knee against the table, grateful for an excuse to put distance between herself and whatever she'd almost let happen in that room, and didn't look back at Sebastian as she followed Mitchell out.

Sebastian watched her go, and when the door clicked shut behind her, he let himself sit in the silence for exactly three seconds before he reached for his phone and typed a message to the one person in the building who knew who he really was.

She's better than the entire executive team combined,he wrote. Why is she still a secretary.

The reply came back almost instantly.

Because nobody's ever promoted her. You'd know that if you'd read her personnel file instead of watching her from across a conference table.

Sebastian's jaw tightened. He had read her personnel file. He'd read it twice, actually, memorized the parts that mattered and several that didn't, and he still hadn't found an answer to the only question he actually wanted answered, which was why a woman that sharp had spent three years letting people like Mitchell take credit for her instincts.

Keep her off the Whitfield transition. He typed back. I don't want her anywhere near the board until I know where the leak's coming from.

There was a pause before the response came through.

You know, if you keep pulling her closer to protect her, that's exactly how people start asking questions about why the new guy cares so much what happens to the secretary.

Sebastian didn't answer that one. He set the phone face down on the table and looked at the closed conference room door for a long moment, thinking about the exact color her eyes had gone when he'd told her he was staring back, and thinking, too, about the betrayal that had put him in this building under a name that wasn't his own in the first place, and how much simpler everything had been before he'd started caring whether Nora Grace got credit for her own work.

It would have been easier, he thought, if she'd been ordinary. If she'd been just another employee to watch and assess and forget.

She was not making it easy.