MY CEO IN DISGUISE

Nora Grace had exactly four minutes before her boss expected the quarterly reports on his desk, and she was spending every one of them staring at a stapler. Not really the stapler. The man standing at the supply cabinet three feet away from it, rifling through folders like he'd never seen a filing system in his life. He'd started two weeks ago. Some kind of operations consultant, according to HR, brought in to shadow different departments before settling somewhere permanent. Nobody seemed to know exactly what that meant, and nobody seemed to care enough to ask twice because he had a way of answering questions that ended conversations rather than opened them. Nora cared. She just didn't ask. His name was Sebastian. Sebastian, something, she'd never quite caught the last name, and it annoyed her more than it should have that she hadn't found a polite way to ask again. He wore his sleeves rolled to the forearm even in a building that ran the air conditioning like it was punishing someone, and when he leaned over a desk to read something, he had this habit of resting two fingers against his jaw like he was holding a thought in place. She had noticed that habit. She had noticed several habits. She was, frankly, noticing far too much for a woman who had a stack of reports due in four minutes. Three, now. Her mind did the thing it had been doing for the better part of two weeks, the thing she scolded herself for every single time and did anyway. It built a version of the next thirty seconds that had nothing to do with quarterly reports. In it, he looked up from the folders at exactly the wrong moment, caught her watching, and instead of the polite, unreadable half smile he usually gave the rest of the office, something sharper crossed his face. Something that said he'd noticed her noticing and had been waiting for it. In her head, he didn't say anything clever. He just crossed the three feet between the cabinet and her desk, slow enough that she'd have time to look away and didn't, and set his hand flat on the surface beside her keyboard, close enough that she could feel the heat coming off him. In her head, the office emptied out around them, the way rooms did in daydreams, inconveniently and conveniently at once. In her head, she wasn't the one who kept her composure. "Nora Grace." She blinked. Priya was standing at the edge of her cubicle wall with a mug in each hand and an expression that suggested she'd said Nora's name more than once. "I said, do you want coffee," Priya repeated, "or are you going to keep undressing the new guy with your eyes from across the room." Nora felt her face go warm in a way that had nothing to do with the office thermostat. "I have no idea what you're talking about." "Uh huh." Priya glanced over her shoulder at Sebastian, who had abandoned the supply cabinet and was now standing near the printer with the particular helpless look of a man who did not know how to clear a paper jam. "You've been staring at him for ten minutes. I timed it." "You did not time it." "I absolutely timed it." Nora closed the folder in front of her, mostly so she'd have something to do with her hands. "He's just new. I'm being neighbourly." "Neighbourly," Priya said, in the tone of someone filing that word away for later use against her. "Sure. Well, your neighbourly quarterly reports are due in what, two minutes? Mitchell already asked me twice if you were done." Nora was up out of her chair before Priya finished the sentence, scooping the folder and her tablet against her chest, smoothing the front of her blazer with one hand in the particular motion of a woman trying to look like she had not, in fact, spent the last several minutes constructing an elaborate fantasy about the temp in Operations. She did not look at Sebastian on her way past the printer. She was proud of that, actually. It took real effort. She almost made it. "Ms. Grace." His voice caught her two steps past him, low and even, the kind of voice that didn't need volume because people simply stopped when it spoke. She turned, and there was a version of her, a very small, very inconvenient version of her, that expected to find him looking at her exactly the way he had in her head a minute ago. He wasn't. He was holding up a jammed sheet of paper with faint apology in his expression, like a man asking a favour he already suspected would be denied. "I don't suppose you know how to make this thing stop hating me," he said. There was something almost boyish in it, which didn't match anything else about him, the way he held himself, the watch on his wrist that looked like it cost more than her car, the stillness he carried into every room like he was used to people waiting on his next word. It didn't match, and that mismatch was exactly the kind of detail Nora had learned in two weeks, not to think too hard about. She set her folder down on the printer tray and reached past him to pop the tray release, and for one unbearable second his arm was right there, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him through her sleeve, and every ridiculous thing she'd been imagining ten minutes ago came rushing back at once, uninvited and entirely unhelpful. "You have to pull the tray all the way out," she said, and was relieved her voice came out steady. "Not halfway. All the way, or it just thinks it's stuck." "Noted," he said. He was watching her hands rather than the printer. She was fairly sure of it, though when she glanced up, his eyes had already moved, innocent, unreadable, back to the machine. "Thank you." "Don't mention it." She picked her folder back up and made herself walk away at a normal pace, and it was only once she was in the elevator, alone, doors closing, that she let herself exhale properly. "It's just a crush," she told the mirrored doors. "He's new, and he's attractive, and you have eyes. That's all this is." The elevator didn't answer, which was the correct amount of input for that particular pep talk. Two floors up, in the executive suite that Nora had visited exactly twice in three years and only ever by appointment, Sebastian Cole stood at the window of an office that was not his printer jam problem to solve, watching the city do what it always did at that hour, and thinking about the exact moment Nora Grace's hand had brushed his arm at the tray release. He should not have been thinking about it. He had considerably larger problems, a board meeting in forty minutes among them, and a woman two floors down who thought his last name was something forgettable instead of the one printed on the building's deed. He thought about it anyway. Behind him, his assistant, the real one, the one who knew exactly who he was, cleared her throat. "Sir," she said. "Mr. Whitfield is asking about the fourth quarter numbers again, and I need to know how long you intend to keep pretending you don't know how a printer works." Sebastian didn't turn from the window. "As long as it takes," he said. "That's not an answer." "It's the only one I've got," he said, and let himself think, for one more second, about warm hands and a low voice telling him not to mention it, before he put his real face back on and went to deal with the board.