NEVER JUST THE ASSISTANT

Chapter 1 — The Interview

The elevator smelled like money.

Not literally, it smelled like cedarwood and something cool and expensive that probably had a French name I couldn't pronounce. But money had a feeling, and this elevator had it. Polished chrome walls. Marble floor that continued seamlessly from the lobby. Soft lighting that made everything look curated, like even the air had been approved by someone in a suit.

I smoothed my skirt with both hands.

It was a habit. My mother had spent the better part of my childhood trying to break me of it Mia, stop fidgeting, you look nervous but twenty-six years in, the hands did what they wanted. And right now, they wanted to smooth the same twelve inches of black fabric they'd already smoothed four times since I walked through the revolving doors.

I was nervous.

I didn't do nervous. I did prepared, I did practical, I did let's get this done. Nervous was a luxury I'd never been able to afford. But the building alone forty-seven floors of steel and glass rising over Midtown Manhattan, the Cole Enterprises logo etched above the entrance in letters that didn't need to be large because they didn't need to try had done something to my composure that I was still recovering from.

The elevator opened on the thirty-eighth floor.

I stepped out.

The lobby up here was quieter than the one downstairs. No security desk, no stream of people coming and going. Just a long reception desk in pale grey stone, a woman behind it with the posture of someone who had never once slouched, and beyond her, a corridor of frosted glass offices that stretched toward a set of double doors at the far end.

Those doors were closed.

I already knew who was behind them.

Ethan Cole. Thirty-four years old. Founder and CEO of Cole Enterprises a global investment and real estate conglomerate valued at eleven billion dollars. He had built the company from nothing in just over a decade, which was the kind of fact that didn't feel real until you were standing in one of his buildings and the marble beneath your feet cost more than your mother's monthly medical bills.

Divorced once. Notoriously private. Rumoured to have gone through three personal assistants in the last two months eleven days, nine days, two days. The last one had apparently cried in the elevator on the way out. Nobody said why. Nobody needed to.

I had read everything I could find about him. I had prepared answers to every question I could anticipate. I had worn my best blazer, my most professional heels, and I had arrived at 8:53am for a 9:00am appointment because early was the only kind of on time that counted.

None of that stopped my hands from smoothing my skirt one more time.

"Miss Reyes?"

The woman behind the desk was already looking at me. Not unkindly, but with the particular efficiency of someone who had learned to assess people in under five seconds.

"Yes," I said. "Mia Reyes. I have a nine o'clock—"

"Mr. Cole will see you now." She was already standing, already moving. Her name badge read Sandra. Her heels made no sound on the marble whatsoever. I made a note to figure out how she did that. "Follow me, please."

Now? It was 8:54am. I followed.

The corridor was longer than it looked. Abstract art on the walls not decorative, not pretty, just expensive and deliberate. The kind of art chosen by someone who didn't care if you liked it. The frosted glass offices on either side were occupied; I caught shapes of people at desks, on calls, heads down. Focused. The whole floor had an energy to it not frantic, but precise. Like a machine that had been very finely tuned.

Sandra stopped at the double doors. Knocked once a single, light knock and opened them.

"Miss Reyes," she announced, and stepped aside.

I walked in.

The office was enormous. Floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides, the entire Manhattan skyline laid out beyond them like something that had been arranged specifically for this room. A desk at the far end dark wood, clean, almost nothing on it. Two chairs facing it. A sitting area to the left that looked like it had never been used.

And a man standing at the window with his back to me.

Tall. Dark suit charcoal, perfectly fitted, not a crease in sight. Dark hair. Hands clasped behind his back, completely still, looking out at the city below him the way someone looks at something they own.

He didn't turn around.

I waited.

The silence stretched for long enough that another person might have filled it might have said good morning or thank you for seeing me or something to acknowledge they were standing in a room being deliberately ignored. I didn't. I clasped my hands in front of me and waited, and the hands, for once, stayed still.

"Sit," he said.

His voice was low. Unhurried. The voice of a man who had never once had to raise it to be heard.

I blinked. "Excuse me?"

Now he turned.

Ethan Cole was and I registered this the way you register something unavoidable, like rain or traffic strikingly handsome. Not in a warm way. Not in a come talk to me way. Sharp jaw, sharp cheekbones, dark eyes that were currently fixed on me with an expression that gave nothing away whatsoever. He was the kind of handsome that came with a warning label, the kind that had clearly made things easier for him his entire life and that he had possibly never once thought about.

He looked at me the way I imagined he looked at everything like he was cataloguing it. Filing it somewhere useful.

"I said sit, Miss Reyes." He moved toward the desk with the ease of someone who had never been uncomfortable in a room in his life. "Or did you come here to stand in my doorway?"

I sat.

He didn't sit immediately. He picked up a single sheet of paper from the desk my resume, I realised and read it in silence. Standing. As if sitting was a decision he made deliberately and hadn't made yet.

I kept my hands in my lap. Kept my expression neutral. Looked at the skyline over his shoulder and reminded myself of three things: I needed this job. I was good at this job. And I did not scare easily.

He sat.

"Four jobs in three years," he said. Not a question.

"Yes."

"Why?"

I had prepared for this. "The first company went bankrupt fourteen months after I joined nothing I could have predicted or prevented. The second relocated their entire operations team to Chicago. The third—" I paused for exactly one beat. "The third, I left by choice."

Those dark eyes didn't move from my face. "Why?"

"The manager had a habit of making the working environment uncomfortable for female staff. I reported it to HR. HR decided there wasn't sufficient evidence to act. I decided there was sufficient evidence for me to leave."

Silence.

He looked at me for a moment that lasted slightly longer than comfortable. Then: "You reported it."

"Yes."

"And when nothing was done?"

"I left. I wasn't going to wait for the second report."

Something shifted in his expression. It wasn't warmth I didn't think this man did warmth, at least not where anyone could see it but something sharpened. Something that looked almost like assessment becoming something else.

"My last assistant lasted eleven days," he said.

"I heard it was a combined total across three assistants."

The shift again. Sharper this time. "You're not what I expected."

"What did you expect?"

"Someone who would pretend not to know the rumours about me."

I held his gaze steadily. My heart was doing something inconvenient in my chest, but my face didn't know that. "Mr. Cole, I've done my research. I know your reputation. I know this role has a high turnover. I'm not going to insult you by pretending otherwise." A breath. "I'm also not going to pretend it doesn't matter to me, because it does. I need this job. My mother is ill and her care is expensive and I am not in a position to be idealistic about employment." I paused. "But I'm also not going to run. I don't do that."

The room was very quiet.

Ethan Cole looked at me across the desk at my face, my posture, my hands folded carefully in my lap and said nothing for long enough that I started to wonder if I had miscalculated. If honesty had been the wrong move. If I should have been softer, more deferential, more

He picked up a pen.

"You'll sign a confidentiality agreement," he said, writing something I couldn't see. "A non-disclosure. A personal conduct clause. You'll be available outside office hours when required I work early and late and I don't apologise for it. You will not discuss anything that happens in this office with anyone. And I don't do second chances." He looked up. "If you disappoint me, you're gone."

I didn't blink. "Then I won't disappoint you."

He held my gaze for one more moment. Then he set the pen down.

"You start Monday," he said. "Seven a.m. Not seven-oh-one."

I stood. Smoothed my skirt once, unavoidable and extended my hand across the desk. He looked at it for a fraction of a second before he stood and took it. His grip was firm and brief and his hand was warm and I absolutely did not notice that.

"Thank you, Mr. Cole."

He said nothing. He was already looking back at the paper on his desk.

Sandra appeared at the door as if she'd been summoned by thought. I followed her back down the long corridor, back past the frosted glass offices, back to the elevator.

The doors closed behind me.

I let out a breath I had been holding for approximately forty minutes.

Then, slowly, in the mirrored chrome of the elevator wall, I allowed myself a single small smile.

Monday. Seven a.m.

I was not going to be late.

But somewhere above me, in an office that cost more than I would earn in a decade, I did not know that Ethan Cole had put down his pen and was standing at his window again looking out at the city.

And for the first time in a very long time, thinking about something other than work.