CHAPTER 3
The door burst open.
"Adrian! Buddy!"
We sprang apart like teenagers caught behind the bleachers. I nearly concussed myself on the wall. Adrian took a very large step backward and somehow managed to look like he'd been examining the baseboards for dust. He was terrible at this. Genuinely terrible. It was almost endearing.
A head of artfully tousled brown hair appeared around the doorframe. Leo Ashford. Younger brother to my terrifying boss. Human golden retriever. The anti-Adrian. He was wearing a blazer over a t-shirt that said "I paused my game to be here" and grinning like he'd just won the lottery.
"Your mother's on line two and she's FURIOUS. Like, capital letters furious. I could hear her through the phone before I even picked it up. She's developed new powers, I think. Telepathic yelling."
Leo's eyes drifted from his brother to me. Then back to his brother. Then back to me. His grin widened to proportions that should have been physically impossible.
"Oh," he said. "Oh, ho, ho. Am I interrupting something?"
"No," Adrian said. Too quickly.
"Yes," I said at the same time. "Wait. No. We were discussing... audits. Forensic ones. Very forensic. The most forensic audits you've ever seen."
Leo leaned against the doorframe with the casual ease of someone who'd never been intimidated by anything in his life. He crossed his arms. He looked at my blouse. He looked at my earrings. He looked at his brother, who was radiating enough tension to power a small city.
"Izzy, sweetheart. Let me paint you a picture of what I'm seeing. Your blouse is buttoned wrong. You've got a taco hanging off your ear—excellent choice, by the way, very festive. And my brother looks like he's about to spontaneously combust. Like, actual smoke coming out of his collar. I'm not a detective, but I play one in video games, and even I can tell something happened in here."
"Line two?" Adrian's voice could have flash-frozen lava.
"Right, right. Mom. Yes." Leo didn't move an inch. "She wants to know why you missed Sunday dinner. Again. This is the fifth time, apparently. She's keeping a list. She laminated it. She's threatening to come to the office, Adrian. In person. She said, and I'm quoting here because I wrote it down to make sure I got it right, 'If my son can't find time for his family, I'll bring the family to him. Tell him I know seventeen eligible women who would love to meet a successful, single CEO with the emotional range of a stapler.'"
Seventeen eligible women.
I felt something twist in my chest. Something sharp and unexpected and deeply unwelcome. It was probably just hunger. Or the granola bar. The granola bar from possibly last winter that I'd definitely eaten in the car.
"Seventeen eligible women," I heard myself say. "Wow. That's... such a specific number. A whole... roster. A lineup. A buffet of eligible women."
Adrian's head snapped toward me. His eyes were doing something complicated. Something I couldn't read because I was too busy wanting the floor to swallow me whole.
"It's irrelevant."
"Sounds relevant." Why was I still talking? Someone needed to stop me. Where was my filter? Still napping? "Sounds like seventeen very relevant—"
"They're not—I'm not interested in—" He was actually struggling. Mr. Precision. Mr. Every-Word-Chosen-Carefully. Stumbling over his sentences like a teenager with his first crush. "My mother has boundary issues. This is a known problem. I've spoken to her about it. Multiple times."
"And you have emotional expression issues," Leo offered cheerfully. "It's a family thing. Dad's the same. Once gave Mom a toaster for their anniversary because he 'noticed she liked bread.'"
"The toaster was a premium model," Adrian muttered. "Four slots. Adjustable browning settings."
"She wanted jewelry, Adrian. A necklace. Something shiny. She cried for three days. We had to stage an intervention. There were diagrams. Charts."
I watched this exchange with a growing sense of complete unreality. I'd entered this building seventeen minutes late with mismatched earrings and a blouse buttoned by what I can only assume was a poltergeist. Now I was witnessing my terrifying, emotionally constipated boss get absolutely roasted by his younger brother about his family's generational romantic incompetence, all while standing close enough to smell his extremely expensive cologne and remember the exact shade of pink his ears had turned.
"Isabelle."
I snapped back to the present. Adrian was looking at me with that intensity. The one that made me forget how words worked.
"Thursday," he said, and his voice was different now. Quieter. Almost... soft? No. Not soft. Adrian Ashford didn't do soft. But maybe something adjacent to soft. Soft-adjacent. "The audit."
"Thursday," I echoed, my voice coming out slightly strangled. "Unless your mother kills you first. Or the seventeen eligible women form a coalition and take you down. Death by matchmaking."
A beat of silence. A tiny, fragile beat.
And then—I swear on my taco earring this happened—the corner of Adrian Ashford's mouth twitched. Upward. It wasn't a smile. A smile's distant cousin, twice removed, who'd only heard about smiles through family gossip. But it was something.
"The audit," he repeated, and he was definitely looking at my taco earring now. Definitely. "I'll be reviewing it personally."
"Creepy," Leo coughed into his fist. "Bro. Buddy. That sounded creepy. 'I'll be reviewing it personally'—do you hear yourself? Do you listen to the words that come out of your own mouth?"
"I'll be in my office," I announced, the words tumbling out in a rush. I was clutching the Kelman folder so hard my knuckles had gone white. "Auditing. Forensically. Probably dying. If anyone needs me, I'll be the one sobbing quietly into a spreadsheet and questioning every life choice that brought me to this moment."
I turned. I fled. My misbuttoned blouse flapped dramatically behind me like a flag of surrender.
"Isabelle."
Adrian's voice stopped me at the door. I froze. One foot in the hallway, one foot still in his office. Literally and metaphorically caught between worlds.
I looked back over my shoulder.
He was standing behind his desk again. Composed. Professional. Untouchable. But his eyes—his stupid, grey, impossible-to-read eyes—were fixed on me with an intensity that made my stomach do a backflip.
"Fix your buttons before the client meeting at ten." A pause. So slight I almost missed it. "And the taco... can stay."
He sat down. Opened a file. Started reading. Dismissed me so completely and efficiently that I almost wondered if I'd imagined the whole thing.
But I hadn't. Because as he turned back to his desk, I saw it. The full, unmistakable flush climbing up the back of his neck. Adrian Ashford, who once sent a company-wide memo about the proper orientation of paperclips, was blushing.
The taco can stay.
From any other man, that sentence would be nothing. A throwaway comment. Mildly amusing at best. But from the man who had once emailed me at midnight about a semicolon?
It was practically a love sonnet.
I walked to my desk in a daze. I sat down. I opened the Kelman folder. Three thousand pages of financial anomalies. Two days to complete an impossible task. The numbers blurred in front of my eyes, meaningless little digits dancing across the page.
Somewhere behind me, I heard Leo's voice drift out of the office. He wasn't even trying to be quiet.
"—got it BAD, dude. Like, rom-com bad. Hallmark Channel bad. Just ask her to dinner. Use words. Human words. 'Would you like to have dinner with me, Isabelle?' See? Easy. Seven words. You use more than that in your coffee order."
And then Adrian's reply. Barely audible. Almost swallowed by the hum of the office printer and the distant sound of Henderson probably eating another crayon.
"...I don't know how."