"I need you to come with me tonight." "As your assistant?" "As someone who won't bore me."
— ◆ —
The call from Catherine Kingsley came at seven forty-three a.m., three days into Zara's tenure, and lasted four minutes during which the word 'darling' was deployed twelve times and not one of them was warm.
Zara had been instructed — by Ethan, by Marcus, by the orientation packet — to route personal calls to voicemail. She had done this. Catherine Kingsley had then called the main office line, the emergency line, and Marcus's personal cell before Ethan, appearing at Zara's doorway with the expression of a man facing a natural disaster, said: "Put her through."
"She wants you at the gala," Zara said, after the call concluded.
"I'm aware."
"She's announcing something. About the foundation. About—" Zara checked her notes. "About the future of the family legacy."
"I'm also aware."
"And you haven't RSVP'd."
"Deliberately."
Zara set down her pen. "You have to go."
He looked up. People did not, she was gathering, tell Ethan Kingsley what he had to do.
"The event has forty-three major donors," she said. "Your foundation funds three children's hospitals, two university research grants, and a clean water program in four countries. If the CEO of the Kingsley Foundation doesn't attend his own mother's gala—"
"I'm not the CEO of the foundation. I'm the chairman."
"That's worse. Chairmen who don't show up look like they're distancing themselves from a sinking ship. Your PR team will spend a month on damage control." She paused. "I looked at your Q4 donor reports."
"I didn't ask you to do that."
"You didn't ask me not to." She held his gaze. "You have to go."
Ethan was quiet for a long moment. Outside, the city hummed forty-two stories below — indifferent, continuous, enormous.
"I need you to come with me tonight," he said at last.
She blinked. "As your assistant?"
He paused, just long enough. "As someone who won't bore me."
Zara's first instinct was to say no. Her second instinct — the one she trusted less but that was usually right — was something else entirely. She looked at this man who ran an empire and couldn't RSVP to his own mother's party and felt, against every professional boundary she'd signed her name to four days ago, something inconveniently like understanding.
"I don't have anything to wear to a gala," she said.
"That's solvable."
"I'm not wearing anything you pick."
"I wasn't going to pick. I was going to send you a car and an account number."
She thought about this. About the professional distance clause in her contract. About the fact that she had six dollars and a MetroCard in her wallet.
"Two conditions," she said.
"Name them."
"I pick my own dress. And when your mother corners me — and she will corner me — I'm allowed to be honest."
Something in Ethan's expression shifted. Opened, slightly. Like a window cracked in a room too long sealed shut.
"Agreed," he said. "On both."
The gala was at the Meridian Hotel. Twelve hundred guests. Every name in the city. And Catherine Kingsley, Zara would discover within thirty seconds of meeting her, was the kind of woman who asked questions that were actually statements and smiled at people while deciding whether to like them.
She looked at Zara, then at her son, then back at Zara.
And she smiled the smile of a woman updating her plans.
"Well," Catherine said. "You're not at all what I expected."
It was only later — in the car home, city lights sliding past the window, Ethan's hand close but not touching hers on the seat between them — that Zara thought to wonder what exactly Catherine had expected.
And what, precisely, she now planned.