Sofia
The sky was as black as it ever got in a big city. If the darkness didn’t give it away, the chill in the March air trumpeted that it was way too early to be standing outside the Blake Enterprises offices.
It was five fifteen in the morning.
Natalie had said that she once got into the office at six and that Andrew looked like he’d been there a while. I needed to catch him arriving. From what Natalie said, it wasn’t going to be easy to get access to him if I didn’t. That’s why I’d already been here for twenty minutes.
When I’d finally convinced Natalie that me going for her job wasn’t the worst thing that was ever going to happen, she pulled up a picture of Andrew so I’d know who I was accosting in the middle of the street. At first I assumed that she’d pulled up the wrong shot, because how could anybody so handsome be such an asshole? He was better looking than every male member of the Avengers cast—combined. Like someone had stuck John Kennedy Junior’s hair, chin, and signature smirk on Chris Hemsworth’s bod. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, if I hadn’t wanted a job from the guy, I think I’d still be outside his office at five a.m. to catch a glimpse.
I stood on my tiptoes, trying to see down the street for the flash of headlights coming in my direction. Nothing. Not even a delivery van. Across the street, an early-morning runner headed in my direction in a gray hoodie, his face obscured by the hood. A car going by caught my attention and when I looked back to the jogger, he was crossing the street toward me.
Adrenaline pushed into my hands and I got out my cell. Shit. I was out here on my own. I was just about to press call on Natalie’s number when the runner stopped and pulled down his hood.
I’d seen that pretty face before.
“Andrew Blake?” I didn’t need to ask. It was obvious. His John-Kennedy-Junior-had-a-baby-with-Chris-Hemsworth thing was in full swing. He was just missing the smirk—and thank God, or my vagina might have caught on fire. The man was even more gorgeous in the flesh.
He snapped his head around at my question and met my gaze, his disapproving frown burrowing under my coat and heading between my legs. He was still hot, even when he looked like he was about to bite me.
“I’m Sofia Rossi.” I held out my hand.
“So?” Ignoring my hand, he pulled out a bunch of keys and unlocked the gray door I’d been waiting in front of.
“So I’m a graduate of Columbia University. I’m a hard worker. I’m creative and organized and super flexible. And I want to be your assistant.”
“You’re American,” he said, almost spitting the words out as if he couldn’t possibly fathom a worse idea than having an American as an assistant.
“New Yorker. I’m tough as nails and ready for anything.”
He unlocked the final lock. “Not interested.” He pulled the door open and went inside.
I wasn’t giving up that easily. I caught the door just before it closed and followed him up the stairs, glancing at the elevator and wondering why we weren’t using it.
What was it about guys’ asses that they always looked at least thirty percent better in track pants? It was all I could do not to reach out and cup his perfect butt cheeks to see if they were as rock hard as they looked. “I heard your assistant quit. If you hire me, you don’t have to go to the trouble of finding someone else.”
He didn’t respond.
We stopped at the second floor, where Andrew bent to unlock the bottom lock of the double glass doors.
“I’m here, ready to work immediately.”
Still ignoring me, he unlocked the top lock, pushed through the doors and then switched on the lights, revealing a white, bright lobby area. I glanced around, taking in the clean, modern furniture that looked like it had never been sat on.
“I’m an early riser and—”
Andrew headed left into a small office, which seemed a bit cramped for a dick-swinging life destroyer, but as I followed him in, I realized there was a door on the other side of the desk he was heading toward. I chased after him.
But he disappeared behind the second door just before slamming it in my face.
Okay, that could have gone better.
But at least I was in his office. And he wasn’t trying to escort me off the premises.
I leaned on the desk in the outer office and caught sight of Natalie’s raspberry cashmere scarf on the coatrack behind the desk. She could afford cashmere, given her salary. All money I could use to get myself off her couch and into an apartment of my own. I wasn’t about to be beaten by Andrew Blake’s bad mood. No sirree.
I took a seat behind the desk and switched on the computer, then looked around at the papers on the desk. Some of it was covered in squiggles that looked remarkably reminiscent of a cartoon Natalie holding a cartoonishly large chef’s knife. There was a small stack of research on a magazine called Verity, Inc. At the bottom of the pile was a paper calendar. How charming. I pulled it open and found the right page. It didn’t look like Andrew had any appointments until noon. So what was he doing in the office at this hour?
I resolved to hang around until he came out and I could convince him that hiring me was the best decision he would make this week.
I stood, pulled off my coat, and hung it next to Natalie’s scarf, took out a notebook from my purse and started to look around. The first thing I could do was tidy up. Not that the place was a mess, but judging by the fact that the entrance lobby looked like it was ready for open-heart surgery, I guessed that Andrew liked everything just perfect. Yes, I’d show him, not just tell him, how helpful I could be. Prove to him that there was no task too menial.
I set about clearing the desk. I took Natalie’s coffee cup and went to find the kitchen. It was completely spotless. I dunked the cup into the dishwasher and set about making myself a coffee in a fresh cup. Something told me that winning Andrew over was going to be a marathon, not a sprint. For a moment I thought about making Andrew a coffee, but he didn’t look the type. With his bod, he probably only ever drank glacier water and protein drinks.
“Can I help you?” a man asked from behind me.
I turned to find an older man looking at me like I was an errant schoolgirl. My heart began to scamper in circles around my chest. I was at a crossroads.
Not much defeated me, but I would struggle to make up a believable story even if a lifetime supply of Ferrara’s cannoli was at stake. It was why I’d initially started spending Saturday mornings emptying trash cans with my mother rather than doing whatever it was that eight-year-olds did on the weekends. I’d told her I’d finished my math homework. My mom could tell from a mile away I hadn’t been telling the truth, and for the next five years, my Saturday mornings were lost. Swift and severe punishment had always been Mamma Rossi’s style.
But now it was sink or swim. I needed this job, and I wasn’t a kid anymore.
“Good morning,” I said like I’d known the stranger in front of me our whole lives. I beamed up at him. “I’m Sofia, Andrew’s new assistant. I’ve taken over from Natalie.” Was it technically a lie if I was going to be Andrew’s new assistant but I just hadn’t been hired yet?
He stepped back. “He recruited someone new already?”
I shrugged. “I started this morning. Can I get you a coffee?”
He pulled his eyebrows together. “You don’t need to do that. We get our own coffees around here.” He pulled off a checked hat that made him look like an old-school private investigator and headed out of the kitchen. “But . . .” He turned back. “Next time you go in to Andrew, could you take some data I have on—You signed an NDA, right?”
I nodded, trying my best to look convincing.
“Some stuff on Verity.” He pulled open the bag he was carrying and brought out some paper. “It’s a complete disaster and I need Andrew to see it.”
“Sure, no problem.” I took the three sheets of numbers from him.
He nodded but didn’t move away. “A word of warning. He won’t like what you’re giving him, so hand it over and . . . duck. Or run.”
I kept my smile firmly fixed on my face, wondering whether or not I was about to be a victim of a 217—assault with an intent to murder. “No problem,” I said. “Leave it with me. Should I tell him who it’s from?”
Too late. The man in the hat had disappeared. Apparently, my storytelling had levelled up some time in the last twenty years. I scooped up my coffee cup and headed back to my desk—or what would be my desk once I actually worked here.
After I’d finished tidying the office and brewed my second cup of coffee, I called Natalie to get the password to the computer. Despite the fact that she begged me to come home and offered to lend me money to get me through the next month, she relented. She gave me the password (g0_2_He11_BLakE) and a truncated list of her day-to-day duties, and explained where she kept her electronic to-do list. I skipped over the part where Andrew hadn’t yet agreed to have me as an employee. I was manifesting hard enough to rip a hole in the universe, so I didn’t need to dwell on the fact that it hadn’t happened yet.
I’d not heard a sound from Andrew’s office and half suspected he wasn’t there at all. Maybe his office was three miles away through a maze of endless corridors, and I was sitting in front of an empty room.
Each of Natalie’s saved folders were organized by company. She had said something about how Andrew went into companies that were facing collapse and fired all the workers and made lots of money. From a brief Google search last night, I’d worked out that he was a turnaround specialist. He turned around failing companies. Natalie had made him sound like a monster, but surely if he stopped companies going to the wall, he was saving, not destroying, jobs.
If the hat guy had given me data on Verity, maybe that was a company Andrew was considering saving. I pulled up Natalie’s file and read all the documentation. Verity, Inc. began as a serious, journalist-led magazine at the start of the last century—like a British version of The New Yorker—but had been reinvented at some point. Now it was more like the National Enquirer.
It didn’t take an MBA to spot falling profits and plummeting circulation on the papers Hat Man had given me.
The company was ripe for a turnaround.
This must be Andrew’s next project. I just needed to figure out how to get him to hire me, so I could help turn Verity around.