Page 6 of After-Hours Heir

Her mind was spinning in circles. The meeting. Last night. The giddy feeling that her secret created inside of her. The reality of what was happening with work.

How disappointed her father would be if she couldn’t save this. And then somehow the way that her mother was just always unimpressed. No matter what.

Around and around in her head as the elevator went to her office floor.

She walked in, and was satisfied to see that she was one of the first people there, which meant she didn’t have a lot ofconversations as she navigated the narrow hallways and went toward her office. The office that she knew so many people at the company didn’t think she had earned.

One she sat in largely because of her father. It was true; it was also true that she had eaten, slept and breathed this publishing house from the time she was a teenager.

If not before.

She had been raised here.

She had sat in this office underneath her father’s desk, listening to him talk about books, profit margins and distributors from the time she was a little girl.

Had she been given something she might not have gotten otherwise? Yes.

Some days it was really hard for her to think that she deserved it. But she didn’t think there was anyone else who knew it better.

Because she hadn’t just been raised in a bubble and handed the publisher. She had been raisedinthe publisher, and she had been raisedforit. When her father had died, she was the one who helped muscle them out of the hole.

It was only now the board seemed to forget. Five years on and she wasn’t seen as a wunderkind, but as a mediocre nepo baby. She could feel it.

And that was the story of her life. Always underwhelming, no matter what.

She pushed open her office door and stopped dead.

Therehewas. Standing with his back to her, broad shoulders made sharp by the severe cut of his black suit. His black hairstyle sleek and ruthless as the rest of him. With the sunlight shining across him, she was certain she could see some strands of gray there.

But they weren’t flaws.

No.

Christos Onassis did not doflaws.

Of course, he was in her office, in her building before her.

That was who he was, how he was.

She did her best not to catalog every interaction, every encounter she’d ever had with him over the last twelve plus years because there was just no reason to go over that.

And over, and over it.

She dreaded seeing his face. As if he sensed her trepidation, he turned slowly.

And then, she was looking square at her enemy. The enemy that made her whole body freeze up every time she saw him.

She remembered one time when her father had taken her to church, a rare occurrence but something that happened on occasion when he felt guilty about the manner in which he was raising her. She remembered the priest saying that Satan had been God’s most beautiful angel. That he had felt he was himself godlike, deserving of worship and praise, and it was why he had fallen.

Christos Onassis, unsuitably named for Christ, seemed to her closer to Lucifer than anything else.

Beautiful. In an otherworldly way.

Arrogant. As if he, too, would boldly claim he was worthy of more praise than God himself.

His eyes were so dark they were nearly black, his brows definitive slashes across his glorious brown skin. His face was sculpted to perfection. High cheekbones, the square jaw. His lips the only thing that looked like they had the potential to soften.

And yet she had never seen that.