Page 143 of His Good Girl

“Get to work, Miss Hale.”

I straightened my dress and tried to recover my face, which was impossible because my face had resigned from its normal service. “Fine.”

“Avery.”

I looked back.

His gaze warmed. “Good girl.”

I closed my eyes briefly. “You are doing that on purpose.”

“Yes.”

“I hate you.”

“No, you don’t.”

I smiled despite myself, sat at the desk inside his office, and went to work.

* * *

For the next few days, we settled into something that looked, from a distance, almost like a routine.

Almost.

I worked. Dana gave me increasingly difficult summaries, then stopped standing over me while I did them, which I understood as a form of trust from a woman who probably considered trust a controlled substance. Benjamin insulted me with improving specificity, which meant he was learning my patterns. Marcus began sending me transcripts directly. Priya from legal once said, “Good catch,” when I flagged a phrasing issue in a public statement, and I carried that tiny praise around for two hours like a medal.

And Callum kept his promises in the most aggravating possible way.

At work, he made me work.

He did not rescue me from Dana. He did not soften Benjamin. He did not let me sit in meetings as decoration. If he asked for my opinion and I hedged, he made me say it clearly. If I drifted into apology, he cut me off with one look. If I did well, he praised me precisely enough that the praise felt earned and dirty at the same time.

And then there were the other moments.

The hand at my back in the empty hallway. The text that arrived during lunch reading, “Stop biting your pen.” The note slipped beneath a file on Thursday morning that said, “Blue suits you. Behave until five.” The ten-minute ‘schedule review’ that ended with me breathless against his office wall with Callum’s lips at my throat, his voice low in my ear telling me I had been very good during the Hartwell call and would be rewarded properly later.

We were reckless sometimes. Enough that I understood why Benjamin watched us with an expression resembling watching children play near the edge of a cliff. Callum kissed me once in the private elevator after a late meeting, pinning me against the mirrored wall for exactly eight floors before stepping back and telling me to fix my lipstick. I touched his wrist under a conference table while Marcus was talking about council optics, just once, just because I could, and watched his jaw flex for the next three minutes.

On Wednesday, he punishment fucked my ass with my face pressed against the glass window of his office because he’d found a typo in one of my summaries. On Thursday, he did not touch me at all until the end of the day, and the lack of it made me work harder to earn it. I finished three summaries, rewrote a statement Dana called ‘usable,’ and still nearly cried when Callum finally put one hand on the back of my neck and said, “There’s my girl” before he bent me over the desk, fucked me, and made me come so hard I nearly blacked out.

It was good.

The feeling of being watched did not go away though. Once, I noticed a man in a gray coat outside the side entrance onTuesday, gone when I looked again. A black SUV across from my apartment idled there too long on Wednesday night, though it could have been a ride share or a neighbor or my imagination. A flash near Rowe Tower’s lobby made me jump on Thursday morning, bright enough that I turned, but saw only pedestrians and phones and the ordinary city pretending innocence. One time, after lunch, I noticed Benjamin speaking in a low voice with security, his face more concerned than usual. When I asked him if something was wrong, he said, “Yes, but mostly in the philosophical sense,” and then sent me to Dana with a stack of files.

Callum noticed me noticing.

“Tell me when you feel it,” he said Thursday evening, after I confessed the unease while sitting on the edge of his desk with my shoes dangling above the floor.

“I don’t want to be dramatic.”

“You are occasionally dramatic. This is not that.”

“Occasionally?”

His mouth curved. “Often. But charmingly.”

“I take back my concern.”