Page 25 of His Good Girl

I turned fully then. “Careful.”

Benjamin did not flinch. He rarely did. It was one of the reasons I trusted him and one of the reasons I considered firing him every other Thursday.

“I am being careful,” he said. “That is the point. I watched her walk in. I watched you after she walked out. You are allowed to help her. You are not allowed to be stupid.”

A colder man would have rebuked him. A weaker one would have pretended not to understand.

I said nothing.

Benjamin’s expression shifted, just slightly, with less acid and more warning. “Callum.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

He waited. I crossed back to my desk and looked down at Avery’s resume, still lying where I had set it, seeing a list of jobs that did not tell the whole truth. No document ever did.

“She starts tomorrow. That is all.”

Benjamin’s silence said he did not believe me.

I did not blame him.

After he left, I tried to return to Hartwell. I made it through two pages of legal notes before realizing I had read the same paragraph four times and absorbed none of it. The rival firm’s allegations blurred into the shape of Avery’s face when I had said she was not a burden because her father loved her. That had nearly undone her. I had seen it. The quick blink, the way she looked away, the effort it cost her not to cry in my office.

I should have felt paternal.

I did. Partly.

Paternal concern existed in me. So did loyalty to Robert. So did a genuine professional instinct that she could do the work if given structure and standards, but layered beneath those things, unwelcome and undeniable, was the awareness of her as a woman. The delicate line of her neck where her damp hair curled loose. The sharpness in her when challenged. The beautiful rose color her face flushed when she was embarrassed. The fact that I had wanted, more than once, to lean back in my chair and see how far that blush could travel if I stopped being careful.

I was not a boy. I did not confuse wanting with permission. Still, wanting had entered the room, and pretending otherwise was a good way to let it make decisions from the dark.

Shortly before lunch, I opened a blank email to her.

Then I closed it.

Five minutes later, I opened a text instead, because text felt less formal and therefore somehow worse.

I set the phone down.

At noon, I sat through a call with the zoning council and gave answers crisp enough that no one could have guessed half my attention remained on a woman who had walked out of my office two hours earlier with a crooked visitor badge and hope she was trying not to trust. Shortly after lunch, Dana Keene came in and told me, without preamble, that if I was going to saddle her department with ‘a sentimental hire,’ she expected permission to ‘sand the girl down to a usable grain.’ I told her Avery was not sentimental. Dana stared at me for five full seconds and said, “That answer was.”

By 1:15, I had signed off on her temporary onboarding.

By 2:30, Benjamin had sent me a calendar hold for Avery’s first week titled Variable Management.

By 4:05, I gave up pretending my restraint was noble when some of it was simply fear of scandal.

I ran a company with thousands of employees and projects that depended on public trust, private money, and the illusion that everyone involved was more virtuous than they were. I knew exactly what a headline could do. I knew what people would say if they saw me take my dead best friend’s daughter to dinner the night before she started working at my company. I knew what Benjamin would say, and his version would be worse because it would be accurate.

But that was not the fear that held my hand over the phone.

This fear was simpler and more private.

I did not want to become another man in Avery Hale’s life who used a position of power to make her smaller.