Page 62 of His Good Girl

Me:Be fair.

Benjamin:You keep using that word as if it will save you.

I set the phone down without answering. In the dark, I almost laughed. Then I almost groaned. In the end, I did neither. I lay still until the ceiling blurred above me, the night carried on, and I knew with perfect, unwelcome clarity that tomorrow would not be easier.

Tomorrow, I would have to be better than I had been tonight.

CHAPTER 8

Callum

By seven the next morning, I had decided the only thing worse than wanting Avery in my building was not being allowed to think about wanting Avery in my building.

Work, in theory, should have solved that. Steel did not care what a man wanted, nor did it care what kept him awake late at night. Contracts did not blush, zoning boards did not soften their voices, and legal threats, however tedious, demanded immediate attention without distraction. I arrived at Rowe Tower before most of the city had fully committed to the day, after two hours of sleep and a shower too cold to be enjoyable. At nine, Avery would walk into this building as an employee. At nine, she would belong to operations, to Benjamin, to Dana, to payroll and policy and the thousand other impersonal mechanisms that made a company safer than a private dinner. Until then, I had contracts to review, a civil project to protect, and a rival firm circling close enough that I could smell their cologne.

Benjamin entered my office fifteen minutes after I got there. He didn’t knock, which meant either the building was on fire or he had decided knocking was for the weak. He carried his tablet, a leather folder, and a paper cup of coffee he did not offer me.

“Good morning,” he said, in the tone of a man announcing war crimes.

“It rarely is when you open with that voice.”

“I have several voices. This is my moderately apocalyptic one.”

“Comforting.”

“It is meant to establish urgency without encouraging panic.” He stopped in front of my desk and held up the tablet. “Should I assemble the war cabinet?”

I leaned back in my chair and sighed. “Is it that time already?”

“Lang’s people started early. Evil is often punctual.”

That cut through the last fog of sleeplessness. I held out my hand, and he gave me the tablet. On the screen was a local politics column, not one of the major papers yet, but one of those insider newsletters that everyone in city development pretended not to read and then quoted by lunch. The headline was vague enough to be cowardly and pointed enough to draw blood:Questions Swirl Around Rowe Structural’s Hartwell Civic Center Bid After Prior Site Concerns Resurface.

I read the first paragraph. Then the second. By the third, my jaw had set hard enough that Benjamin, who noticed everything, took a careful half-step back out of the blast radius.

“They don’t name Lang specifically,” I observed.

“No. They prefer to waft around that.”

“They don’t name the prior site either.”

“No. The modern smear campaign is less knife, more perfume atomizer.”

I scrolled. The article was a masterpiece of implication without commitment. It did not accuse Rowe Structural of anything specific because specificity created legal exposure. It only gestured toward a prior building site on the east side, one already complicated by council politics and an unrelated labor dispute, and invited readers to do the research themselves. The message was clear enough though. Rowe had been selected to lead the Hartwell Civic Center contract, and someone wanted the city to think we were too compromised to keep it.

Lang wanted the job, but they had lost the bid, and they did not lose gracefully.

I set the tablet down. “Get everybody together.”

Benjamin’s eyes brightened in a way that would have concerned a less experienced man. “The actual war cabinet or the decorative one we invite when we need minutes taken?”

“Actual. Legal, PR, Dana, Marcus from government relations, Elise from risk, and Tom if he’s not already inventing ulcers somewhere in legal.”

“He is. I passed him in the hall. Very pale. Excellent pacing form.”

“Conference room A. Twenty minutes.”

“Fifteen?”