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Prologue
AJ
A wise woman once told me, “Shut that shit down, Adrienne—starting now.”
That wise woman was my sister Emily, older by two-and-a-half years, advising me on how to survive my new, incredibly coveted job at the male-dominated Engelman Sports in Beverly Hills, where I’d been miraculously hired as assistant to “that unbelievable smokeshow.”
“He is hot as hell, girl, but I don’t care what you do. Flip a switch. Get a poker face. Fake it till you make it, AJ, because that office will eat you alive if you let on that you have even the tiniest crush on your boss,” Emily had said—and with that big sister sternness she always broke out when things were serious. When she felt I needed it.
Which I very much did.
Because once upon a time—a distant five years ago—I found Adam Maxwell to be deathly attractive. Like, lose-your-breath, when-was-the-last-time-I-blinked, why-am-I-suddenly-sweating attractive. Objectively, he was.
Still is.
But five years ago, I wasn’t equipped to deal with it. I was twenty-two years old. Fresh out of college and brand new to his presence. I’d yet to build up my Adam Maxwell immunity and in fairness, I’d just never been face to face with a man who looked like that.
Having grown up in SoCal, I’d seen plenty of good-looking guys before. But Adam Maxwell was stupid handsome. The kind of perfect in the face that you didn’t see outside of movies, that would make him a stone-cold panty-dropper even if he were a mortal five-foot-ten, but the man was six-foot-goddamned-four with the lean muscle of an Olympic athlete, and to make matters worse, he had that smile.
That big, devilish smile that made you smile even when you didn’t want to smile—even when you were actively trying not to smile.
It was annoying.
Completely maddening for a variety of reasons, starting with the fact that I didn’t actually like him. I had a loving boyfriend in Caspar, whom I’d been dating since college, and I wanted nobody else. But getting heart palpitations when Adam Maxwell smiled wasn’t a choice, it just happened, and it wasn’t just me.
I saw with my own two eyes what it did to people. How it managed to seduce both men and women alike.
Thanks to that stupid, effortless charm, Adam got away with murder on a daily basis—murder that only I had to deal with the fallout of. He could blow off a date the fourth time in a row, cancel a meeting just as it was about to start, or plain steal the shirt off your back in the name of landing a client, but it would be totally fine—all because of that stupidly charming, irresistibly boyish-yet-cocky-as-hell smile.
In the beginning, I hated him for it.
But in the end, it was exactly what saved me.
Because every angry call I had to take, every Adam-induced fire I had to put out was like a little more dirt thrown on my silly crush, and within five weeks of working for him, the attraction was totally buried. Breathing or not, it was six feet under, and within about another month, I pronounced it officially dead.
Which made room for the start of our new dynamic.
The one where I was so consistently overworked and annoyed with the man that I didn’t have the time to do anything but my job, or the patience to bite my tongue and shut up when he was being far too much of a prick. Questions as to what “that face” was for were met with totally truthful answers, whether it was “you’re annoying me right now” or “I need you to stop rescheduling on this girl if you have no intention of ever seeing her.” And because Adam Maxwell was a bit of a twisted dickhead, that snappy brusqueness was precisely how our work relationship thrived. Precisely how I endeared myself to him and became known at the office as The Adam Whisperer. The only one who could rein him in when he was being a raging asshole. The only one who could make him sit long enough to actually listen.
It took a good six months, but once we fully settled into those roles, we became the ultimate dream team.
And in past five years, we’d gone to hell and back for his clients.
Together, we’d negotiated over three hundred-thirty million dollars worth of MLB contracts. Endured hundreds of layovers and thousands of hours worth of keeping one another sane in airports all around the world, with activities ranging from highlighting scouting reports for meetings to forcing our Spotify playlists on one another to filling out our trusty RuPaul-themed Mad Libs I’d bought from a Hudson News at O’Hare three years ago.
We’d camped outside clients’ houses together, driven through 2AM snow squalls together and argued over whether or not I said to just listen to the GPS, which I obviously had.
Unsurprisingly, I’d hated the man more times than I could count.
But that wasn’t to say I hadn’t also appreciated him before.
Borderline loved him.
Because the fact of the matter was that I’d lived the craziest, most eventful days of my life with him. We battled daily drama together, defended each other and guarded each other’s most precious secrets from the rest of the gossipy office.
Five years into this journey and we were a formidable duo, and in my mind, nothing was ever going to stop us.
But in my heart, I knew all good things came to an end.
And I should have known that one day—in just a matter of seconds—everything would change between me and Adam. In a literal blink of an eye, our years of hard-earned friendship would burst into flames. The word “platonic” would be a joke.
And work would never be the same.
“Nothing in this world stays perfect, AJ,” Emily had always told me.
So I should’ve known that one day, Adam and I would be ruined forever.
And I should’ve known it would all start with Caspar.
1
AJ
“Whoa.”
The wide-eyed looks were immediate when I got into the office this morning, which made me snort as I rolled my eyes.
