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I crossed my arms over my chest, unnerved by the way she watched me. Something sparkled in her gaze, as if she could see through the business veneer I’d been wearing for the past decade. In a way, it would have been easier if she were just a stranger off the street. I’d gotten comfortable wearing my mask. A little too comfortable, maybe.
And honestly, part of me preferred a total stranger for a job like this one. Someone who wouldn’t catch my eye or stir up warm feelings—both of which Jessa had already done. But shuffling her to another department within the company wasn’t an option right now. There was no other position open at Fairchild Enterprises, not since we’d pared back some positions and reorganized in the wake of the investigation. I wanted to help the Waltons out—and this was the one spot that needed filled.
“What have you been doing?” Jeremy hadn’t gone into much detail. Just that she was chasing rainbows in New York, which to me sounded like she was drifting aimlessly until she found something that stuck.
“Just trying to make it work,” she said with a laugh. “It’s the city of dreams, right? Well, I’ve got a few dreams that I’ve ignored for too long.”
“Jeremy says you’re looking for a new job.”
Her mouth opened, but nothing came out at first. “Sort of. My living arrangement has changed, so I need a higher salary.”
I nodded. “What number did you have in mind?” It wasn’t my style to discuss numbers before experience or responsibility, but I knew Jessa could do this job in her sleep. She’d always been the detail-oriented and driven little sister compared to Jeremy, and that alone was enough to assure me she could hack it.
Her eyes widened. “Um…sixty thousand a year?”
I laughed. “Come on, Jessa.”
She deflated. “Fifty?”
“Wrong way. Aim higher. What do you need per month for rent?”
Her eyes turned into saucers. “Um…three thousand.”
I did a quick calculation and nodded. “We’ll start at 100k and review in three months. If you do a good job, we can go up from there. You okay with signing an NDA?”
The stars in her eyes were almost as beguiling as the flush of her neck. “Um…of course. Wait, are you serious about the 100k? You actually said that, right? Or am I dreaming this?”
“I really said 100k.”
Her throat bobbed. “Like in US dollars?”
“We can discuss crypto if you’d rather—”
“No, no. Let’s keep it real. None of that digital stuff.” She rolled her lips in, a grin threatening to explode. “Can you say the starting pay again?”
“One hundred thousand dollars.” Now I couldn’t fight the grin either. “Simply because this job is what we might call…full-timeplus. We start at eight in the morning, and sometimes you’ll need to stay late. Things crop up, late meetings are scheduled, and we have business dinners and other events. My brothers and I are going through something right now which can be time-consuming on occasion. Maybe you’ve heard?”
“The investigation,” she said softly.
The acid twist in my gut returned, the one that accompanied me every day when I woke up and every night when I went to bed. I swallowed the sensation, tucking it back into the recesses of my mind and body. If I didn’t, I’d crumble on the spot.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s fraud investigation was one of the most devastating turns of my life. The only thing that surpassed it was losing my biological parents at age seven, and then losing my younger sisters to the foster system and then sex trafficking during my late teens.
Bad always followed the good. The universe had massive pitfalls in store for me, which meant I needed to tread carefully. That included keeping romance at a solid zero. Because that feeling when you met someone and your heart skipped a beat? That was called arrhythmia. That shit would kill you. It was better to stay away from all potential threats.
“It’s brought its own sort of workload to our lives,” I said. “But beyond that, you’ll mostly be responsible for my direct schedule, sitting in on meetings, preparing reports, running errands as needed…”
“So basically your bitch?”
A laugh rocketed out of me. “That’s not the technical term, but sure.”
“For 100k a year, I will be your bitch, Damian Fairchild.” Her coy smile paired with the husky lilt of her voice had my cock stiffening in my pants. I squelched the curiosity that sprouted to life inside me, the urge to toy with this thread.
“Great. Now, being my bitch does have rules,” I went on. “It might not seem like it after what you saw, but we run a tight ship here when it comes to our staff. We’re fair, but we like things a certain way. I know we go way back, but here, you’re just part of the Fairchild team. That’s how it has to be.”
She nodded effusively. “So what you’re saying is I need to keep it a secret from the rest of the staff that you and Jeremy came in last place in flag football every year during middle school, right?”
“No need to go sharing my middle school dirt, Jessa. Besides, if you start that, you don’t want me to retaliate,” I teased. But as soon as the words came out of my mouth, I wished I hadn’t said them. The warm grin that blossomed on her lips was a hard yank into the past, and I didn’t have time for a distraction like that.
