Page 11 of Tempted By the Safety

“So it’s not a me problem, it’s an everyone-else problem.” I’m grinning now, full wattage. “Got it. I’m a workplace hazard. I should get a sign. Caution: extremely fetching PA, proceed with—”

I don’t get to finish, because the car’s slowing, and when I look up from him to actually track where we are, the rest of the sentence goes out of my head.

It’s a store everyone knows by reputation, the kind that doesn’t need a name over the door. Spotless glass, no price tags visible in the window because a store like this assumes you already know better than to ask, mannequins dressed in quiet, expensive neutrals. Spencer’s already pulling into a spot at the curb.

“No,” I say immediately. “Absolutely not. I can’t afford so much as a scarf in there, and I’m not letting you watch me have a nervous breakdown over a price tag. They’ll smell my net worth from the door.”

“It’s not coming out of your pocket.” He puts the car in park. “Consider it a work expense. I’m giving you the tools you needto do the job, same as I’d expense a laptop or a phone plan for anybody else on payroll.”

“This is not a laptop, Spencer, this is a building where the air costs money.”

“I’m not sending my assistant into meetings underdressed because his first check hasn’t landed. That’s not on you to fix. That’s mine.”

“I really don’t think you understand the math here,” I say, but weaker now, because he’s already unbuckling his seat belt like the conversation ended three sentences ago. “This feels like I’m about to owe you an organ.”

“You’re not,” he says, and opens his door.

I sit there another second, staring at the storefront, at Spencer rounding the hood toward my side, and I think about arguing it one more round. Then I remember the eleven minutes it took me to pack my whole life into a duffel bag and two milk crates, and I decide that maybe, just this once, I let somebody else win.

He’s out and around the hood before I’ve got my seatbelt off, and by the time I catch up, he’s already at the door, a slab of glass with a thin brass line for a handle. He pushes through it like he’s done it a thousand times, which, judging by what happens next, he has.

“Mr. Rhodes.” A man in a charcoal suit materializes from behind a rack of coats, already smiling. “We weren’t expecting you until next week.”

“Change of plans,” Spencer says, and the man’s smile widens as he nods.

A second person peels off from the register, a woman with a tape measure looped around her neck. Her eyes do a fast, expertpass from my sneakers up to my hair, polite and unsparing at once. I can tell she’s already tallying how much work I’m going to be.

“He needs a wardrobe,” Spencer says. “Office appropriate. He starts from scratch.”

“Of course,” the woman says. “Right this way.”

I trail behind her past a wall of shirts so white they hurt to look at directly, past a table of folded knits, and I keep my hands in my pockets because some feral thrift-store part of my brain is convinced that touching anything in here adds to a bill.

She pulls three things off the rack in quick succession, laying them over her arm: a crisp cotton shirt, pleated gray trousers, and a navy fine-gauge sweater.

“These would work well for the office,” she says, holding them up against me without touching me. “Clean lines. Very versatile.”

“Very,” I agree, because it is, technically, true, in the same way oatmeal is technically food.

I look past her shoulder at what I actually want, which I clocked the second we walked in: a deep sapphire shirt in a silk so dark and rich it reads as black until the angle’s right.

“Can I see that one?” I ask, pointing.

She follows my finger, and a flicker ofare you surecrosses her face, quickly smoothed back before it lands. “That’s a statement piece. Might be a bit much for daily office wear.”

“I think I can pull it off,” I say, and reach past her before she can find a diplomatic way to steer me back toward the navy and gray.

I grab trousers to go with it myself, black, slim through the leg but not tight, a cut that would look amazing on my ass, and Iknow right away that this is the outfit. I’ve been dressing myself since I was old enough to have opinions, and when you grow up never able to afford the wrong thing, you learn to spot the right one on sight.

The fitting room is bigger than my old bathroom. I change fast, leaving the top two buttons open, tucking the shirt into the trousers, and I catch my own reflection for half a second before I make myself stop looking, because if I start admiring myself in a store like this, I’ll forget I can’t actually keep any of it.

I step back out.

Spencer’s over by the window, phone in hand, thumb moving across the screen, and he doesn’t look up right away.

“Okay,” I say, spreading my arms. “Verdict?”

He looks up.