Page 24 of Sexting His Assistant

My jaw locks.

Across the table, Voronin is still speaking. “—if we delay one quarter, we may be able to avoid undue attention from⁠—”

“No,” I say.

He stops. Everyone stops.

I place my phone face down beside my folder as if nothing in the world has shifted. “We should move now,” I say. “Delay suggests hesitation. Hesitation invites pressure. This isn’t how I run my company. Do you understand?”

Voronin clears his throat. “Of course.”

I continue speaking. I ask for revised figures. I cut one projection in half. I tell legal which clause to bury and finance which risk to absorb. My voice remains even. My hands remain steady. No one in the room sees the problem.

Only Nina.

I feel her attention like a hand between my shoulders.

Don’t look at her, I tell myself.

So naturally, I do. But just once.

She’s very still in her chair, notebook open, pen frozen above the page. Her mouth is parted slightly. Her eyes are fixed on me with the kind of horror a person reserves for death, scandal, or both.

Good, I think, and dislike myself for it.

She should be horrified. She’s just sent a text obscene enough to stain the air to my phone in the middle of a board meeting.

And yet beneath the anger—because there is anger, cold and immediate, there is something much darker.

I’ve spent years refusing to want anything from her that I couldn’t defend. Years telling myself that wanting alone is harmless if it remains contained. Years allowing distance to stand in for decency.

Then she writes a message like that to another man while sitting ten feet from me.

A mistake, yes. An accident. And still I’m expected to sit here like stone while every filthy line echoes in my head in her voice.

I take a breath. Then another.

“We’ll take a ten-minute break,” I say.

Chairs move at once. Papers slide. Men stand and check phones and murmur to one another, relieved by the pause they think I have granted them.

I have granted them nothing.

“Miss Hale,” I say.

Nina does not move.

I let my gaze settle on her face. “You will stay.”

No one comments. They are all smart enough to pretend this is about the meeting. When the last person leaves, the door closes softly behind them.

Silence.

Nina’s still sitting exactly where she was, phone in her lap, eyes on the table now instead of me. Up close, her composure is gone. I can see the pulse beating too hard in her throat.

I stand slowly. She rises at once.

Good. She still has instincts.