Two Little Secrets From My Boss

Chapter 79

The function was held at a private estate in Greenwich—the kind of property that existed behind gates and hedgerows, invisible to anyone who hadn't been specifically invited. Marble foyer, crystal chandeliers, a string quartet nobody was listening to.

Two hundred guests selected for their net worth or their usefulness.

I'd come alone, dressed in the best suit I owned—still two tiers below what most men in the room were wearing—and spent the first hour doing what I always did: watching, calculating, cataloguing who mattered and who was decoration.

That's when I saw her.

She entered through the terrace doors as though the party had been waiting for her arrival. Black dress, cut close to her body in a way that made the fabric look poured rather than sewn.

Dark hair swept over one shoulder. A glass of champagne was already in her hand, though I hadn't seen anyone offer it—it had simply appeared, the way things appeared for women like that.

She laughed at something the host whispered, and the sound carried across the room like a tuning fork struck at the perfect frequency. Three men near the bar turned their heads simultaneously.

The kind of beauty that made rooms rearrange themselves—people shifted to create space around her without realizing, conversations paused and resumed at slightly higher volume, as though everyone had unconsciously decided to perform harder.

I didn't know she'd arrived with a man named Victor Ashford—old money, conservative investments, the type who talked about inheriting his father's empire the way other people discussed the weather.

What I knew was that I couldn't stop watching her.

She worked the room with a precision I recognized because I used it myself—strategic positioning, targeted conversations, careful allocation of attention.

But where my version felt like labor, hers looked like pleasure. She made every person she spoke to feel like the most interesting individual at the party, then moved on before they could get comfortable with the feeling.

She reached the bar twenty minutes later. I was standing two seats away, nursing a bourbon, replaying a conversation with an investor that hadn't gone well.

She ordered champagne without looking at the bartender, then turned and caught me watching her.

Most people would have looked away. She held my gaze with a directness that sent a jolt of electricity from my chest to the base of my spine.

"You've been staring at me for twenty minutes," she said. "Either you're interested or you're trying to figure out if I'm someone important. Which is it?"

"Both," I said, surprising myself with honesty.

She laughed—that same champagne laugh, up close now, warm against my skin like sunlight through glass. "That's a better answer than most men manage. They usually lie and say they weren't looking." She extended her hand. "Bianca."

"Alexander." Her fingers were cool and smooth against mine, and she held the handshake a beat longer than courtesy required. A deliberate choice that I registered and filed away.

"Xander Hale," she said, and the fact that she already knew my full name should have been my first warning.

"I've heard your name in interesting circles lately. They say you're building something impressive from nothing, which takes a particular kind of hunger."

"Or a particular kind of stubbornness."

"Same thing, in my experience." She sipped her champagne, watching me over the rim with eyes that were cataloguing me.

"The men here inherited their positions and spend their evenings congratulating each other on the accident of their birth. You're different—I can see it in the way you hold yourself. You're hunting."

The observation cut closer to the truth than anything a stranger should have been able to see. I felt exposed and exhilarated simultaneously, the way you feel when someone reads you accurately and you can't decide whether to be flattered or afraid.

We talked for an hour. Bianca asked questions that went beneath the surface. She listened with her whole body, leaning forward, her fingers occasionally brushing my forearm when she emphasized a point. Each touch brief enough to seem accidental. None of them were.

"I should get back to my evening," she said eventually, though neither of us had moved.

"Should you?"

She smiled—slow, promising nothing and suggesting everything. Then she pulled a cocktail napkin from the bar, produced a pen from the small clutch she carried, and wrote her phone number in an elegant, sloping script. Three words: For emergencies only.

She slid the napkin across the bar, her fingertips grazing mine. "You look like a man who has emergencies, Xander Hale."

Then she was gone, absorbed back into the crowd, and I stood holding that napkin like a man handed the key to a door he hadn't known existed.

I called her three hours later. Not the next day or after a strategic waiting period—three hours, from the parking lot, sitting in my car with the napkin smoothed flat on my thigh. Bianca answered on the second ring.

"That was fast," she said. "I expected at least until tomorrow morning."

"I'm not a patient man."

"Good, neither am I." A pause. "There's a hotel on the Post Road, half a mile south of where you're sitting. The Linden. Room 412. I'll leave the door unlocked."

I drove there with my heart slamming against my ribs, every rational instinct screaming that this was too fast, too easy, too perfectly orchestrated.

I ignored all of it. I wanted to be chosen by this woman with a ferocity that overwhelmed every defense I'd built since Serena walked out with her suitcase.

The hotel room was dimly lit. Bianca stood by the window in that black dress, barefoot now, her heels discarded by the door.

She turned when I entered, crossed the room, took my face in both hands, and kissed me with an intensity that wiped every coherent thought from my brain.

I pulled her against me, my hands sliding down the curve of her waist to her hips. She tugged my shirt free and raked her nails up my stomach. I found the zipper at the back of her dress and drew it down, the fabric parting to reveal skin that was warm and smooth beneath my palms.

She pushed my jacket off, yanked my belt free, and we stumbled toward the bed in a tangle of half-removed clothing. I laid her down and she pulled me on top of her, wrapping her legs around my waist, her mouth hot against my neck.

When I pushed inside her she gasped and arched beneath me, fingers digging into my shoulders hard enough to bruise.

It was passionate and close to wild—nothing tender, nothing careful.

She bit my lower lip and I groaned against her mouth and the bed frame knocked against the wall in an accelerating rhythm until neither of us could breathe.

She came with a cry muffled against my shoulder, her body clenching around me, and I followed seconds later, collapsing with my face buried in her hair and my pulse roaring.

Afterward, we lay tangled in damp sheets, breathing hard. She traced her fingers along my jaw and studied my face with an expression I mistook for tenderness.

"You're going to be enormous, Xander. I can feel it."

I believed her, completely, the way I'd once believed Serena when she promised to stay. I lay there with Bianca's body warm against mine, and I imagined a future—this woman beside me at every gala, every milestone.

A partner who understood ambition because she lived it, who wouldn't leave when the struggle got difficult.

I was already building a life around her in my mind, and… frankly speaking, I was surprised of how quickly I turned to this mode.