One
Emma
* * *
This was not happening the way I planned it. At all.
Not this trip, and not this meeting. To be honest, not my life either. But I was in the middle of trying to save my business, so I had no time to think about that.
I was sitting in a large boardroom in an office building in downtown L.A. The boardroom had a bank of windows, and from the windows was a view of smoggy city and hills, all of it suffused with sunshine. The sunshine creeped me out, because it was late October, and I was a New York girl. New York was cloudy and chilly right now, like October was supposed to be. What kind of unnatural place was this?
Worse, I was in a meeting with Catharine Knowles, the CEO of one of Hollywood’s trendiest production companies. Catharine needed an executive assistant. My company, Executive Ranks, supplied the best executive assistants in the business. We meet, we make a deal. It should be simple, right?
It wasn’t.
“Next page,” Catharine said, flipping the paper in front of her. She was in her late fifties, slim and stylish, her hair in a sleek bob streaked with gray that ended just below her ears. She wore reading glasses as she read the page. “My investigator has found out that another of your executive assistants, Tricia Clark, had a long-term affair with the CFO of Northwest Bank, who was married with three children. What can you tell me about that?”
Nightmare. This was my nightmare.
When we started the meeting, Catharine had asked me about my sister, Samantha, who I had hired out to Aidan Winters, the CEO of Tower Venture Capital. Sam and Aidan had fallen in love, gotten married, and Aidan had made Sam one of the company’s executives. It was a great love story, and I was glad my sister was happy, but here’s the truth: it didn’t make my company look very good. I’m supposed to hire out qualified professionals, not potential wives.
But I was ready for that line of questioning. I responded that Sam was my very first recruit, that she had already been an executive assistant for nearly a decade when she met Aidan and was more than qualified for a promotion. Sam hadn’t been out scouting for a man—she was the best executive assistant in the business. And, honestly, sometimes love happens. Workplace romances happen. People fall for each other. No one can completely control that, even me.
It was a good answer. Catharine accepted it. Then she dropped a bomb on me.
“What about Helena Parkinson?” she asked. “She’s one of your current recruits. She eloped with the head of payroll at Smith and Koenig last week.”
That sound? That was a nuclear bomb going off in my business. Because Helena had told me she was going on vacation last week. When she’d actually been eloping with the head of payroll. And I hadn’t known.
Not until Catharine told me in this sunny-as-hell boardroom, in this sunny-as-hell city.
I had no doubt that her information was good. She’d hired an investigator to do some digging before deciding to hire my company. She’d gone to pretty great lengths, but that didn’t surprise me. Executive assistants were given access to incredibly sensitive information: salary numbers, contract details, the private phone numbers and home addresses of top executives. An executive assistant in Hollywood could be privy to even more sensitive things, like movie stars’ addresses or their private texts. Hell, even their dick pics. The wrong person in the job could leak very bad information to the online press.
So no, it wasn’t out of line for Catharine to hire her own investigator to look into my recruits. It was exactly what I would do in her position. What was a disaster was that she’d uncovered information I didn’t know myself. Which meant three things.
One, I may as well be standing in this meeting with my skirt up and my panties down, my bare ass showing. Because it was that embarrassing.
Two, my recruits had been lying to me. Bold-face lying, straight to my face, when I prided myself on being the bitch in control.
And three, my business was about to swirl down the drain.
“Well?” Catharine said, her sculpted eyebrows rising as I twisted in the wind. “Tricia Clark?”
Right. The other recruit who had fucked me over, this time by fucking the CFO. Why hadn’t I known? Why couldn’t my executive assistants keep their panties on?
“I’ll be discussing that with Tricia,” I said, because what could I say? “But I think you should look at our record of success. I sent you a portfolio of testimonials from a dozen Fortune 500 companies, and all of them say—”
“My executive assistant,” Catharine said as if I hadn’t even spoken, “will, among other duties, accompany me to script and set meetings. It means that she will be in contact with some of the most famous actors in the business. I need an assistant I can trust not to be tempted to act out of line.”
Cold sweat was trickling down the back of my neck, and I kept my arms to my sides because I had the suspicion there were sweat marks in the arm holes of my sleeveless sheath dress. “If you’d prefer, I can find you an assistant of a more mature age. Or a man.”
Catharine held up one hand, which had a series of beautiful one-of-a-kind rings on it. She was a great dresser and, I thought, an interesting woman. The kind of woman who would be cool to know if she wasn’t currently raking me over white-hot coals. “I am not hiring a man,” she said with finality. “For God’s sake, you think any man can keep it in his pants in Hollywood? Gay or straight, not a single one of them can manage it. And my assistant is a reflection of me. I’m way over the hill in Hollywood terms, but no one minds, because I have the money. But my assistant should be impressive.”
Impressive. Young and attractive, female, and immune to Hollywood sex appeal. Where was I supposed to find this unicorn? “How about a lesbian?” I asked. It was a callous question, and any HR department would tear me limb from limb, but I was desperate. I didn’t have any lesbians that I knew of in my current recruits, but if I had to, I’d scour the fucking earth for one.
“I don’t care who my assistant sleeps with on her own time,” Catharine said. “I want one of your recruits, Emma. But this report says I can’t trust them the way you say I can.”
“You can trust my recruits,” I said. “They go through a complete background screening before I even take them on. Then they take IQ and personality tests. If they pass those, I put them through training and job shadowing for months. Less than ten percent of the people who apply to Executive Ranks ever make the cut.”
Was I begging? Maybe I was. Executive Ranks was my baby—me, Emma Riley, a girl who came from nothing and climbed her way up in the world, lonely step by lonely step. I’d built my baby from nothing but a website URL, a five-thousand-dollar loan, and an unbeatable willingness to make something of myself. I was twenty-one at the time. Now I was thirty-one, I had recruits in some of America’s biggest businesses, and I had no life outside of this business.
No friends, no boyfriend, no social life, no children—not a fucking thing. Just this.
Catharine Knowles leaned back in her chair. “Emma,” she said, “I’ll be honest. I need someone, and Executive Ranks was my first choice. Your reputation is that you’re a bright young CEO on the rise who runs a tight ship. But these reports show the cracks in the foundation.” She motioned to the papers in front of her. “There seem to be a lot of cracks.”