He chuckled. “My apologies. I sometimes forget you work for me. You’re so easy to get along with that you feel more like a friend.”

“Aw, shucks, thanks.” I grinned at him and took another bite of my sandwich. Well, that was kind of sweet. He seemed oddly sheepish about his admission, and picked up the lunch I’d ordered for him. It was now my job to order his meals from the local health food café each morning and schedule them to arrive by one. I swear, the man ate a diet straight out of Men’s Health magazine, all eggs, lean meat, and fresh vegetables. And there was me thinking bankers subsisted on a strict regime of coffee, steak, and whiskey. Maybe that was the ’80s Wall Street stereotype talking.

“So, you’re working on a shoot this weekend?” King asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“Can I come and watch?”

I gaped at him. “Are you serious?”

“Of course,” he said, and pulled out his phone, fingers swiping over the screen.

“What are you doing?”

“Cancelling an afternoon tea party I was supposed to attend so that I can accompany you to your photo shoot.”

“You’re not coming.”

He frowned and gave me this sad little puppy-dog pout that I swear made my ovaries wake up and say hello. The man was unfairly good-looking.

“Come on,” I said, “you have to admit it is weird that you want to come to this.”

Now he looked sceptical. “Will there be other women there who look like you?”

“I presume so….”

“You see? It’s not weird at all. I enjoy looking at women, especially ones who are interested in cocks rather than vaginas.”

I couldn’t believe he’d just said that. I also couldn’t resist the urge to give him a scare. Glancing over his shoulder, I said, “Oh, hi, Gillian. Were you looking for me?”

King’s complexion instantly paled, and he went utterly still. I burst out laughing as he turned and found the doorway empty. “Oh, my God, the look on your face. That was priceless!”

“It was cruel.” He scowled at me, but I could see the smile he was trying his best to hold back.

“It serves you right for talking about cocks and VJs at the office. I bet you don’t say stuff like that to Eleanor.”

“Eleanor is old enough to be my mother.”

“And what am I? Chopped liver?”

“You,” said King, voice low and gravelly, “are the perfect age to be hearing words like that.”

On instinct, I licked my lips, and his eyes zeroed on it. Why oh why did he pay such close attention to the small details? It was too much, and the lesbian façade I’d been putting up was slowly beginning to crumble. If he kept giving me looks like that, he’d figure out sooner or later that I was lying, because my body language practically screamed my attraction.

He kept on staring at me, and I knew he was waiting for me to give in.

“Fine, you can come, but no manhandling the other models. I know what you Cambridge types are like. Frisky.”

He laughed. “If by ‘frisky’ you mean uptight and socially awkward, then you know us very well indeed.”

“Are you seriously using the words ‘uptight’ and ‘socially awkward’ to describe yourself? Because if you are, you’re fooling no one.”

King tsked. “I’m not talking about myself. I’m talking about the kind of people I went to school with. I was lucky to be born with natural charm.” He flashed me a cocky grin.

“Self-professed charm is no charm at all.”

“You find me charming.”

“That’s true. I find you about as charming as an ’80s sex comedy.”

King laughed loudly at my put-down, strangely seeming to enjoy it, and began eating his lunch while eyeing the chessboard.

“So, are we going to finish this game or what?”

We did.

And this time, I came out the winner. We were at a draw.

Oliver King: 1. Alexis Clark: 1.

Seven

The following morning I walked into the office, sensing an odd vibe in the air. It wasn’t long before I discovered the reason. It was B-day at Johnson-Pearse.

And no, that wasn’t B-day as in birthday. That was B-day as in Bonus Day. Apparently, investment banking, along with the vast majority of jobs in the financial sector, orbited around yearly bonuses. And those bonuses were announced at the start of each calendar year. I’d always read about this sort of thing in the newspapers, where left-wing journalists would criticize banks for giving out exorbitant bonuses to their employees while the rest of the country suffered one of the worst recessions in decades. I had to agree with the journalists; it was pretty fucked up. That still didn’t stop it from happening, though, and now I was getting to witness it all first hand.

It soon became apparent that everybody wanted to achieve a larger bonus than the one they got the year before, which accounted for the nervous tension. Nobody wanted to get a small bonus, because that meant they were losing at the game of making more money than everybody else.

I learned all of this from Eleanor as we worked together to complete our morning tasks. She’d been very happy with the way I’d handled things during her absence, and was confident I was going to make an excellent replacement after she left. Her confidence in me gave me a boost.

The hours until lunch passed busily. The way things worked on B-day were as follows. Each employee was called into King’s office, or the office of Daniel James, senior managing director. The bonuses were not announced publicly. Instead, each employee was told his/her bonus in private. And the absolutely bizarre thing about it all was that every single one of those employees exited King’s office looking confident and satisfied.

I knew some of them had to be bluffing, because not everyone got a larger bonus than last year. And here lay the competitive nature of the business. No matter what number those bankers got told when they entered King’s office, they would never let their colleagues see their disappointment.

Like I said, it was all about appearances.

It was mid-morning, and another “pleased”-looking employee had just exited King’s office when I went inside to bring him his coffee.

“Hey. How’s everything going?” I asked, setting the cup down on his desk.

“Monotonous,” he replied, running a hand through his short blond hair.

“Don’t you enjoy telling people their bonuses? I mean, the ones who did well, at least?” I asked, curious.

King only shot me a look that said it all. So he didn’t like B-day. Duly noted.

“Will you thank your mother for the note she sent yesterday?” I said just before I was about to leave.

King glanced up from the papers on his desk. “Note?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “I got it yesterday. She wrote telling me she enjoyed my company when I’d stayed for tea.”

A stressed look crossed over King’s face. “Do you still have it?”

“Yes, it’s in my drawer.”

“Go get it,” he clipped.

Frowning, I turned and went to retrieve the note. When I returned, I handed it to King, and he hurried to pull it from the envelope. His eyes scanned the words, and then a relieved breath escaped him.

“Yes, this is definitely her handwriting.”

I let out a nervous laugh. “Who else’s would it be?”

Shutters went down behind King’s eyes and he stood, walking to me and handing me back the note. I took it and watched as he went to the drinks cabinet at the back of the office and pulled out a bottle of expensive whiskey. In less than a few seconds, he’d poured some into a glass and knocked it back. I recalled his words from yesterday.

When I’m stressed out, a nice glass of top-shelf whiskey usually does the trick.

Why had his mother sending me a note stressed him out? And why had he thought somebody else had sent it?

“King, is everything all right?” I asked, concerned.

He closed the drinks cabinet and turned back, his expression hard. Whoa. I’d never seen him look at me like that before.