Every Last Secret(16)

She didn’t move. Didn’t slump with defeat or stagger back to her chair. She didn’t blink or quake or react in any way at all. Her gaze swung toward me with the slow and practiced control of a woman who had been through it all. “Jeff’s dead,” she said.

I met her eyes squarely. “I can attest from my visit with him yesterday, he’s not.”



Forty-five minutes later, I watched as Marilyn revoked her resignation via email, the “Send” button clicked with a hostile amount of contempt. I didn’t care. I had secured my job, and her four kids and husband would continue thinking that her fifth son had died in early labor and wasn’t living in a convalescent home, blowing out the candles on his thirteenth birthday cake without a single family member in sight.

I brought the paperwork to William, quietly entering the sleek and sophisticated space that showed a sliver of the ocean. Everything was glass—the door I pushed to come inside, the walls between us and the adjacent office, the floor-to-ceiling windows that separated the room from a fifty-foot drop. There would be no quickies on the desk in this office, not unless he wanted the entire team to watch.

He glanced at the paperwork without lifting his hands from his computer keyboard, then nodded. “Fine. Close the door on your way out.”

The dismissal would have made a regular woman bristle with irritation, but I only wanted more. A psychologist would have blamed the unhealthy pull to rejection on my father, but I knew what a ticket into this world would cost me. Dirty, underhanded deals. Slow and relentless seduction. A twisted contortion that might break my spine in two but would roll me higher and higher on the rungs of society until I was where I belonged, looking down on women like my mother and Cat Winthorpe and in complete puppet-master control over men like my father and William.

It would come. Already, I was closer.





CHAPTER 9

CAT

William quietly worked the Aston Martin’s stick shift, his hair ruffling in the breeze as he took the curve leading up to the small cliffside restaurant. The night was silent, the wind soft.

I turned in the seat to face him, admiring his profile in the dusk, the blue glow from the dash faintly lighting his distinguished features. I fell in love with those features my junior year in college as I peeked at him over the top of my computer screen from the corner of the interns’ room. We’d all been slightly terrified of him, his rare visits to our room punctuated by lots of cursing and—more often than not—the firing of whoever had screwed up. Our turnover rate was insane, and crying was common among the interns, everyone tense and dreading the moment that they’d invariably make a mistake.

My own misstep had come just before Christmas. Our fellow students had all flown home, their social media accounts full of Christmas trees, ice skating, and spiked eggnog. A dwindling group of five had stayed to meet the increased workload of a corporate takeover that William was masterminding. I’d spent six hours on a spreadsheet and, at some point in the process, sorted a column without including all the fields—an error that completely invalidated every other cell in the spreadsheet. Four hours later, relieved to finally be through with the task, I’d added the spreadsheet into the shared drive without noticing the error.

When William burst into our room, I snapped to attention, watching as he carried a printout over to our supervisor’s desk and set it before her, stabbing the page with one finger. I heard my name and straightened, steeling myself as she pointed in my direction. His gaze swept over the room and stopped on me.

It was our first eye contact, and I felt empowered by it, rising to my feet as he strode toward me. His expensive dress shoes clicked along the tile, and his eyes were as dark as his suit. He’d stopped before my desk and held the spreadsheet up. “I suppose this piece of worthless shit came from you?”

I don’t know why I smiled. It was something we’d dissected over champagne on our honeymoon and in late-night walks down memory lane. I should have been terrified. I should have stammered out an apology. But instead I met his eyes with a smile he later described as cocky and sexy as hell. I smiled and . . . stunningly enough, William Winthorpe, destroyer of companies and notorious prick . . . began to smile back at me.

I came to work the next morning and found a first-class ticket to Banff in my desk drawer. I lost my virginity to him in a mountainside cabin on that trip. When we returned to San Francisco, I packed up my apartment and moved into William’s sleek downtown condo without a minute’s hesitation.

He tapped the horn at a passing opossum, and I held on as he swerved.

“I heard about Marilyn.” I captured a loose tendril of hair and cupped it against my neck. “She’s definitely staying?”

“For now.” He accelerated through the turn, his gaze on the road. “Neena talked to her. Brought her to her senses.”

There was no doubt that we needed Marilyn. She’d spent months working on our FDA trials and had developed a key relationship with the testing contacts. Losing her would set us back six months, easily. “She’s probably being heavily recruited.” There weren’t many scientists with her pedigree. Add in that she was black and female and she was probably getting a fresh job offer every day. It was impressive that Neena had changed Marilyn’s mind, and without offering her more compensation or perks.

“She is.” He glanced at me. “Neena thinks I need to work on my management style.” He wasn’t happy with the assessment. I could see it in the way his second hand joined his first on the steering wheel, the set of his mouth, the rigid line of his long body as he hunched forward in the seat. My husband, for all his confidence, was also impossibly hard on himself.