Breaking Mr. Cold (Giselle and Donovan) novel Chapter 688

Chris gave a short reply. "A little."

"Come take a look," Giselle said as she pushed her laptop toward him. "These are the materials for my meeting this afternoon. Study them and see whether you can follow the discussion."

He looked at her with a faint, puzzled expression.

Giselle added, "I want you to help me with some of the routine tasks in my job. It's basically the work of an executive assistant, so I want you to start learning now."

Her reasoning was simple. She wasn't involved in organized crime, nor did she hold any government secrets. Aside from the nuisance that came from Anne and Renee, she didn't live under constant threat.

Chris didn't need to spend his days fighting off danger. Most of the time, he stood by with nothing to do, and she figured she might as well let him participate in the company's day-to-day operations. At the very least, he could lighten her workload.

"I…" Chris stared at the dense Valanthean text on the screen, his usually sharp gaze turning slightly unfocused. "I don't know many of these characters. This one… what does it mean?"

Giselle read each line aloud. He repeated after her, sounding like a beginner muddling through his first Valanthean lesson, mispronouncing more than a few words.

His command of the language was, in fact, extremely limited. He knew basic conversational phrases, but anything more complex—whether vocabulary or infrequent characters—was beyond him.

"Alright, let me pull up something in Edevanian instead," she said. Since he had grown up abroad, Edevanian was essentially his native language, and the company now had international operations anyway.

She opened her email, scanned the list, and casually clicked into a file sent by the general manager of their Soutara branch. It was a set of local promotional materials she hadn't reviewed yet.

But when the document opened, she realized it was written in Malithorn script, intended for local advertising. A Valanthean translation had been attached afterward.

"Really?" She regarded him with renewed interest. She had assumed he was simply a highly trained operative skilled with weapons and combat. She hadn't expected additional abilities.

The sound of his Mali pronunciation stirred a few distant, half-formed memories in her mind, though they vanished as quickly as they appeared.

"If you learn languages that easily, you'll pick up everything else quickly too," Giselle said. "Keep reading the Valanthean materials. Ask me whenever you don't understand something. I believe you'll get the hang of it in a few days."

To her, he was quick-witted, physically sharp, trained in special operations, and seasoned enough to have survived real battlefields. He was also meticulous with weapon assembly and disassembly. His mind was anything but ordinary. If those abilities could be redirected toward business and management, he would be far from mediocre.

"Okay." He accepted her instruction like a direct order, pulled a chair beside her, and began studying the Valanthean documents with serious focus.

Whenever he came across a character he didn't recognize, he asked immediately, then repeated it several times. The humility and earnest concentration in his expression had nothing in common with the cold, stoic bodyguard she usually saw.