Just Before My Wedding: Trapped By My Ruthless Boss novel Chapter 10

Chapter 10

KISAREL.

Mr. Stark’s text had left no room for interpretation and even less for comfort.

4 AM.

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I was up at three, moving through the apartment in the dark, trying not to wake Jace as I pulled myself together. My hands wouldn’t cooperate, I dropped my mascara twice. Spent four full minutes staring at my reflection in the mirror like it had personally offended me before grabbing the items I brought in my duffel bag – a knee–length navy dress with a modest neckline, a blazer over it, and low block heels.

I took a cab and sat in the back with my bag on my lap, and my eyes on the city sliding past the window, and tried very hard not to think about what kind of man calls his PA to his private suite at four in the morning.

That’s a mini luxury apartment where he stayed whenever he worked late into the night and couldn’t return home.

My heart began an unhealthy marathon. Why did he want me to meet him there?

Jace wasn’t cool with the fact that my new position was making me leave the house at 3:30 in the morning for no good reason. But he had no choice now, did he?

any

The Stark Industries building was quiet at this hour. The lobby guard recognized me and let me through without a word. The elevator ride to the suite floor felt longer than it had right to be. I watched the numbers climb and told my heart to calm down, and it told me, very clearly, to go to hell.

The hallway leading to the suite was all low light, thick carpet, and silence. I’d only been here once before, to drop off documents he needed urgently. I hadn’t gone inside then. I’d handed them to Noella at the door and left immediately.

I stood at the door for approximately four hours before I let myself knock.

“Come in.”

His voice through the door was enough to make my stomach drop two floors. I turned the handle and pushed it open.

The suite was large and dim, lit mostly by the desk lamp at the far end and the glow of the Manhattan skyline through the floor–to–ceiling windows. It smelled like him — that specific combination of expensive cologne and something quieter underneath it that I had no business being able to identify.

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He was at the desk with files everywhere, stacked, spread, and annotated. His laptop was open to one side with something running on the screen. He was in tailored navy trousers and a white dress shirt, sleeves rolled to the forearms, the top two buttons undone at the chest. Hair perfectly in place, like it had agreed to behave and meant it.

I stood near the door with my bag held in front of me, but he didn’t even look up,

“Sit down.” He finally said.

I sat in the chair across from the desk, placed my bag on my lap, folded my hands over it, and waited.

He let the silence stretch as he turned a page, made a note in the margin, and turned another page before he finally spoke.

“What are you wearing?” He asked like he was already disappointed in the answer I was going to give.

I blinked and looked down at myself. “I a dress, sir. And a blazer-”

―

“I can see that.” He set his pen down, slowly.

He leaned back in his chair and looked at me for the first time since I’d walked in, and I felt that look move over me like a temperature change. “What I’m asking is why.”

“I–I don’t ”

“You are my personal assistant, Miss Harry.” He said calmly, “You represent this office. You represent me. You are an extension of what this company projects to the world.” He tilted his head slightly. “Does that look like what this company projects to the world?”

“Sir?”

“Smart,” he said. “Elegant. Presentable. Those are the three things I expect from your appearance at all times. What you have on right now is none of those things.”

My jaw tightened. I pressed my lips together and said nothing.

“Saturday,” he continued, turning back to his files like the matter was already resolved. “Noella

will take you shopping. Have something appropriate by Monday.”

The relief that moved through me lasted exactly one second.

“I-” I swallowed. “Mr. Stark, I don’t – I’m not really in a position right now to-”

“To what?”

“To afford-” God, this was humiliating. I pressed through it. “New clothes. A full wardrobe. I

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just–financially, at the moment, I can’t-”

He looked up, and I couldn’t even decipher his expression.

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“The cost will be deducted from your salary,” he said. “Incrementally. You’ll pay it back over time.”

“That’s-” I stopped.

“That’s what, Miss Harry.”

“Nothing.” I said quietly. “Thank you, sir.”

He held my gaze for one beat longer than necessary.

Then he slid a file across the desk toward me.

“The Henderson account. Read through it. I need your notes on the discrepancies in the third quarter figures before six.”

***

OCEANS.

I tried.

I want that on record. I genuinely, effortfully tried to keep her out of my head after she left my office last night, and I failed so completely that it was almost impressive.

I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I’d shut people out before and moved on.

But this time, I sat at my desk at eleven at night, wondering what she was doing on the other side of the city, which was not something Ocean Stark did, and which I was therefore pretending wasn’t happening even as it continued to happen.

Had she made up with her cheating boyfriend yet? Not that I gave a fuck. I was just curious.

As the boss that I am, I couldn’t just pick up my phone and call her to find out what she was doing. That’ll be ridiculous.

When Moonie showed up – unannounced, as she always did, operating on the assumption that my schedule existed to accommodate her – I let her talk. Nodded in the right places. Kept half my attention on the quarterly projections and the other half on the specific effort of not asking about Kiss, which was its own kind of exhausting because the question kept reforming at the back of my throat every time there was a pause in the conversation.

I lasted until Moonie mentioned casually that her dear cousin, my ‘PA‘, had gone to spend the night at her boyfriend’s place.

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I had kept my face completely still. But inside my chest, something shifted in a way I didn’t have a clean word for. It wasn’t particularly concern or jealousy. It was something more territorial than either of those things and significantly less rational than both.

She should be resting for our big meeting with Henderson’s legal team, not spending the night and fucking her boyfriend throughout.

That was the reason I was bothered. Professional. Entirely professional.

I did my best to cut short their fuck spree the best way I could without seeming like a psychopath who would have gladly asked his PA to head to the office at one AM.

I picked up my phone at twelve AM and sent the text before I’d fully finished justifying it to myself.

Four AM was a perfectly reasonable hour. People worked at four AM all the time.

She knocked, but I didn’t look up when she walked in, because looking at her did things to my cock that I had no patience for at four in the morning while trying to get through a Henderson file. I

All the while we were in the suite, I did my best not to steal glances at her and focus on the numbers staring at me from my screen. But it was increasingly difficult with the way she kept shifting in her seat and the occasional flip she did with her bangs.

My cock did that thing it usually did whenever she walked past me. Only this time, she was sitting right fucking next to me.

It was a long day today. After three meetings, a quick visit to our new construction site, and a conference call that made me want to fire everyone on the call, including myself, I was well

spent.

By seven in the evening, I was running on black coffee and self–denial.

Kiss had been next to me through all of it. By the third meeting, I had stopped noticing how good she was at her job and started noticing the small things I had no business cataloguing – the way she tucked her pen behind her ear when she was listening carefully, the way she pressed her lips together when someone said something she disagreed with but wasn’t going to challenge, every fucking move she made.

She was exhausted. I know. But, fuck, I wasn’t willing to let her return home just yet.

“Sir,” she called softly from the door, “When will you be ready to leave?”

“Not anytime soon,” I replied without looking up. Because looking up would mean looking at

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her, and looking at her at this hour in this empty office would mean acknowledging that the reason I hadn’t let her leave yet had nothing to do with work and everything to do with the fact that the moment she walked out of this building she was going back to a man who didn’t deserve the air she breathed, and I was staying here alone with a scotch I hadn’t touched and numbers I’d read four times without retaining a single one.

Looking at her always melted my resolve in huge chunks, and I was doing all I could not to bend her over this desk, shove her dress up around her waist, and fuck her so hard that every memory of every man who’d ever touched her before me got completely obliterated — and nobody left on this entire floor to hear a single thing except her losing her mind screaming my name into the dark.

So no. I didn’t look up.

My phone beeped. I picked it up, expecting Moonie or legal or someone from the Henderson camp with a last–minute revision.

It was Reeves.

“Mr. Stark. We’ve finally found a lead on your mystery

woman.”

For the first time in a long time, my heart skipped a beat.

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