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"Well, this will give you plenty of chances to dress a little more alluring. Plus, I'll ship you one of our new lingerie pieces. You can test it out for me on him.”
"And how exactly am I supposed to do that?" I asked, absolutely not taking her seriously at all.
"Fall down again, but this time truly be unconscious so he can see my lingerie on your body. Trust me, your body is sick, and the moment he sees my lingerie on your body, he's going to lose it. Plus, you could wear it to the beach as well. Are there beaches where you are in Thailand? Do you both have any plans for it?"
"We have a resort vacation planned in Phuket.”
"Perfect, I'll send you something."
"Please leave me alone," I said and reached for the phone. "I'm done; I'm leaving. Go work on your business some more and stop trying to ruin my life. I like my job and my boss. We flew here on his private jet, and my salary is insane. I'm not going to give any of that up just because I have a crush on him. It’ll die and I'll come to my senses when he gets with someone, and that's bound to happen sooner or later."
"That someone could be you," she said, and I ended the call. She was always putting these ridiculous ideas in my head, trying to save me from my unrequited love narrative. I wasn't going to listen to her because I truly had spent too much time so far with Hunter not to understand him, and any distraction whatsoever from his work was like cancer that he wouldn’t hesitate for even a minute to get rid of.
I stretched my neck a bit more, testing the extent of the strain, and I felt a little better. My prayer was that it wouldn’t get worse during the day, so I found some aspirin to take in advance and hurried out of the bathroom.
I had to get dressed and present myself before my boss and pretend he'd never seen me almost naked.
Chapter Three
Hunter
For the first time ever, I waited for her arrival. Not just because she was late, which was understandable given her accident, but because for the first time since she had been working with me, I had finally noticed that she was a woman. From the moment I had left my bathroom until now, it was all I could think about. And I had overheard her with her friend.
I had gone back into the room so that I could offer her some aspirin and overheard a healthy chunk of gossip that had left me quite astounded and a little bit uncomfortable. In the past, and every time I had hired a female secretary who was competent, it had almost always ended the same way. They tried to insert themselves into my life in either a romantic or sexual capacity, which was too much of a distraction to keep around. I hated mixing business with pleasure, and the past few years with the company and its explosive growth had been nearly out of control. So, after firing the last secretary for dressing indecently and all but throwing her cleavage in my face, I had given very clear instructions to the Human Resources department: "Find me someone competent who isn't the least bit attractive.”
A man preferably, or an older woman with children. And then Madison had entered the picture. She had no experience working in the renewable energy sector, but she did have a master’s degree in it and could understand details about our business. This was enough to qualify temporarily as my secretary. I didn't have to explain everything. Eventually though it became clear that she was organized, could learn at a rapid pace and was almost perfect in the role. It was impossible to hide her natural beauty but the way she carried herself made it very easy to ignore.
Until now. Now, and as I had overheard, she was probably doing all of this to fit the role of being as unattractive as possible for me, despite being attracted to me. This was more than enough to clear the lens I had always looked at her with and refocus my attention on her for a moment. I wasn't going to do anything about it, but I was quite looking forward to viewing her in this different light until and if it became a problem.
"I'm here, Sir. Where are you?" I received her text message and immediately raised my head.
"In the corner by the palm tree of the lobby," I replied, putting my phone away. My gaze was focused on the path leading to the bank of elevators, and soon enough, she spotted me.
She quickly hurried over in her dark grandma loafers, bootleg, pleatless flare dress pants, oversized suit jacket, and green button-up dress shirt. I couldn’t believe this was the same woman I had seen earlier. In that bathroom, her true self had been revealed, a goddess, and now she had tried once again to veil herself as a dull-looking administrator of some sort. She was hiding... her body, her femininity—she was hiding it all from me!
I took in her thick glasses, and when she finally arrived before me, nearly out of breath, I couldn’t help but ask, "Do you actually need those glasses?"
She tried to catch her breath but forewent this effort altogether when it was taking longer than she expected.
"Um, what do you mean, Sir?" she asked as she pushed the glasses up her nose. They were obviously too big for her small face. My eyes went to her hair, noting how straight and tied back and tucked and out of the way it looked. She barely had any makeup on her face, and her demeanor was as unremarkable as usual. She was never flustered, however, not until now at least, and I knew it was because she was late, which she usually wasn't. Her cheeks were flushed, and slight perspiration beaded across her forehead.
I sat up then and replied to her. "I’m asking if you need those glasses. You seem to struggle with them a lot; maybe they're not the best for you. Why don’t you try contacts instead? This way, you can always be able to see properly. I suspect that not having your glasses on earlier on was part of the reason you fell."
She seemed to contemplate this a moment, then she nodded. "I’ll look into contacts, Sir," she said. "And yes, I do need them. I am more or less blind without them."
"Alright," I replied and rose to my feet. After all, I wasn't one to push, and at the end of the day, it was indeed her business.
I didn’t believe her, though. I didn’t believe that she truly needed them. I was almost completely certain now that it was all a part of her facade, and I thought of how to reveal this as we got into the waiting car outside of the hotel.
"Good morning, Mr. Swift," our driver, Kit Charnchai, greeted.
"Miss," he nodded towards Madison as well.
"Good morning," I replied, and soon he shut the passenger door behind me.
He was the designated uniformed chauffeur organized for us by the conference team, and we had already met the previous night when he had picked us up from the airport.
"We're heading to Le Normandie by Alain Roux at the Mandarin Oriental," Madison said to him as she got into the seat in front. I had never quite noticed that that was where she usually sat rather than my side, but now my attention was fully on her. I wanted to tell her to switch seats and from now on ride in the back with me, but ultimately and thankfully, I came back to my senses.
