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Pamela grinned and looked back and forth between Oliver and me. “That’s wonderful,” she said. “Amazing. I’ll go get?—”
She said these last words at the exact moment Oliver looked at her and said, “Please go get?—”
They both finished together, “Rob.”
A few minutes later, I stood with the CEO and CFO of my company, toasting the future of Cody Tech with a bottle of champagne that had appeared out of nowhere. It felt like my world was spinning in the right direction.
We stood in the center of Oliver’s office, West LA spread out before us through the windows, and touched our glasses together, grinning at each other. I caught Oliver’s eye, and awave of unease went through me. The celebration made sense—but that niggling voice in my head was telling me I didn’t deserve it, that I hadn’t done much except ride Oliver’s coattails to success.
I sipped my champagne, hearing Delia’s advice and wishing I could take it and just enjoy the moment. But nothing felt the way I’d expected it to.
We spent the afternoon with people from many different departments at Cody Tech, trying to refine initial designs and get some idea of production costs in order to have a working prototype and a cost model ready to go when we met with MLB again. There was a lot to be done, and I was glad to be in the middle of it. The rushing around and constant churn almost distracted me from the hard knot in my stomach telling me I hadn’t done it myself. I tried not to think about it, tried to focus on the results instead of the methods used, but one fact kept rising to the surface of my mind, and the more I thought about it, the uglier it seemed: I’d gotten here by sleeping with the CEO.
I explained to myself many times why it didn’t matter, how it was just a coincidence of events, how I would certainly have gotten here another way if Oliver had never wandered into the coffeehouse that night. But it didn’t change the way things had happened. I’d gotten a hand up by putting myself in the CEO’s bed. And that had never been the plan.
Oliver, Rob, and I had just left a meeting in the developers’ tower, and the guys were joking together as we walked.
“If I’d known you were going to come backon fire, I would have told you to take eight months off years ago,” Rob said to Oliver.
Oliver shot him a look, but his expression was light and open. “When are you taking yours?”
“Not anytime soon. I would have,” Rob said. “But then you and Holland here decided to give everyone a shitload of work to do.”
We entered the executive tower and I glanced at the security desk as we walked straight through. The security guys didn’t badge me when I walked in with the executives, and it made it feel like they knew exactly how I’d gotten to where I was now. Suddenly important because of my relationship with Oliver. I shot them a weak smile as I read the time on the clock over their heads. It was already late, and on the news of the impending deal with MLB, we worked even later—Oliver in his office and me in mine.
I didn’t get nearly as much done as I should have—I was having trouble keeping my mind on the work. Instead, I kept thinking about how everyone at Cody probably knew exactly how I’d secured my promotion. I tried to shake the idea away, but shame was growing into a hard lump I couldn’t swallow around. At nine, Oliver appeared in my office to drag me away from my desk, and I let him, though part of me just wanted to go home and stew in my growing shame.
That night we didn’t have sex. Instead, I slept in the warm circle of Oliver’s arms, his body wrapped around me. At some point in the night, my mind released me from its constant churn and I slipped into a warm slumber. And even though I’d spent most of the day in a combination of worryand shame, being in Oliver’s arms that night as the city quieted beyond the walls of his house felt right. My mind calmed, my body relaxed, and for the first time in as long as I could remember, maybe for the first time ever, I felt like I’d come home.
I wanted to preserve the feeling of peaceful happiness I’d found in Oliver’s arms, but it slipped away as soon as the sun rose Tuesday morning, and I couldn’t help the distance I put between us as we headed for work.
“Is everything all right, duchess?” Oliver’s dark eyes flitted to me as he drove, worry written around his mouth and in the furrow between his eyebrows. “You’ve been quiet all morning.”
I nodded, a dark pain inside me where my own disappointment with myself had grown. “No,” I admitted. “Not really.”
Oliver gave me a dark look and then maneuvered off the freeway and down a busy street without speaking, pulling into a parking lot a few minutes later. He turned in his seat, concern in his eyes. “What’s going on?”
I dropped his gaze, my mind spinning. What was I going to say? I shook my head, searching for words to capture my own disappointment in myself. “I’m not upset with you,” I tried. “I’m angry at myself.”
It was his turn to shake his head in confusion. “About what?”
I let out a breath, wishing for clarity. “I feel like a fraud, Oliver.”
“What are youtalking about?”
“The promotion. The new office. The deal. I feel like I got everything I wanted and deserved none of it.”
“You deserved every bit of it. You’re the one who revised the technology. It was your idea. You got the meeting.” He shrugged and shook his head. “I really don’t get it.”
“Even if I did deserve every bit of it, it doesn’t matter,” I said, staring at my hands. “Because no one would believe it.”
Oliver said nothing, waiting for me to continue.
“Everyone will think I got where I am by sleeping with you.” My voice was a harsh whisper.
“What?” Oliver barked. “Bullshit!”
I pressed my lips together, determined not to cry.
