Page 1 of Tell Me What you Think

Chapter 1

When the elevator doors open on her floor and Olga Serra steps into the hallway, only a few lights are on in scattered offices visible through the glass walls. They belong to the handful of coworkers who, like her, enjoy arriving a little early to steal a few quiet minutes before the chaos of the workday begins.

Olga is the executive assistant to Ricard Mandril, the executive vice president of strategy she was assigned to when she joined the company six years ago.

Savoring the silence, she reaches her desk, pulls her planner from her bag before hanging it behind her chair, and turns on her computer. While it boots up, she opens her daily planner to go over it one more time. She usually closes it the night before with every detail already memorized — the ten o'clock coordination meeting, the midday review committee, the calls Ricard has scheduled that she'll place herself before patching him through — but she doesn't feel settled until she's checked every item, making sure everything is under control.

Once she's done, she stands and takes off her blazer because the central heating is always set to seventy-three degrees, even though late November in Barcelona doesn't call for it the way other cities in the country might.

She walks to one of the two common areas on her floor and makes herself a coffee while she glances quickly at her phone. Nothing — not a single notification. Sometimes, like now, that's a relief; other times it gives her a low hum of unease, a reminder that her social life is, by most measures, pretty thin.

Coffee in hand, she heads back to her workstation, sets the mug on the desk, and steps into Ricard's office the way she does every morning. She straightens the papers on his desk, cracks the window open slightly because he always complains about the heat, and powers on his desktop computer so it's ready when he arrives. Then she checks the sticky notes he sometimes leaves under his monitor screen, making sure none are meant for her — Ricard has a habit of staying late, and when he needs her to do something the next day and hasn't been able to reach her, he leaves her a note there instead of on her own desk.

"People are terrible gossips, Olga. A lot of foot traffic goes past your desk. Better to leave it on mine," he'd explained the first time she worked up the nerve to ask about it — after he'd complained that she hadn't done a task she hadn't even known existed.

Ricard is a little eccentric, but he's not a bad person to work for. He's polite and considerate, and he's not the type to offload everything he can onto other people — or onto Olga, in this case.

Once she's satisfied that everything's in order, she goes back to her desk and gets to work, so absorbed in what she's doing that she barely notices when the office fills up around her and footsteps in the hallway and overlapping phone conversations take over everything.

"Good morning, Olga," Ricard says, startling her when he arrives with his ever-present brown leather briefcase.

"Good morning, Mr. Mandril," she greets him.

The man — dressed in a suit, his hair so white it practically gleams like aluminum foil — gives her a pleasant smile as he passes.

"Anything new?"

"No, sir. Today's schedule is the same as we left it yesterday," Olga answers, turning in her chair to watch him disappear into his office.

"Perfect."

He leaves the door half-open — fully closed spaces aren't his thing — and she returns to her work, sinking back into it until she looks up and realizes Ricard is heading toward the conference room with barely ten minutes to spare before their scheduled ten o'clock meeting.

"I'll be right there," she says, finishing a note in her planner.

"Take your time," he says with a smile. "There's plenty."

Ricard disappears, and she stands, grabs her phone, her planner, and her pen, and steps into the hallway expecting to catch her friend Silvia before the meeting. Instead, she sees Marina Cardona walking toward her from the far end of the corridor in a white suit, a pale brown silk blouse, and her dark blond hair swept up in a loose bun.

Olga nearly stumbles and freezes in place, rooted to the spot, while the woman she's been in love with for two years closes the distance between them and stops beside her.

"Good morning, Olga," Marina says, in that warm tone that's part of an open, approachable nature — one that stands in sharp contrast to the sheer ferocity she brings into a boardroom.

"Hi, Marina."

Her voice comes out small, and she presses her planner against her chest as the director's perfume wraps around her and pulls her into that haze she always drifts into whenever Marina is nearby. Things would go a lot better for Olga if the regional director were one of those cold, distant executives who keep their staff firmly at arm's length — or if she didn't have that natural elegance that makes her move through the office like she was built for it, or those impossibly long lashes framing a pair of pale blue eyes, or that unshakeable self-assurance, or that magnetic pull that makes Olga orbit her like a moth circling a light bulb. It would also help if she didn't remember Olga's name, if she ignored her the way some of the other executives did — treating the staff like furniture. But she isn't like that. Warmth and empathy are simply part of who she is, and that only makes the flutter Olga feels throughout her entire body turn her knees to water every single time.

Without all of that, maybe she wouldn't have started noticing her from day one — first with simple admiration for a woman who seemed to have achieved everything she'd set out to, and then in a different way entirely, once she realized she was developing feelings she couldn't do a thing to stop.

Despite Silvia's persistent nudging to just go for it, to at least test the waters, Olga has never made a move — not because she's afraid of a rejection from Marina, but because the regional director is intensely private about her personal life. The whole company knows she's been divorced for four years, and while she came to the last company dinner alone, she'd brought different men to the two before that. Silvia says that doesn't mean anything, that she could be bisexual, but Silvia isn't the one whose heart races in this woman's presence. She's not the one who turns red for no reason, stammers, squeaks, or blurts out something ridiculous — who loses track of what she was about to say the moment Marina looks at her or smiles, or who nearly passes out when Marina touches her. That last one has only happened once, since Marina isn't much of a toucher despite how warm she is. But one day the elevator was a little crowded, and when Olga stepped back to make room for someone who insisted on squeezing in, she collided with another passenger, stumbled dramatically to the side, and caught herself only because Marina grabbed her by the arm.

The warmth of that hand spread across her skin and radiated through her entire body, followed immediately by a rush of heat pooling between her legs, and the sensation was so overwhelming that when Olga opened her mouth to say thank you, what came out instead was a high-pitched squeak — which drew a smile to Marina's lips that looked, to Olga, far more like a slow, knowing smile than an amused one. Since that day, she's been dreaming about being touched again, and sometimes she even catches herself mentally plotting ways to stumble into her on purpose, like some kind of complete lunatic.

"Do you know if Ricard has finished the Q3 report? I need to know whether the Lisbon budget was closed out or if there's still something pending," Marina asks, glancing at her watch and noting there are still a few minutes before the meeting.

Olga reminds herself to breathe before she actually passes out, and draws in a breath so deep that for a split second she feels dizzy.

"He wrapped it up yesterday," she finally manages, silently praying her cheeks haven't gone too pink.