Chapter 1

Several months later

I had finally fallen asleep when it woke me—the sound jolted me out of a dream. It was some kind of pounding, rhythmic and close, but it wasn't the music from the party that had happened earlier. That seemed to have ended, so what was I hearing? It filled the room.

I lay and looked at the headlights arcing across the ceiling of my bedroom and listened in confusion. I'd been dreaming about…well, it was only the same old stuff, a selection from a carousel of nightmares. There was the one where I went to take an exam and somehow, its location had changed. Then I was running around my former college campus (or sometimes the high school, and once my elementary school) trying to find the right room, but my legs always moved so slowly that I never covered any distance. A variation on that theme was having to take an exam but I hadn't done anything for the class, not one assignment, and I didn't even own the books. I knew I was going to fail but couldn't do anything about it.

Sometimes I dreamed that all my teeth fell out; I put my hands to my mouth to try to hold them in, but it was no use. Probably the worst one put me back at the card game (when I woke up, I was at the point of puking), but I also dreamed about swimming. I showed up to my lane at a big meet and knew that I had overtrained, messed with my stroke, tapered badly, lost sleep, and eaten wrong. Everything single thing had gone sideways, but I was going to have to race anyway and it was going to be terrible. Sometimes I also realized that I wasn't wearing my tech suit or my goggles broke when I bent to take my mark. I knew that I would fail in front of my family, the fans, the coaches, and my teammates, and my heart sank…

Oh. Now I recognized the sound that had woken me: it was my heart beating so hard that it filled my ears with the noisy rushing of my blood and booming thumps that were way too rapid to be healthy and normal. Pressure weighed down on my chest and I sat up fast and then stood, rocking unsteadily as I wrapped a blanket around myself in the freezing darkness. I walked to the open window and looked down at the cars that whizzed by as fast as they always did, no matter the time of night.

Or day, I thought, as I looked at my phone. It was morning already, but it was a few hours before I usually got up for work. I tried to get my mind to empty and my thoughts to clear, but that wasn't happening lately. I definitely wasn't going to be able to sleep again, but I wasn't actually sorry. I couldn't take any more of those dreams.

"You look like shit," my coworker Gigi said when she walked up to my desk later that day. She was trying not to smile as she said it, but she couldn't prevent the corners of her mouth from turning up a little. She liked to pretend that we were not in competition, but we both knew the truth. Of course we were. "Are you sick or something?"

I already knew that I looked terrible, because reflective things called mirrors existed and also because every part of me thrummed with exhaustion and anxiety, and that was bound to show on my face. But I would be darned if I let this woman know the truth. "I had a late night," I told her, and faked a delicate yawn that almost turned into a real one, which probably would have cracked my jaws in half. "I shouldn't have gone out on a Monday night, but we had so much fun. It was worth a bag or two under my eyes this morning."

"A bag or two, or ten," she answered, and now she did let the smirk out, because ha ha, that joke was hilarious. "Where did you go?"

"You know," I said, and named a few places, some that I had actually been to and some I'd only heard about. I was pretty sure that Gigi had made an appearance at all of them, though, so I had to be vague about details so that I didn't give myself away as a liar. She herself went out constantly, since she was so pretty. She had a boyfriend who seemed to have money, too, so the lack of it didn't hold her back. She always talked about the things she made him pay for, like her phone, nail appointments, and gorgeous purses. He'd bought her a car, too, kind of a basic model, but I sure didn't have anyone buying a new car for me. I didn't even have anyone to slide over a ten to partially subsidize a ride.

"Did you get that dress you were looking at the other day?" she asked.

Gigi had seen me drooling over a picture on my phone of a silver slip dress and had mentioned that the color would be terrible with my bright, ugly hair. I'd been looking at clothes instead of reading through the legal document that had been open on my monitor but no one cared about that, anyway. "I wore it last night," I told her. "It's even cuter in person."

"What shoes—"

But she broke off and we both turned to stare as we saw our boss leave her office and walk quickly toward the bank of elevators. Most of the interior walls in this place were glass so there was really no way to hide, which was why Gigi had spotted me staring at the gorgeous dress. It meant that we'd been able to see the head of our department, Annis, taking a lot of serious calls lately. She'd also been going upstairs a lot, riding the elevator skyward to where the major players here at Whitaker Enterprises had their own glass-walled offices.

Gigi picked up a piece of paper I'd had on the corner of my desk and pretended to study it thoughtfully. It was actually just the new schedule of classes at our building's gym and I was supposed to have taped it up in the women's bathroom. Annis, our boss, was really into printing stuff, and she had asked me to post the schedule in various places on our floor. Working out, she'd told me, was important for our mental well-being, and she'd sounded a lot like my mother when she'd said it.

Gigi pursed her lips and ran her finger along the numbers and words, as if they were hugely important in our pursuit of compliance with all state and federal laws regarding commercial real estate. "Why the hell is she going up there again?" she hissed to me, but I had no idea.

We found out the next day.

I had managed to get a little more sleep the night before, and I'd also applied ice to my face for hours and used several serums and creams that promised to reduce swelling and dark circles. I did look better but I saw Gigi carefully appraising the damage beneath my eyes, which still wasn't totally gone.

I ignored her and looked out the conference room windows, because the view went for miles up here. Along with everyone in our department (minus our boss, who was very late today), I had been summoned to the thirtieth floor for this unscheduled meeting. We could see all the way across Detroit and into Windsor, Canada and I wondered what people were doing there. If I left this office building right now, I could get into my car and navigate through the icy slush covering the streets. I could drive to the tunnel beneath the Detroit River and enter another country. I could disappear into that new place, use a fake name, and become someone totally different in every way.

"Good morning," a man's voice told us, and everyone on our team turned to look at him as he walked in and took a seat at the head of the oval conference table. What was Stephen Whitaker doing here? He was the big, big boss of this company, like, in charge of the whole shebang. He was a big, big guy, too, and I'd always thought he looked like he'd be more comfortable chopping down trees or snowshoeing rather than leading a huge real estate firm. But he did that very well, because Whitaker Enterprises was incredibly successful and he was extremely wealthy. And happily married, which I knew because I'd seen Gigi make some unsubtle overtures to him in the building's gym, overtures which he'd utterly ignored. She'd been mad that he hadn't responded, but she should have been glad that she didn't get fired.

It turned out that was exactly why we were here today: somebody had been let go. But this wasn't a normal situation. I'd watched a few fellow employees get canned before, and it had been with a minimum of fuss and bother. The process certainly hadn't included the CEO of the company. But now, here he was, Stephen Whitaker himself. He talked for a while in a very serious way about honesty and industriousness, and Gigi and I glanced at each other. We weren't friends, but our minds aligned on a few points. We both knew what was happening in our department.

Nothing, that was what was happening. No one was trying hard. No one was working much at all. It was more like we were doing the absolute bare minimum, which seemed to suit us all very well. It gave Gigi time to send sexy messages to the guys that she was stringing along on different dating apps (she had a virtual harem, despite the boyfriend who paid her bills). It gave me time to sit in the building's old stairwell to take the unfortunate calls that came in on my phone way too often. After dealing with those, I also had time to try to make myself feel better by pouring over pictures of expensive clothes and accessories.

Annis, our leader, had never required anything different from us or from anyone else we worked with, so why should we have cared? She hadn't given a crap about what we did or that we didn't work. No one in our department was good at his or her job because no one tried hard or bothered much. People came and went with frequency, and their replacements quickly fell into lazy lockstep with the rest of us—it was just how we did things.

But now everyone at this table was nodding thoughtfully as we listened to Stephen Whitaker, as if a work ethic was something that we'd paid attention to in the past. Sure, we were soooo invested in the legal department! Yes, absolutely! Nod, nod, nod.

I did it, too, feeling like an idiot. I'd been around for the longest and I was pretty sure that I'd been hired exclusively based on the jewelry I'd worn to my interview, not for my competency or a willingness to learn. Annis had liked my necklace and had asked where I'd gotten it, and we'd talked like old friends. I'd taken this job right out of college, when I'd come home to Detroit and hadn't had a clue about what to do with myself.

My life up to that point had been regimented and scheduled and when that was over, I'd looked around in confusion. There was nothing left to train for, no reason to prepare, and no goals to achieve. I'd received an offer from Whitaker Enterprises and then stayed at the company because…well, why not? Was there really something better?

"That's enough on that topic for now," Mr. Whitaker announced. "I know this is difficult for everyone but we needed to clear up these issues."

I had snapped back to attention when Gigi's chair squeaked but I had no idea what he'd been saying.

"Again, in the future, please don't be afraid to approach someone in HR." He gestured to three people sitting next to him, and they smiled nervously and waved. "You can also always shoot me an email. I'm in the company directory."

I nodded again along with everyone else, although I didn't know what we'd cleared up. Also, Hell would freeze over before anyone at this table ever emailed him. He checked his phone and then tilted his head as he looked at the woman standing in the conference room door, someone I vaguely recognized as an employee on this floor. She seemed to understand his signal and walked off down the hall, and I looked out the big windows again and imagined what the people in those other buildings were doing. Were they industrious? Were they happy? Would I be, if I ran away?

"I apologize for my tardiness," a different voice announced, and I looked toward the glass doors again. Another man was entering, one about as tall as Stephen Whitaker but not same the husky, lumberjack type. This guy seemed utterly at ease in the razor-sharp suit he wore, which fit him perfectly and looked very luxe with his tie and pocket thingy. My sister Brenna was really, really good at clothes, and she would have been able to explain exactly what made it all fit so well, but I only knew that I was impressed. I was impressed with the rest of him, too, like his thick, dark blonde hair and his blue-grey eyes. In that outfit and with his ideal features, he was runway-ready.

"Fuck," I heard Gigi breathe out. "Who is that? And where has he been hiding himself?"

Somehow I doubted that he was the type to use her dating apps, and he certainly didn't look as if he'd have been sucked in by one of her semi-nudie profile pictures. This guy would not need any help finding girls, and in fact, was probably pushing them out of his way. "Stephen," he said, and the CEO stood so they could shake hands. "I got held up. My new badge wasn't working." He turned around and stared at the woman who was hovering again near the door, and I saw her blush.

"It's no problem." Stephen Whitaker looked at the rest of us and smiled. "Everyone, this is Beckett Forsman. He'll be leading your department from here on out. Beckett, let me make the introductions." To my shock, he went around the table and said all of our names. He knew us? It gave me a very, very uncomfortable feeling. Hadn't we been flying under the radar down there on the twentieth floor?

"Where's Annis?" I hissed to the guy next to me. Despite the fact that I'd worked with him for at least a year and despite the fact that Stephen Whitaker had just said it, I wasn't exactly sure of his name. Could have been Jim. Could have been Tim. Could have been Alfonso.

"Didn't you listen to what Mr. Whitaker explained?" he murmured back. "Annis is gone! I bet she must have done something pretty bad for them to have a meeting like this." But then the new guy, Beckett Forsman, turned and stared at me and Alfonso, or Peter, or whatever his name was, and both of us shut up and studied the conference room table in front of us instead of meeting his eyes.

Our new boss talked for a minute or so about his background, how he was a lawyer who'd been a partner at a firm in New York (he name-dropped it, so it must have been an important one). If I was calculating right, that put him somewhere in his thirties but from the looks of him, not very far advanced into that decade. I happened to glance at Gigi's lap and saw that she was already reading about him on her phone underneath the tabletop.

"I grew up in the Detroit area, went to college in Boston, and also got my JD there," he told us.

Gigi elbowed me and pointed to her phone, where it said "Harvard." "It's in Massachusetts," she mouthed, in case I hadn't been aware.

"I'm glad to be back," he continued, although his tone didn't say that at all. He spoke without inflection and his face was devoid of any expression. "I'm pleased to be the new in-house counsel here at Whitaker Enterprises, a company I've always admired."

It seemed to be the moment for applause. The human resources people started it and the rest of us joined in, and Beckett Forsman watched us without acknowledging that he even heard the sound.

"We have a lot to do," he continued when we stopped. "Let's get started." He held out his hand toward the door and stared around the table. Now it seemed to be the moment for our exit, so I stood up and moved fast. I wanted to get the first elevator down so I could do a little clean-up around my desk, straightening files that I should have already worked on or put away, tossing some old potato chip bags, and hiding a few notices that no one needed to see. I hadn't kept them at home, because my roommates were extremely curious, and now those terrible letters from the credit card companies and debt collection agencies were going to have to live in my car.

Gigi was right behind me and I knew why she was in a rush, too. She wanted to examine herself in the large mirror that she kept in her own desk drawer. Then she planned to apply more makeup and touch up her hair with the styling products that she also stored in there.

"Come on," she muttered to the elevator doors, and she jammed the button a few more times with her thumb. As pretty as she was, those were her worst feature. She had thumbs that looked like lollypops (skinny stems but big, round, and flat at the top). They reminded me of the suckers we used to get as treats after my big sister Nicola took us to get haircuts, since Nic had always been in charge of things like that. My sister Brenna would have shredded Gigi over those ugly digits if she had seen them, because Brenna didn't miss a chance to shred anybody for anything, and my other sister Addie would have told her to be nice, that Gigi couldn't help it. Because Addie was nice herself.

So that summed up three of my sisters, Nicola, Addie, and Brenna. I also had two more and a brother, my twin. There were enough of us to field our own basketball team, but that wouldn't have worked. I was the only one who was good at sports.

The bell chimed as the elevator arrived. "Finally!" my coworker said, shoving her way into the car before the people already inside could step out. "Are you coming?" she demanded, and ran her ID card before jamming her thumb on the button that said twenty.

All that rush didn't make any difference, though. When we got to our floor, we could see through the glass walls that Beckett Forsman was already in the corner office. Everything that had made it personal to our former boss must have been removed while we'd been upstairs, so all that was left was the furniture. The desk, chairs, and the room itself looked a lot smaller with this new guy sitting in there. He was larger-sized and also had…I guess I might have called it a presence. He totally commanded the decluttered, personality-free space.

"How the fuck did he already get here?" Gigi marveled. "Did he fly down?"

I had no idea, but I went pretty quickly to my office. She hurriedly took her beauty products into the bathroom, and I cleaned my space. Then I started doing actual work, not faking it but really getting things done. I got very involved in clearing up an issue that, honestly, could have been resolved several weeks before with minimal effort, but now had gotten worse due to my inattention to it.

I was so engrossed in my job that I didn't notice the figure standing at my door, which was weird because I should have been able to spot him coming down the hallway. But I didn't see him until he knocked, one sharp rap that rang loudly and made the thick glass quiver slightly.

Beckett Forsman glanced down at his phone as he entered, reading something, and then he looked up at me again. "You're Juliet Curran?"

"Yes," I told the new boss, and stood, smoothing my skirt. Annis, the former boss, hadn't cared about us adhering to the company dress code and I was very, very glad that I hadn't worn jeans today. Given his own attire, I had to guess that he wasn't an office-casual kind of person himself.

"I'm here knocking because I haven't figured out the phones and they're struggling with the login for my computer," he told me.

"Oh, I can help you with that," I said. I'd always shown the new employees how to set up their stuff, and there had always been a lot of those new people around.

"Really?" He stared at me, one eyebrow raised. "You do the IT for this department? Well, I know you have extra time to devote to it."

"What?"

"Please come to my office." He turned and went that way himself, and after standing stupidly for a moment and watching him go, I followed. I felt Gigi's eyes on me as I walked and I knew that she was probably jealous that I had been the first one picked by him. I was already aware that this was bad, though.

"Have a seat, Juliet." He nodded at the chair that I'd last occupied as I listened to Annis talk about her problems with her kids and her boyfriend (they didn't get along with each other, and another issue was that he'd cheated on her repeatedly). That had been a friendly conversation, but from the look on this guy's face, it wasn't going to go the same way this time.

"You've been with Whitaker Enterprises for three years. Four this summer," he stated, and I relaxed slightly. Ok, this was going to be, like, an intake interview. He was just meeting all of us.

"Yes, I started here right after I graduated from college."

His eyes flicked to his monitors. Annis had used only one, but there were three on the desk right now. It was another change that must have occurred while we were upstairs at our meeting, but he frowned at them and checked his phone instead. "And you were a…" He squinted slightly. "A physical education major?"

"I was a college athlete," I explained. "But then I didn't want to be a gym teacher and I didn't want to start coaching. So…so," I concluded, because I wasn't actually going anywhere with that thought.

"I see. You were a swimmer," he stated, and I nodded. If he was looking at my résumé, then he should have been able to see the high level I'd achieved in that sport.

"I went to a small college but if you know about swimming, then you know that our program is very highly ranked, higher than a lot of big schools," I said.

"That's wonderful," he responded, in exactly the same monotone he'd used before when he'd mentioned that he was happy to be back in Detroit. It actually sounded as if he didn't give one single crap about it, and he quickly moved on. "As the newcomer, I'm interested in understanding how this department worked. Your tenure here is the longest."

"Yes," I agreed, and realized he was waiting for more. "I think the department worked ok. I think we were fine."

"I'm astounded by the number of employees."

I nodded. It was certainly his right to be astounded.

"The astounding part is that there are so many employees and they accomplish close to nothing," he said slowly, as if to make sure I was getting the point. "So much of the workload was farmed out and completed by another law firm, instead of by this office. Do you know why that occurred?"

I understood two things: one, that he had figured out our disfunction pretty fast, and two, that my job was in danger. No, I didn't find it interesting or exciting, but it was a steady salary and it wasn't very difficult. Scratch that—it wasn't hard at all, and I got paid for doing the bare minimum.

"As the person with the longest tenure, where do you pin the blame for that problem?" he asked me.

"Uh…"

"What were the expectations set forth by your former superior here? Do you feel that you were fulfilling them?" he continued.

He'd presented me with an easy out. I could have said that Annis hadn't had expectations for me or for anyone else. But really, whose fault was it that we all sucked? Yes, her own conduct provided us with a poor example. Yes, she'd been the only attorney, so no matter what, the rest of us had been limited in what we could have legally accomplished. She'd made strange choices in hiring our team, she hadn't supervised us, she never set goals or cared that we were looking at our phones rather than doing anything related to why we were getting paid…

"Juliet?" he prompted.

"I think you're asking me if our problems are all about Annis, and that's not true," I answered. It would have been easier to say that they were, but I wasn't going to lie to his face. I was terrible at that; I turned red and got kind of breathless. But also, it just wasn't fair to my old boss. Yes, she'd been more interested in nail designs than legal work; yes, she'd tried to hire her boyfriend and it turned out that he was a felon. And yes, she'd paid a homeless guy to set off the fire alarm to get us out of a required training…

"Juliet?"

"I'm trying to say that you can't put all the blame for our problems on her. We, the rest of the employees, could have stepped up and tried to do more. That's what I think," I concluded.

"Hm. It's an interesting perspective."

Did he really believe that? He was back to sounding as if he didn't give a crap.

"All right," he said, and he looked at his phone again. "Could you send Michael…I'm going to mispronounce this. Michael Unwichtige," he finished, and looked at me for confirmation.

"Michael? Sure, I can get him." I was considering who that was—maybe the guy who sat near the ladies' room and waved every time we went in there? "Before I go, can I use your desk phone?"

"You may," he told me, so I picked it up, dialed, listened to the prompts, and hit some keys. Then I called down to the actual IT lady and she said she knew about the problem with the login, and it should work…

"Now," she told me. "Try it again now."

I said thanks and hung up. "IT says to try it again," I told my new boss, and pointed to his keyboard. He raised an eyebrow but did try it, and his computer immediately responded. "Your phone should work, too," I said.

"Good." He paused. "Thank you for solving my tech issues."

"You're welcome. I'll get Michael for you." I sure would, as soon as I looked him up in the company's online directory and identified him.

"It was so fucking stupid!" Gigi seethed at the end of that long day, as we waited for the elevator and she gouged her lollypop thumb into the button. I glanced around to make sure that no one was close enough to hear her, because she wasn't bothering to modulate and didn't appear to care that our boss still occupied his office just down the hall. "He asked me all kinds of questions. He totally invaded my privacy!"

The elevator doors opened and she charged in, ignoring the man with the cleaning cart who was trying to step out. "What did he ask you?" I wondered after I entered, too. My own interview with the new boss had been short and pointed, but not any invasion at all.

"When do you arrive for work in the morning?" she asked, pitching her voice low to imitate Beckett Forsman's deep tone. "Are you here five days a week? What time do you leave?"

"He already knows the answers to those questions," I said. "He can just log in and see when we scanned our ID badges to get to our floor." Now he could do that, since I had fixed his tech problems. I bit my lip, thinking about all the mornings when I'd arrived tardily. I struggled a little with that, too, and my sisters had always given me crap about it.

"What?" She turned to me and I saw utter horror on her face. "That's why we use our badges?"

For the first time in our working relationship, I felt sorry for her. "It's one of the reasons. Did you tell him the truth?"

"Fuck, no! Of course not! I don't want him to know that I've been here less than the minimum thirty hours per week."

"We're supposed to be here for a minimum of forty hours, not thirty. We're salaried and that's what it says in the employee handbook."

"You read that?" she asked me.

Yes, I had, because my older sister Sophie had made me when I got hired. She was the smartest one in our family, although I didn't admit that to her face. First there was Nicola, the hardest-working sister who acted a lot like she was our mom, although we already had one of those. Then there was Sophie, who wasn't smart enough to pull herself out of her gross, hermit lifestyle. Addie, the nice one, was next, then me and my twin, Patrick. His life was a mess, even compared to mine…anyway, my younger sisters were Brenna and Grace, the brat and the dreamer. We'd all grown up together with my parents, Frank and Jackie, who were still married and lived in the same house where they'd marked our heights on the door jamb. Things hadn't been perfect, but we'd all been really happy back then.

"Shit!" Gigi swore, startling the woman who was just stepping into the elevator with us. "I'm going to have to do something to cover my ass."

I vaguely wondered what that would be, but honestly didn't care too much. I was more interested in her interview with Beckett Forsman. "What else did he ask you?"

"So much personal stuff!" she complained, and again lowered her voice to approximate his. "How long is your lunch break, can you provide a breakdown of the work you did last week to give me an idea of your productivity?" She stamped her foot. "That's none of his business!" she said in her usual octave, and the woman who had joined us covered her mouth to hide her smile. Gigi narrowed her eyes, thinking hard for the second time on this ride. "You know, Stephen Whitaker was just telling us that if we suspect malignance, we should contact human resources. Maybe I should file a thing about our new boss harassing me."

"I don't think this counts as…and what did you say? Malignance? Did Mr. Whitaker really use that word?"

"Yeah, he was going on about it for a while, because Annis did something bad. What do you think it was? Did she fuck somebody at the company or is it about her man going back to jail? She's a real lawyer," Gigi reminded me. "They have rules they're supposed to follow." She was quiet for a moment and narrowed her eyes again. "Do you think he works out?"

"Who?

"Our new boss, dumbass!" she exclaimed. I only shook my head and asked why she would care, but she had her reasons. I understood them when she continued with her next question: "Would the rules prevent a lawyer from sleeping with someone in his department?" she asked, and the other woman in the elevator covered her entire face with her hands.

If that was Gigi's plan to save her job, I wished her luck, I thought. She rushed off the elevator when it stopped, shoving me and our fellow passenger out of the way and hurrying toward the gym. I didn't see her again until I was up on a treadmill myself. And then…holy Mary. She walked out of the locker room and I almost shot off the back of the machine. She was dressed like a stripper—or near enough. She wore tiny, tight workout shorts that had a ring design, placed so that her…well, her cooch was framed in a bright purple circle, and when she turned around, I saw that each of her butt cheeks was, too. She'd paired those stunners with a bra that might have been made for exercise, but I doubted it. Her boyfriend had gifted her with implants and this bra was not enough to give her girls the support they deserved. Also, it was mostly lace. Like, I was trying not to stare, but I might have been able to see her nipples.

Wow. Gigi was very confident in showing off her body, and with a body like hers, why wouldn't she have been? But this wasn't an ordinary gym. This was in the building where we worked, and we were surrounded by our colleagues and bosses. I didn't think I'd shown that much skin the last time I'd been at the beach in a bikini…

Oh, well, duh. This was part of her plan, of course. If Beckett Forsman showed up here, then she was going to coerce him into bending his lawyer/boss rules and sleeping with her, and she was counting on this outfit to make that happen. And, judging by the looks and attention she was already getting from some of the male exercisers, I thought her plan might work. There were gym towels available for us to wipe away sweat but right now they might have been needed to mop up drool puddles on the rubberized floor.

"Hello."

I whipped my gaze away from the bullseyes drawn on Gigi's butt and looked to my right, where my new boss now stood. He was dressed all in black, in a sleeveless shirt that wasn't clingy but was a lot more body-conscious than his work suit, and black shorts that also showed off more leg than the pants he'd worn earlier. I'd been right that he wasn't lumberjack-huge, but I had missed how built he was. His suit had, very unfortunately, covered up all that super-nice muscle.

Those thoughts raced through my head as my feet continued to pound on the treadmill, right-left-right-left, in an endless cycle. I didn't like running, but I had to do something. One way to keep my mind off it might have been to stare at the guy next to me, and he was a very nice sight. But yes, he was also my boss.

"Hello," I answered him. I quickly glanced around, but there weren't any other open machines. He hadn't picked this one, he'd been forced to take it—anyway, I wasn't Gigi, so I wasn't playing any games with him. I redirected my eyes forward, adjusted my earbuds, and kept running.

But I did occasionally check to see what he was doing. He wasn't listening to anything and he'd put some papers up in front of himself, but he wasn't reading them, either. His own eyes flicked around the room, studying everyone in it. It wasn't in a lech kind of way, but curious and kind of appraising. Then I noticed that we were running at exactly the same speed, our feet hitting the belt at the same time and thumping along together.

He glanced over at me and nodded curtly but I interpreted it as a friendly gesture. Maybe he wouldn't be as scary of a boss as I'd thought. I took out my earbud and—

"I think I dropped my ring right over here," Gigi announced loudly. She sashayed in front of the row of treadmills, got to Beckett Forsman's, and then said, "Yay! There it is!" She turned so that her back was to him and bent over, and I saw his eyes practically drop out of his head at the presentation before him.

Looked like Gigi was going to be more successful than I'd anticipated. Well, maybe she'd get him off our backs, and once they were together, then he would lose interest in all the productivity stuff he'd been so focused on before.

I replaced my earbud and kept running, thinking that the treadmill was a good metaphor for my life right now. I wasn't getting anywhere. As I thought about that, my heart pounded harder than it should have even while exercising. This activity should have eased my anxiety, right? But it wasn't working for me right now.

So after a while, I got off. I left the gym, too, and I looked back at Beckett Forsman as the glass door closed behind me. He was still on the treadmill but had slowed to a walk, and Gigi had taken the machine that I'd previously occupied. It seemed as if they were talking, and I watched her throw back her head and laugh. Apparently, he wasn't too upset over her lies about her work hours.

Beckett Forsman was just like any other guy, entranced by a cute butt; hers really was and I couldn't argue with his taste. She'd had the right idea, I decided, and I looked forward to an easy day at work tomorrow due to her conquest.

Things weren't going to change after all. Bullet successfully dodged.