Accidentally His. Permanently Mine.

Friday, 30th of August, 2024

The sheets smell expensive.

That’s the first thing my brain registers before the rest of it comes crashing in the light pouring through floor-to-ceiling windows, the skyline of Las Vegas burning gold and white outside, and the slow, horrifying realization that I am not in my room. I know I’m not in my room because my room doesn’t have eighteen-foot ceilings and a California King the size of a small country, and my room certainly doesn’t have him in it.

Mr Andrew James Scott is still asleep.

He’s on his stomach, one arm thrown across the pillow beside him, dark hair against white linen, and even like this utterly unconscious and completely unaware of the destruction he has caused he is unfairly beautiful. The kind of beautiful that makes you stupid. The kind I clearly was last night, because I, Dakota Mae Stern, twenty-three years old, full-time intern, part-time complete idiot, gave my virginity to my billionaire boss in a Las Vegas hotel suite, and he is sleeping like a man who has no idea anything significant just happened in his life. Because to him, it probably didn’t.

I sit up slowly. My head throbs at the movement, dull and insistent, and I press my fingers against my temple for exactly two seconds before I remind myself I don’t have two seconds to waste. I piece it together in fragments, Logan, Mr Scott's best friend pressing a glass into my hand at the hotel bar, the sweet taste of something that wasn’t just the Shirley Temple I’d asked for, Mr. Scott coming to find me looking like he’d had too much himself, the elevator, his hands on my waist in a way that felt so deliberate I’d believed every second of it. And then the rest of it. All of it. Every detail I’m going to spend the next decade trying to forget.

I’m off the bed before I let myself feel any of it.

I find my clothes in a trail that makes my face burn, and I pull everything on with my back turned to the bed, moving quickly and quietly in the way you learn when your whole life requires you not to make noise about the things that hurt you. My dad taught me that. Get up, get dressed, get moving. Grief doesn’t wait for you to be ready, and apparently neither does professional humiliation. I slip through the adjoining door to my room on the other side of the suite, the intern room, the assistant room, the room that has always made very clear exactly where I stand in the hierarchy of Mr Scott’s world and I close it behind me without a sound.

I lean against it for three full seconds. Then I brush my teeth, wash my face, and open my laptop.

Because what else am I going to do? Fall apart? I’ve got a board deck to finalize, a car service to confirm for the 9 a.m. meeting Mr. Scott has with the Hartwell Group, and three emails from the Chicago office that have been sitting in his inbox since yesterday that he definitely hasn’t read. Falling apart is a luxury I genuinely cannot afford, and not just emotionally. I have fourteen thousand dollars in medical bills sitting on the kitchen table back home in Chicago, my dad’s latest round of treatment isn’t covered until the insurance appeal clears, and my student loan repayment starts in four months. I don’t fall apart. I organize someone else’s calendar so meticulously that they never have to think about a single thing, and I tell myself that is enough.

By seven-fifteen I’m dressed in the black blazer I pressed last night, my dark hair pulled back, my notes organized on the desk with his coffee order already called down to room service. By seven-thirty I have confirmed the car, replied to the Chicago office on his behalf with language I know he would approve of, and drafted the agenda for the Hartwell meeting in a format tight enough that he can read it in the elevator on the way down. I do all of this on autopilot, which is the only setting I have right now, because the moment I slow down long enough to actually feel the ache in my body or the way my chest is pulling tight under my sternum, I am going to be in serious trouble.

He comes through the adjoining door at seven fifty-two. I don’t look up. “Morning,” I say, keeping my eyes on the screen, and my voice comes out so level I almost impress myself. “Car’s confirmed for eight-thirty. Your agenda for Hartwell is on the desk. Chicago signed off on the amendment, I’ll have the full revision in your inbox by noon. Coffee’s on the cart.”

There’s a pause. I feel it, the way you feel someone looking at you when they’re trying to figure out what they’re seeing. “Good morning,” Mr Scott says slowly, like he’s testing the temperature of the room.

I finally look up and give him exactly the kind of smile I’ve seen the senior partners give each other in meetings when they want to appear warm and mean absolutely nothing by it. Professional. Appropriate. The smile of someone who is fully in control of herself and her circumstances and has definitely not spent the last hour quietly reassembling every wall she owns.

“The Hartwell file is tabbed,” I tell him, nodding toward the desk. “Second tab is the financials. Third is their revised ask. I flagged the line items I think need pushback.” I pause. “Also, there’s a small jewelry box on the desk. I found it in your jacket pocket when I pulled it from the chair. I didn’t open it.”

I set it on the corner of the desk without ceremony and go back to my screen. He crosses the suite and picks up his coffee first. I hear him set the cup down, hear the soft sound of the box being lifted, and I keep my eyes absolutely fixed on my laptop because I will not watch his face when he opens whatever that is. I don’t care what it is. I don’t care about anything that has Andrew Scott’s name attached to it beyond the parameters of my job description, and if I repeat that to myself enough times between now and getting on the plane back to Chicago, I might actually start believing it.

“Dakota.” “Mm?” “Did you sleep alright?”

The question is careful. I hear that. I hear the way he says it, measured and slightly lower than his usual boardroom register, and some part of me that I am actively choosing to ignore knows exactly what he’s reaching for with it. He doesn’t remember. I can tell he doesn’t remember, and that lands somewhere underneath my ribs in a place I refuse to look at directly. He doesn’t remember and he’s trying to figure out what he should know, and I am not going to hand it to him.

“Fine, thank you,” I say pleasantly. “Did you review the Hartwell agenda?” Another pause. Longer this time. “Not yet.” “It’s on the desk.” I close one tab on my laptop and open another. “You’ve got about thirty minutes before we need to go down.”