by Julia Sexton
At least until midway through the day, and then she couldn’t really tell him anything. He breezed out of his office to get to a meeting, and after that, he failed to come back.
By all logic, it should have been a short meeting, just to meet with one of the development teams and check on the progress of a particular project (to her mild irritation, Genevieve didn’t actually know what any of the projects were until they were officially unveiled, as they were simply listed as Greek letters in all of the files she had access to). And yet an hour later, when Ms. Cavanaugh of the Vector Corporation walked in for their meeting, Vincent had yet to return.
Genevieve apologized profusely and explained that no matter how many times she called the development team, no one was picking up, but she was sure he wouldn’t be gone for too much longer.
Two hours later, after Mrs. Greenfield and Mr. Victor showed up, there was still no sign of Vincent.
Forty minutes later, Mrs. Greenfield impatiently told Genevieve, “I’ll reschedule for a time when he’s not so overwhelmingly busy. Just let him know that Isaiah is getting impatient for an update.” With that said, she turned and left, her high heels clicking.
Dutifully, Genevieve typed the message into that day’s calendar, and she barely managed to hold in an exasperated groan when Mrs. Harvester walked in.
The president of Skyview Incorporated paused just outside the elevator, taking in the complete lack of anything productive being done. She looked at Genevieve and her harried expression and laughed gently.
“Don’t worry, dear,” the woman assured Genevieve.
“We’ve worked with him before. This isn’t the first time he’s kept people waiting.”
Genevieve smiled weakly, but she felt calmer after that.
Finally, after another forty-five minutes of waiting, the elevator pinged and slid open and Vincent strolled back into the waiting room, as if he was perfectly on time.
Before he could disappear into his office with Ms. Cavanaugh, Genevieve hastily informed him, “The representative from Arco was here, but she said she would reschedule, and she said to let you know that Isaiah is getting impatient.”
Vincent paused long enough to swear rather colorfully, and then he hurried into his office with Ms. Cavanaugh in tow.
Genevieve sighed slowly and rubbed her temples. By the time she left that evening, Vincent was still meeting with Mrs. Harvester.
Genevieve had barely been at work for ten minutes when Vincent stepped out of the office.
“You. Come with me.”
Vincent left it at that as he stepped into the elevator.
Genevieve quickly switched the phone over to voice mail and hurried after him before the elevator could close.
Down they went, to the development floor. Genevieve followed him off of the elevator, and she caught a pair of goggles and an apron when he tossed them to her. He handed her a sleek, glossy tablet a bit more delicately.
He was shrugging out of his jacket and his vest and rolling up the sleeves of his shirt as he said, “I’m going to say things periodically now and then, and you’re going to record it. Even if it seems irrelevant. Even if it just sounds like I’m talking to myself. Got it?”
He pulled on a pair of gloves, took off his sunglasses, and put on a pair of goggles.
Genevieve nodded quickly, put on the goggles and apron, and got ready to start typing.
“Is this the project that you were checking on yesterday?” she asked, since the worst he could do was not answer.
He grunted an affirmation. “If I need something done right, I need to do it myself, apparently,” he groused.
Conversation ended there. Vincent was wholly focused on the work before him, and Genevieve was wholly focused on recording everything he said, along with brief notes about what he was doing whenever he said something.
Most of it was written in the same shorthand she had taken notes with in college; a bit odd, but fairly intuitive.
Some of it was seemingly unrelated rambling, talking about some man named Isaiah and work that the other man was doing. Some of it was equations that consisted almost entirely of Greek letters.
Some of it was griping about physics, gravity, thrust, propulsion, friction, how things behaved in a vacuum, and things that Genevieve really only understood the basics of. The entire time, his hands moved, reworking the blueprints on the computer and pulling the prototype in front of him apart.
Eventually, Genevieve’s stomach growled, and she blushed faintly as Vincent stilled for a moment and turned to look at her, blinking at her in quiet bemusement.
He pushed the goggles up onto his head and asked, “What time is it?”
“Almost 3:00,” she replied, glancing at the time on the tablet.
“Shit, we’ve been in here for that long?” He laughed incredulously.
“Well, come on.” He set the goggles down and stripped off the gloves.
“We may as well go get some lunch.”
“No meetings?” Genevieve wondered as she pulled off the goggles and apron. She set the tablet down beside the scattered remains of the prototype, and she jogged after him as he stepped back into the elevator.
“Nope,” he replied.
“I keep post-dev days free in case of emergencies.”
Rather than up, the elevator continued downwards, all the way down to the lobby, and Genevieve realized with some surprise that he had actually meant ‘go get some lunch.’
“Emergencies like reworking the entire project?” Genevieve asked wryly.
“Precisely,” he replied.
“Let’s go, Genesis. I know a great little café down the street.”
“Genevieve,” she corrected once more as she fell into step beside him.
Chapter 4
Lunch made one thing very clear.
Vincent Grimoire, genius inventor, pioneer of space exploration, and CEO of Orbital Prime, had no idea how people worked. He generally expected ‘jump’ to be followed by ‘how high?’
Obedience was met with satisfaction, fearful disobedience was met with disdain, and defiance was met with perplexed admiration.
“Maybe if you didn’t look terrifying?” Genevieve suggested between bites of her pasta.
He stared at her in sort of puppy-ish incomprehension.
“Have you seen yourself when you’re annoyed?” she wondered, her brows rising.
“You either look like you think everyone but you is an idiot, or like you’re getting ready to go for the jugular.”
He cleared his throat. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
Dinner that evening was leftovers from lunch as Genevieve sifted through all of the messages that had poured in while she was gone.
She called back the ones that left all of the proper contact information, left notes about the ones who at least left a name and some inkling of what they were calling about, and discarded the ones that offered nothing to work with.
The office door slid open, and Genevieve glanced up, the phone cradled between her cheek and her shoulder and her fork raised halfway to her mouth as she listened to a man stutter out his name and phone number.
“You know,” Vincent began conversationally, leaning in the doorway, the tablet from earlier held in one hand. He held the tablet up.
“This is good work. Maybe I should use you as a note-taker more often.”
Her brows rose. “With all due respect, Mr. Grimoire, I’m bringing the phone with me next time.”
He snorted and waved a hand at her to continue with what she was doing and stepped back into his office.
Chapter 5
Working for Vincent was a bit like sitting in a frying pan and then jumping into an ice bath.
Some days, he would pop into the waiting room purely to chat with her. Some days, he would lean out of the office just say, “Morning, Genesis,” before slipping back into his office, and she gave up correcting him on her name after the fourth time.
Some days he simply would not shut off, like some sort o
f talkative perpetual motion device. Other days, he grunted at her a few times and didn’t say a word. Other days, she only saw him as he came and went.
To say he ran hot and cold did not do him justice. He ran scalding and frigid, a shock to the system like jumping from the tropics into the tundra.
His temper was not much different. Some days, his patience stretched for miles, and on other days it snapped with a single wrong word. It was always brief, though.
His anger never lasted more than a day, and it always seemed to simply evaporate, as if he had suddenly just decided ‘well that’s a silly thing to be angry about, so I won’t.’
With each day, Genevieve got better at navigating the minefield that was her boss, and she thought that maybe he was evening out as time passed. Perhaps she was growing on him.
Three weeks in, as Genevieve sat at her desk eating lunch and rescheduling a meeting with the representative of BioMetrics after a lab accident left most of the workers under quarantine, Vincent stepped into the waiting room. He paced the room quietly until Genevieve hung up the phone, and then he cleared his throat.
“Cathy worked here for about three and a half years,” he said, completely out of left field.
Startled by the random topic, Genevieve was silent at first.
She gathered her wits quickly, though. “Quite a track record,” she acknowledged.”
“Yeah. Heh.” He dragged a hand through his hair.
“See, I’m a bit of a perfectionist…”
“I hadn’t noticed,” Genevieve drawled wryly.
Vincent flipped her off off-handedly and plowed onwards.
“I’m a bit of a perfectionist, and I went through PAs like toilet paper before she showed up. I would have a new one pretty much every week. The longest lasted a month, and I think I might have replaced one of them after only three days. And then Cathy came along and managed to exceed all of my expectations.”
“She was your friend,” Genevieve guessed.
Vincent sighed. “Yeah. A sister, really.”
They lapsed into silence, until Genevieve asked for the second time, “Why did she leave?”
“I told her a secret,” Vincent admitted with a shrug.
“A big one. I’d never told anyone else before. But I figured, she already knew everything else about me, so if anyone deserved to know, it was her.” He scuffed one shoe against the corner of the desk.
“She didn’t take it well. She turned in her two weeks notice, barely spoke to me for those two weeks, and I haven’t heard from her since.”
Genevieve laid a hand over his on the desk, and he shot her a startled glance over his sunglasses.
“I’m sorry,” she offered simply.
“You deserved better than that.”
He offered her a crooked smile.
“I dunno. I guess she had her reasons.”
Genevieve had a strange and probably unhealthy fascination with Vincent’s accent. She could be perfectly content just listening to him talk, so it came as no surprise when she quickly came to enjoy her bouts as his scientific note taker.
The way he shaped words, the way they rolled off of his tongue, the way he almost seemed to be purring his sentences sometimes, like a smug cat. All of it enraptured Genevieve in a way that few things had before.
On a whim one day, she asked, “What sort of accent do you have, anyway?” Some people might have considered it rude, but those people had never met Vincent.
“Foreign,” he answered cheerfully.
He grinned in the face of Genevieve’s clearly unimpressed look and carried on working.
Genevieve glowered at him for a few seconds, but once it became clear that a real answer was not forthcoming, she huffed and resumed recording his scientific gibberish on the tablet.
Chapter 6
Orbital Prime was a very large company, with hundreds of employees. Vincent saw dozens of different people every day. So while Genevieve was aware that her birthdate was in her file, she figured it stood to reason that her boss wouldn’t actually bother to commit his personal assistant’s birthday to memory.
So it was quite a surprise to her when she sat down at her desk on August seventh and found a small box, wrapped simply in green tissue paper, sitting on the keyboard with a square of paper sitting on top of it.
The square of paper read simply ‘For Genevieve Carter.’
She had been working with Vincent for long enough to recognize his writing, and her first thought was a somewhat inane, ‘So he does actually know my name,’ and that led to a somewhat soppy smile as she finally realized that ‘Genesis’ was his attempt at a nickname.
She set the card aside and tore open the paper to reveal a jewelry box. With mounting excitement, she opened it, and she gasped quietly when she saw the contents.
A pair of rose gold earrings and a rose gold necklace. Each earring was a delicate swirl of rose gold curled around a string of miniscule amber beads, and the necklace was two rose gold chains join to the same clasp with a mesh of rose gold and amber between the chains.
Quickly, she pulled out her simple golden hoop earrings to put the new ones in, and she carefully latched the necklace around her neck. She got to her feet and almost jogged over to the office door. She knocked quickly, a staccato of six beats.
The door slid open and Vincent looked up expectantly from his desk.
“I know you’re busy so I’ll keep this short,” Genevieve started, speaking in a rush, “but thank you, so much.” She clasped her hands together in front of herself and very nearly bounced in place.
“I can’t even imagine how much these cost—I mean, I know money’s not really a concern for you, but still. Thank you.”
Vincent offered her a crooked but surprisingly sincere smile.
“No problem.” He shrugged one shoulder loosely. “Figure it’s the least I can do.”
Genevieve wanted to say something. She wasn’t sure what, but whatever it was, she felt like it would be important. Maybe that he mattered to her, maybe that Cathy had been crazy for leaving. Whatever it was, she felt like it would change things between them.
The phone on her desk rang before she could say anything, and with a smirk, Vincent pointed towards her desk.
“Back to your station, minion.”
Genevieve rolled her eyes and returned to her desk, answering the phone on the second ring.
“Orbital Prime,” she greeted. “You’ve reached the office of Vincent Grimoire. How may I direct your call?”
Chapter 7
Vincent and one of the development team leaders had been in the CEO’s office for ten minutes when the shouting started. Genevieve tried not to listen, but with how loud they were being, it was hard not to.
Mostly it consisted of Vincent calling the team lead incompetent and the team lead calling Vincent an overly demanding perfectionist, and it spiraled out of control from there. It lasted for almost a full half hour before the team lead stormed out of the office and into the elevator.
A moment later, Vincent stepped into the waiting room as well, pacing back and forth across it quickly and nearly vibrating with excess energy. His hair was ruffled, his sunglasses were gone, and his eyes were wild. Anger and adrenaline had brought color to his face, tinting his cheeks red.
He was muttering to himself, and the way anger shaped his accent, so it fit around his words in entirely new ways, was an absolute delight. All in all, he was well and truly frazzled.
It was possibly one of the hottest things Genevieve had ever seen.
Completely unrepentant, she watched him pace like a cornered animal for a short while, until an idea lodged itself in her head. It struck her so quickly that she stood up as soon as it occurred to her.
Vincent paused mid-stride to look at her.
“What?”
Well, no sense in backing down now. She had already been caught.
Genevieve switched the phone over to voice mail, stepped out from behind her desk, and walked up to him.
She leaned up, curled a hand around the back of his neck to pull him down, and kissed him.
The kiss was short and glancing at first. He hadn’t been expecting it, after all. But he adapted at an admirable pace, and the kiss very quickly turned harsh and biting, filled with pent up irritation.
His hands fell to her hips, his grip on them almost bruising, and the kiss seemed to go on for an eternity, the rest of the world slowing to a halt around them.