by A. J. Wynter
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Copyright
Copyright 2018 by AJ Wynter - All rights reserved.
In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.
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Author's Note:
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are a product of the author's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental. The author does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for third party websites or their content.
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Two Powerful Executives.
One Risky Takeover.
Will hearts or careers be broken?
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One Perfect Fake Boyfriend
The Billionaires of Torver Corporation, Book 5
A.J. Wynter
Contents
Copyright
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Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Epilogue
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Chapter One
“Give it back!”
“No way!”
I chased Eliza around the room, grabbing at my phone to no avail. I was terrified to see what shenanigans my roommate had been up to this time. I panicked as Eliza rushed into the bathroom and locked herself in.
“You can’t get me now!” Eliza said, giggling through the door.
“Come on Eliza,” I said, giggling. “Give it back.”
“It’s your fault you don’t lock your phone!”
“It’s not my fault you’re a thief!” I yelled back at her.
“For real, Sabryna, who doesn’t have a passcode on their phone?”
I sighed and sunk down into the chair next to the door, giving up. “Could you at least tell me what you’re doing?”
“Um,” Eliza said. “It’s definitely not a Tinder profile.”
“ELIZA.”
“Sorry! Sorry!” Eliza said, opening the door and slinking out. “But it’s good, really. Just take a look at it!”
I rolled my eyes and grabbed my phone back from her. To be fair, it was a good profile, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t pissed. I flipped through the photos she had posted. They were good pictures, and made me look classy—most of them were taken at office parties where I worked, at the illustrious Torver Corporation. In the main picture she had chosen, I was wearing a long silver gown that shone against my dark skin and flattered my curves. I looked like a classy movie star.
“Just admit that it’s good,” Eliza said. “Can you at least do that?”
“It’s good,” I said. “But we’ve been over this.”
Eliza sighed and collapsed on the couch. “You haven’t gotten laid in three years, Sabryna, and don’t bother lying to me about it. You’re way too hot to just be sitting around like this.”
“We’ve talked about this before, and you know why I don’t want to talk about it again,” I said sharply, tears beginning to well in my eyes. “I just need to be alone.”
I walked off to my room and shut the door. I knew that Eliza meant well, but she had no experience with what these past few years had been like for me...the level of grief that had weighed down on me for months, grief so heavy that it often felt like I was suffocating.
Sometimes it still felt like I was living in that November day...that cold afternoon in the flat I shared with Nate in London. I had been sitting at the table, mug of tea and a crossword in hand, when the phone buzzed, and I picked it up as casually as ever. It had been a police woman with a tone of composed dread in her voice. When she told me that Nate had been hit by a car as he crossed a busy London street, it was as if time had frozen around me. I had dropped the phone and fallen to the ground—and some days, it still feels like I had never gotten up.
It’s not like I had never tried to date after that—I had tried once, a year ago, once again at Eliza’s request. I went on a perfectly nice, perfectly normal dinner date at an Italian restaurant downtown. I liked the man, he was nice, and we had similar interests, and there was definitely potential. But when I got home later that night, I had broken down into sobs, thinking of Nate—of all of our early moments, the days back in college when I’d sit across from him in coffee shops and melt at his smile, and I missed him more than ever. After that night, I knew that moving on would take a long, long time.
I was okay being alone, though. I barely had any time to myself these days, anyway. My job as the personal assistant to Johnathan Torver, the CEO of the Torver Corporation, had gotten a lot more intense over the last year or so. The company had grown exponentially, and the amount of work that Johnathan and I had to do had seemed to triple. It was normal these days for us to both show up with bags under our eyes, completely worn out and running on nothing but office coffee and pure determination.
It had already been a long day—I had a ridiculous amount of stuff to do at work today, and on top of that Eliza had to go and dig up all of the Nate stuff I usually tried to repress. I took a lavender bath bomb that I had gotten from one of the Torver party gift bags, and decided that I would take the rest of the evening to relax. Just as I had gotten into my bathrobe, my phone rang. It was Johnathan Torver, my boss. I wondered why he was calling so late. I would have thought he would be as exhausted as I was.
“Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”
“I have an idea I want to run by you,” Johnathan said, and I could hear the sound of the television in the background. Even though Johnathan was an extremely important man, we had always had a casual and comfortable relationship with each other that I liked. We trusted each other.
“Okay,” I said. “What is it?”
“Well, obviously things have been pretty crazy lately, and there’s a good chance they’ll only get crazier. We can’t keep doing this amount of work ourselves forever, you know. So I was thinking...what if we hire you an assistant?”
“You want to hire your assistant her own assistant?”
“Yeah,” Johnathan said. “Why not?”
I picked up the bath bomb and began to toss it up and down in my hand. My own assistant?
“I know it’s different,” Johnathan added. “And I know things have always been comfortable the way they are, but we both need a break. We’ve got the money to hire someone else, and you’re good at managing people. You figure out what you want to outsource the new person, and it gets done.”
“I have been tired these days,” I admitted.
“See?” Johnathan said. “It’ll work. I’ll start looking around and
we can do interviews. You have priority in choice though, since you’ll technically be this person’s boss.”
“Wow,” I said. “Okay.”
“Great,” Johnathan said. “I’ll see you later.”
I hung up the phone and threw it on my bed. It felt like just yesterday I had started off at Torver Corporation, and sometimes I still felt that small. But now I was high enough up on the food chain to get my own assistant—that was crazy. I wondered who would show up to apply for the job—positions at the Torver Corporation were incredibly prestigious, so we’d get applicants for jobs that had qualifications that were way beyond what we would expect. People would go far to get close to Johnathan Torver and all of his power. That was one of the reasons, Johnathan admitted to me once, that he had hired me—he could tell that I was pure of heart, and had good business sense without the lack of a moral compass people in this industry sometimes had.
I placed the bath bomb into the tub and watched it fizzle and dissolve into light purple foam. I let out a sigh of relief as I let myself sink into the tub—I had been looking forward to this since practically the moment I had gotten out of bed this morning. I looked down over my body as I watched the water wash over me—Eliza was right, I had been looking good lately, and it did seem a shame to waste it. My apartment, although it was modest in size, had a huge bathtub that could easily fit two or even three people. It was easy to imagine a man in here with me. We would come in after a nice dinner out, in from the Seattle rain into the warmth of a warm bathtub, with candles and glasses of chardonnay perched on the sides of the tub. I could sink into his arms and feel safe and warm, and afterwards we would towel off, and I would lead him to my bedroom where we would make love all night and—
My leg made a squeaking noise against the side of the tub as I shifted myself up. Well, it was nice to think about, at least. Maybe Eliza had a point about the whole getting back out there thing—it had been three whole years since Nate had died, and maybe it was time.
Well, not quite time, I thought. First, I had to go about finding myself an assistant.
Chapter Two
“Excited?” Johnathan asked with a grin as I walked into work a few days later. “They’re all in the waiting room, shaking like leaves.”
“I’m kind of nervous for them,” I said. “And for myself.”
“You’re the boss here, Sabryna,” Johnathan said. “This is your interview, your questions, your choice, and frankly, after reading these questions you’re going to ask...” he said, handing me back the manila folder which held the interview questions I had written. “You’re being a bit of a hard-ass.”
“What?” I said.
“Yeah,” Johnathan said. “These questions are like five times harder than any of the ones I asked you all those years ago.”
I shrugged. “Yeah, well, I want the best.”
Johnathan shook his head. “That’s why I hired you,” he said with a laugh, and we walked into the conference room. We had set out some coffee and pastries as a formality, but we both knew all of the applicants would be too terrified to touch them.
Johnathan and I sat on one side of the table, where the third chair was soon filled by Samantha, his wife. Johnathan and Samantha had started out as rivals when we took over Samantha’s company, Wordsworth, but their rivalry had quickly morphed into love. This summer, I had been to their wedding in Spain with the rest of the company, where we drank champagne on the beach and laughed about how unbelievable it was that the two CEO’s that once could barely look at each other were now completely smitten with one other and exchanging vows.
“Who’s first?” Samantha asked, taking a seat.
“Some girl named Maureen,” Johnathan said. “She’s pretty well qualified.”
“They all are,” Samantha said, rolling her eyes. “It makes it so difficult, I miss the days when you could throw most of the stack out after glancing at the resumes.”
Johnathan laughed at her, but I tried to compose myself for the sake of Maureen as she walked in and introduced herself. She was a meek looking girl, tall, but very skinny and pale. She looked terrified already, and her hand felt like a child’s when I shook it. Her confidence was not much better.
“Hi Maureen,” Johnathan said, and I saw Maureen blush a little bit. He was a handsome man, so I really couldn’t blame her. “Welcome to the Torver Corporation. We’re so glad you’re interested in joining us. Sabryna is my assistant, and a damn good one at that, and if you’re hired, you’ll be her assistant. She’s just going to ask you a few questions.”
“Okay,” Maureen said, so softly that we could barely hear her.
“Okay,” I said, glancing over my list of questions. “So, tell us a little bit about yourself.”
“Um,” Maureen said, fiddling with her hands and trying her best to stand up straight. “I graduated with a degree in business management, and I’ve been working in a real estate office.”
“Nice,” I said. “What do you think of the financial decisions we’ve made, as a company, over the past five years? Would you agree with them?”
Maureen’s eyes widened.
“Sabryna...” Johnathan whispered. “That’s not really something she’s gonna need to...”
I ignored him. “So?” I asked.
“Well,” Maureen said. “I haven’t really researched that, to be honest, but the Torver Corporation has been doing very well lately, so I can only assume that whatever you’re doing, you’re doing right.”
“Mhm,” I said, pretending to scribble some notes on my paper. “That’ll be all Maureen. It was nice to meet you.”
Maureen stood up on shaking legs, shook all of our hands, and made a hasty exit.
“What the hell was that, Sabryna?” Samantha asked the second the door slammed. “You didn’t even give her a chance.”
I took a cherry pastry off of the table and bit into it. “My assistant, my rules,” I said.
“She could have been good!” Johnathan said. “She was shy, yes, but very well qualified, and there’s no way she should know the financial history of the company to interview as an assistant, that’s absurd.”
“Yeah, maybe,” I said. “But I knew all that and more when I applied to be your assistant.”
“You’re special, Sabryna,” Johnathan said. “You can’t expect everyone to have been the kind of economics nerd you were back then. It’s an assistant job. They don’t need that.”
“Well, you should want that. And like I said, my assistant, my rules,” I repeated, and smiled.
Johnathan and Samantha gave up and leaned back in their chairs. We had a long morning of interviews ahead of us.
“ANY ONE OF THEM, SABRYNA,” Samantha was saying as she updated her phone calendar. “I would have hired any one of them on the spot.”
“That’s nice,” I said, already annoyed. “How many left?”
“Only a couple more,” she answered. “And you better like one of these, it’s almost noon and I have a lunch to get to.”
“I’ll try my best,” I said, rolling my eyes. I know it sounded like I was being demanding, but working at the Torver Corporation was no joke, and it was no ordinary assistant job. Sure, Johnathan might run the company, but he had no idea of all of the times my expertise and attention to detail ended up saving his ass. There was no room for mistakes here, and we only hired the best.
“Who’s next?” I asked, turning to Johnathan’s clipboard.
“A guy called Logan Ainsley. He’s twenty-eight, went to school here, and has been working in business management for the past five years. He’s probably one of the most qualified people we have on the list, Sabryna.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ll give him a chance,” I said, not even taking myself seriously.
As the door clicked open, I took a glance up and immediately shot my eyes back down in embarrassment.
I did not expect Logan Ainsley to well...to look like that.
I blanked out as Johnathan was introducing himself to Loga
n, trying not to reveal how already flustered I was by his presence—I mean, for fuck’s sake, I was the one interviewing him. Logan was tall, a few inches over six feet perhaps, with light brown skin and short black hair that curled just so. His suit was cut perfectly, and was probably hand-tailored and expensive, and it tastefully hinted at what looked to be a very muscular and fit body underneath. And the way he looked when he smiled at Johnathan was...well, some things can’t be put into words.
“And of course,” Johnathan said, turning in my direction. “This is Sabryna, who you’ll be working for if you get hired. We’d be lost here at Torver without her.”
“Hi,” I said, trying my best to hold my composure as Logan reached out and took my hand—in the business world, you shake a lot of hands, and some handshakes are too firm or too flimsy, too quick or slow or sweaty, but this one? The gentle strength of his hand felt like something extraordinary already.
“Logan Ainsley,” he said. “It’s wonderful to meet you.”
“You too,” I said, as he took a seat in front of me.
For Christ’s sake Sabryna, your BOSS is here, be professional about this.
“So, Logan,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself?”
And for the first time in my life asking that question, I really did want to know.
“Well,” Logan said, stretching back in his chair comfortably. “I’ve been managing a small branch of an accounting firm down the road, which has been doing quite well, but I’m looking to get involved in something a bit bigger.”
I looked at him dubiously. “You want to go from managing to being an assistant?”
“Yes,” Logan said. “Being an assistant at one of Seattle’s top growing companies is better for a business career in the long run than managing something small that isn’t going anywhere.”
“This isn’t really a job with any guaranteed upward mobility,” Samantha added. “You’d be an assistant’s assistant. If anyone was getting promoted, it would be Sabryna.”