KADEN“Do you have any plans for this weekend?” Ember asked me as we headed to work together on Friday morning, a week after the first time we made the trek together.I shrugged, shifting in the seat of the cab we were sharing. My pride and joy was my brand-new Bugatti, but Ember refused to drive to work in it with me. She claimed people seeing us getting out of a cab together could easily be explained away, but getting out of my car was too suspicious.“People share cabs all the time,” she had argued when I led her to the parking garage of my building one morning. “We could live close to one another, or we could be coming back from an early meeting, but getting out of your car says we were together wherever we were coming from.”“That makes no sense,” I’d told her, grabbing her hand and pulling her to my side. “We could have been together at the early morning meeting we shared the cab from, too.”“Yeah, but it just looks suspicious,” she had said, promptly bypassing my car and walkin

EMBERThank god I didn’t take the day off with Kaden. I hadn’t been at the office an hour when Craig told me Mr. Marx wanted to see me. If I hadn’t been at the office when that came through, I probably would’ve been receiving a call about now, telling me to come pack my cardboard box with my stuff and never come back again. Mentally, I breathed a sigh of relief.I had been tempted when Kaden asked me to spend the day with him. We were spending more and more time together after work, but the thought of spending an entire day with him was tantalizing.What was he like when he wasn’t tired from work or half-distracted by it? When we were together, he never made me feel like he was distracted, but I knew he had to be. He had a high-pressure job, and he could say what he wanted, but I knew he got stressed out by it at times.A full day with only the two of us, away from work and everything that came along with that, sounded heavenly. I hoped we would be able to carve out some time to do it

KADENWalking to my dad’s office, I knew something was about to go down. I had no idea what, but I could tell something was about to happen, all the way down to my bones.When Dad called me to his office, it was usually me alone. Sometimes, other senior members of staff would join. Other times, it was clients. The Morrison thing had been an example of that.In the five years I’d worked for Marx Inc. though, I’d never been called in at the same time as a recruit. The fact that he was calling both me and Ember to his office immediately and at the same time made me think this might be personal.Whatever he might have to say about Ember and me about what we were doing, I wasn’t fucking stopping. It had nothing to do with him. We both worked our asses off for him and got our jobs done.We didn’t flaunt our relationship at work, and we didn’t hookup in storage closets or conference rooms, though the thought had crossed my mind more than once. Okay, so we fucked in the office that first time

KADENI blinked, and my chin dropped to my chest. Blood pounded in my ears, making me wonder if I’d just heard my dad correctly. Surely, I couldn’t have.“Are you serious?” I asked. “You’re demoting me and appointing a recruit who has been here less than a quarter as the Chief Financial Officer of one of the biggest investment banking firms in the city?”Saying it all out loud convinced me. I’d definitely misheard him. There was just no fucking way he could have said he was appointing Ember Jordan to my position as CFO. It wasn’t that I didn’t think Ember could it—I had complete faith in her ability to do anything she set her mind to—but she’d only been at the company a few months.We had people working for us who had dedicated their entire lives to this company. People who were more than qualified in both education and, more importantly, experience to take on the role of CFO. If we needed a new CFO, that was, which we didn’t because I was sitting right fucking here.Ember—gorgeous, s

EMBER My heart raced, my palms were clammy, and my ears were ringing. What in the holy hell was happening?I heard Kaden speaking to his dad, but it didn’t sound like he was standing right next to me. It sounded like his voice was coming from underwater. My eyes darted around.Nope. No water had somehow sloshed into the office. There were no candid cameras anywhere. No talk show host jumping out from behind Mr. Marx’s hulking frame to yell, “Gotcha!”Blinking hard, I tried to make sense of it all. Before I could even start, Kaden glared daggers at his dad and clenched his fists. “You know what? Fuck you. I’m not taking this shit from you. Fuck you, and fuck this company. I’m out.”Without waiting for a response from either me or his dad, he turned and stormed out of the office. I sat in my chair, watching all this unfold around me in utter disbelief.“Well,” Mr. Marx said finally, breaking the silence that reigned in his office. “I thought he would handle that better, but I should ha