Page 24 of Babies for the Big Shot

She enters my boardroom with unstudied confidence, wearing a pencil skirt that borders on indecent not by design but by the simple, biological fact of her body within it. She takes her seat, crosses her legs with effortless composure, and when she speaks, the room stills.

Her ideas are clean, strategically sound, and delivered without performative flourish. Each point lands with the quiet precision of a blade, cutting through half-baked assumptions and derivative strategies with a clarity that leaves the entire table silent in her wake.

And then she looks at me.

Just a fleeting glance, accompanied by the faintest curve of her mouth, not a smile, not quite, and the entire machinery of my mind seizes. Words fracture in my throat. For a split second,I’m not Nick Ashford, CEO of Ashford Holdings. I’m just a man, wrecked by the mere fact of her existence.

She doesn’t even realize it. That’s the cruelty. She isn’t playing a part. She isn’t teasing. She’s simply herself. Competent, unapologetic, alive in a way that has undone every bolt holding me together.

By the time I return to my office, I’m running on adrenaline and restraint. I close the door behind me and remain there for a moment, leaning against it, trying to breathe through the electric chaos under my skin.

“You look two seconds from putting your fist through your own desk.”

The voice comes from my left. Calm. Amused. Infuriatingly observant.

Jonah. Chief operating officer. Oldest friend. Occasional moral compass I ignore at my peril. He’s seated in the visitor chair, ankle resting casually on my coffee table, peeling the wrapper from a protein bar with the indifference of a man who has trespassed here so often the notion of knocking is obsolete.

“You ever consider waiting for an invitation?” I ask.

He shrugs one shoulder, takes a bite. “You ever consider not pacing the executive floor like a predator trying to chew off its own leg?”

I glare at him. He only raises his brows in quiet triumph, unbothered.

“You’re going to have to address it eventually,” he continues, chewing slowly. “Or at least stop looking at her with the haunted desperation of a man being denied oxygen.”

“I’m not?—”

“You are,” he interjects, with a finality that brooks no argument. “You’ve been orbiting her for weeks with that expression. It’s uncomfortable for everyone involved. If thiswere Regency England, I’d be taking bets on which corridor your restraint finally fails in.”

“She works for us,” I say, keeping my tone flat, unwilling to let him hear what simmers beneath it. “This is neither appropriate nor professional.”

Jonah leans forward, eyes pointed. “You can frame it however you want, but you’re not fooling anyone. Least of all yourself. This isn’t about propriety. It’s about control. And you’re losing it.”

I drag a hand across my jaw, stubble catching against my palm. Exhaustion presses against my temples, born not of late nights but of relentless internal argument. He’s right. And I hate that he’s right.

“I am trying to be responsible,” I say, each word ground out with careful precision. “She’s intelligent. Capable. She deserves a workplace that doesn’t… compromise her.”

“She deserves a boss who doesn’t stare at her like she’s a glass of water and you’ve been crawling through the Sahara for a week,” he replies, voice quiet now, stripping back the humor to expose its foundation. “She’s not a casual distraction. If she were, you wouldn’t look the way you do right now.”

I don’t answer. Because silence is safer than confession. Safer than admitting that the mere mention of her name has heat pooling low in my spine and a hollowness blooming in my chest.

Then comes the knock at the door.

I don’t need to look to know who it is. The certainty lands in my gut with the impact of a body blow. And when she enters, carrying a folder clutched in hands that remain steady despite the faint flicker of nerves in her eyes, my pulse fractures under the weight of her presence.

Sara. All sharp edges and quiet vulnerability, masking herself under professionalism that does nothing to hide what I already know. The room constricts around her. Around us.

And I remain silent, holding on to the last fragile threads of discipline I still possess.

She has been working late almost every night. I notice it without intending to, the subtle indicators of exhaustion layered beneath her focus: the slight drag in her gait when she thinks no one is watching, the faint shadows under her eyes that speak to long hours spent revising campaign decks long after the rest of her team has left the building.

She isn’t merely competent. She’s hungry. Determined to prove her worth in an environment that devours the weak and resents the strong in equal measure.

And I am the obstruction in her path. The immovable force standing between her and her ambitions. Worse than that, I am distracted by her. Not her strategy or her numbers or the angles she identifies that elude others, but by the tilt of her mouth when she challenges me, the hollow at the base of her throat, the quiet ferocity with which she exists in every space she enters.

My attention should be on her budget projections. Instead, it’s caught on her presence, anchored there by something I refuse to name.

Jonah rises from his chair, stretching with deliberate indolence. “Ms. Brooks.”