Page 6 of Tempted By the Safety

“This,” I say, gesturing down at myself with my free hand, “is the good outfit. You should see the alternative. Tiny shorts, no sleeves, honestly borderline illegal in several counties. You’re getting one or the other until my first paycheck clears. Then I promise I’ll invest in something boring and gray that saysI file expense reportsinstead ofI DJ on weekends.”

He doesn’t answer that, but a muscle ticks once at the corner of his jaw, and I file it away as the single most interesting thing that’s happened to me all week.

He takes one of my milk crates without asking and leads me in.

Inside, everything is quiet and clean. My studio smelled like radiator dust and whatever I cooked last. This smells like nothing at all.

“So who forced you to hire a PA?” I ask, trailing him down a giant hallway. “Blink twice if it’s the scary lady from the restaurant.”

“My agent thinks I take on too much,” he says flatly, without looking back.

“So that’s a yes on the scary lady.”

He doesn’t confirm it, which I decide is basically a yes.

He carries my crate up a wide staircase and opens the first door at the top. “Guest suite.”

It’s bigger than my studio, with a window wall pulling in real daylight, a regular bed, no futon mechanism required, and through an open door I can see a bathroom with a freestanding tub deep enough to drown a smaller man. It is, by a distance I am not saying out loud, the nicest place I have ever been asked to sleep.

“I’m gonna need to see the fine print on this,” I manage. “Feels like there’s a catch. Is there, like, a hidden camera or something?”

Sadly, he doesn’t laugh, just moves on. I decide to adddoes not respond to jokesto the growing file labeledSpencer.

After I dump my things in the guest room, the tour keeps going on the same floor: his bedroom, gray walls and a hugebed, and his home office, lined with supplement mockups for the nutrition brand.

Back downstairs, he shows me the home gym, which is bigger than the one I used to pay for, then the pool out back lying flat and blue and untouched, and then the kitchen, which stops me cold: six-burner range, double oven, marble that’s never seen a knife mark. Every appliance I’ve ever coveted from a catalog, sitting there gleaming.

After the tour, we return to his office, where Spencer walks me through the job in four minutes flat: calendar, meetings, errands. Groceries on his dime, mine included, and that one I clock as an unreasonably sweet deal. Pool and gym are mine to use, long as I work around his schedule. I get up the nerve to ask about the kitchen, and he tells me I can use it however I please, which sends a thrill through me.

But then I realize I’m about to know this man very intimately, in the unglamorous sense, his coffee order and his moods and probably his laundry, and the thought makes me fidgety. He’s enormous and stupidly good-looking, and I already know that’s going to be a problem. I’ve seen his social media, the parade of women, the ex-girlfriend from last spring who looked like she stepped out of a skincare ad, so I know exactly which lane I’m not in. Not that I was planning to be in any lane other than the PA one.

I sign the paperwork he slides across the desk, having skimmed it enough to know it’s fine, and then he tells me the conference call he mentioned at the door is about to start.

“Should I sit in? Take notes?”

“Not now.” He’s already reaching for his laptop. “Settle in first.”

So I leave him to it and wander, ending up back in that gorgeous, unused kitchen, where I open the fridge expecting, I don’t know,something. What I find is a shelf of identical shrink-wrapped meals, chicken and rice, chicken and something green, a drawer full of energy drinks in colors that don’t occur in nature, and nothing that resembles food a person would actually want to eat.

I stand there with the door open, cold air on my shins, and decide that groceries are the first order of business.

I came here to be his PA, and even though I don’t know yet what that’s going to mean, day to day, I know what it’s not going to mean. I’m not going to be some rescue project because I looked pitiful in a parking lot. I’ve been taking care of people, one way or another, for about as long as I can remember, and I’m good at earning my keep.

I plan on proving it.

3

Spencer

I come down the stairs already two hours into my day, whey protein digested, shower done, calendar skimmed. Six a.m. sets are non-negotiable, offseason or not, and I’ve got a brand consultant at nine who’d better bring numbers instead of apologies.

Halfway down the hall, I smell butter browning in a pan. My kitchen has never smelled like anything since the day I moved in.

I round the corner and stop.

The marble I’ve never seen a knife touch is covered in a scatter of eggshells, sitting in a smear of yolk nobody’s wiped up. Butter wrappers, balled up, one on the floor by the trash can where it missed. Two pans on the stove, both going, and a third stacked dirty in the sink. It looks like six people cooked breakfast and every one of them left before cleaning up.

Milo’s at the stove with his back to me, a spatula in one hand, hip cocked against the counter, and he’s wearing the outfit he threatened me with yesterday. Cropped top, hot pink and sequined all over, stopping a good four inches above the waistband of shorts so short I can see most of both thighs. His back is a long clean line down to a waist that dips in sharp beforeit flares out again, and I catch myself tracking it before I’ve decided to.