Please Me, Daddy novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Take the Glasses Off
On her first morning as the new CEO's assistant, Livia sees that he is the man from Saturday's masked night; he knows it too, sets the silver mask on his desk, and she stays, then gets an email ordering her to bring his coffee with her glasses off.
At nine o'clock on my first morning as an executive assistant, forty executives stood up when the new CEO walked in.
I stood up with them, in flat shoes and glasses I didn't need, and looked at his hands.
Three nights ago those hands had pinned my wrists above my head.
I had given him a fake name that night.
Gia.
I had worn a silver mask and a blond wig.
I had slipped out of his hotel suite at four in the morning with my shoes in my fist.
Now he was walking to the head of the conference table in a navy suit.
His name was on the door outside: Quentin Stroud.
"Breathe," Robin whispered beside me.
Robin Burke ran the CFO's calendar, and she had been my friend for less than an hour.
She had found me lost in the lobby downstairs and walked me up to the thirty-first floor.
"He's scary on paper," she said. "But Stroud is fair. In two years nobody has ever heard him say a thing out of line to an assistant."
"Good to know," I said.
I turned my grandfather's steel watch so the face sat on the inside of my wrist.
8:59.
I hadn't taken this job for Quentin Stroud.
I had my own reasons for being on this floor, and not one of them was in a navy suit.
He didn't look at me when he came in.
He put one hand on the back of his chair and said, "Sit."
Forty people sat.
"Six assistants have worked that chair since March," he said, and nodded at the seat to his right.
"I'm told there's a new one. Ms. Doyle."
My name was Livia Doyle on the Hartigan Hotels badge clipped to my jacket.
I raised two fingers off the table.
His eyes landed on me for the first time.
They stayed on my face for one long beat, and then they moved on.
"Ms. Doyle takes the minutes," he said. "Everyone else, welcome to the part of the day where you tell me the truth about your numbers."
The man across the table laughed and nobody else did.
That was Merrick Elliston, the chief operating officer, who had met me at the elevator at eight-forty.
He had shown me where the good coffee was.
He had told me to sit at the end of the table, out of the line of fire.
"Don't let Quentin rattle you," Merrick had said. "I'm right down the hall."
I opened my notebook and wrote the date.
The voice was the same.
Low and level, with a bite of gravel at the bottom of each sentence.
It was the voice that had spoken into my ear on Saturday night.
Good girl.
I had said daddy back, and I had meant every letter of it.
My pen stopped moving.
"Ms. Doyle," Quentin said. "Read me back what I said about the Denver property."
He hadn't said anything about Denver.
I looked at my page, and then at him, and then at the page again.
"You haven't mentioned Denver yet, Mr. Stroud," I said.
Somebody down the table drew in a breath.
"Correct," he said. "Read me what I did say."
"Six assistants since March. Welcome. Tell me the truth about your numbers."
"Word for word."
I read it back again, word for word, in a flat, polite voice.
He nodded once and turned to the room.
That was the only test he gave me in front of the others.
The meeting ran an hour and ten minutes.
I wrote down every figure Merrick gave him and every figure Quentin crossed out, and I didn't look up at his mouth once.
When the room emptied, Robin squeezed my elbow and left.
Merrick paused in the doorway and gave me a thumbs-up.
"Ms. Doyle," Quentin said, without turning around. "Stay."
The door clicked shut.
He stood at the window with his back to me and his hands in his pockets.
"Your glasses are new," he said.
"I've worn them for years."
"Your hair was down. And lighter."
"I think you have me confused with someone, Mr. Stroud."
"There's a mole under your left ear," he said. "I found it with my mouth."
My face went hot, and I kept my pen steady on the page.
"Many people have moles," I said.
He turned around.
He wasn't smiling, and he wasn't angry either.
He was waiting, as he had waited on Saturday.
He had held my chin then and asked what I wanted.
He had let the silence stretch until I said it out loud.
He opened the top drawer of his desk and set a silver mask on the blotter.
It was the one I had left on his pillow.
"I'm going to say this once, with the door shut," he said. "Saturday doesn't exist in this building."
"I won't bring it up and neither will you."
"If you don't want it to exist anywhere else either, tell me, and I'll never ask again."
I looked at the mask.
I thought about how long it had taken me to get onto this floor.
I thought about the way he had said good girl.
"I don't know what that is," I said. "Will that be all, sir?"
The corner of his mouth moved.
"For now. Coffee, black. Four minutes."
So I stayed.
I walked out to the desk by his door with my knees not entirely working and sat down in the chair six other women had quit.
My screen lit up before I had touched the mouse.
One new email, from J. Stroud, no subject.
Four minutes, Ms. Doyle. Take the glasses off when you bring it.
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