After I Saved Him, My CEO Said We Were Strangers novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Beam
A crane shackle snaps and Hallie shoves her CEO clear; she wakes to him denying he knows her in front of his fiancée and her father, and a text arrives as she leaves: don't sign anything the Draycotts send.
The beam let go at 10:42 on a Tuesday morning, with forty crew members watching.
I was standing beside Declan Ashworth, our CEO, holding a clipboard and arguing with him about a permit date.
I heard the shackle snap before I saw anything.
Then the crane cable whipped, and eleven hundred pounds of steel started swinging straight at his head.
He was looking at my clipboard.
I didn't think about it.
I dropped the clipboard, put both hands on his chest, and shoved him as hard as I could.
The beam took me across the left shoulder and the side of my head.
The last thing I saw was his hard hat rolling across the concrete.
I woke up the next morning with a metal plate in my collarbone and stitches over my eyebrow.
Declan was in the chair by my bed.
He had his laptop open on his knees and his eyes on the screen.
There were lilies on the windowsill, with a card from his grandmother, Dorothea Ashworth, who chaired our board.
"Hi," I said. My voice sounded like gravel.
"You're awake." He didn't look up. "The doctor says the shoulder will heal. The concussion is mild."
"That's it?"
"The company is covering everything."
His tie was loose, and he looked like he hadn't slept.
A nurse came in to check my IV, and she smiled at him.
"He hasn't left once," she told me. "And he signed your surgery consent himself, so you were in good hands."
"As next of kin?" I asked.
"Company policy," Declan said.
He still didn't look up.
I had no next of kin in this city except my best friend, Bea Tanner, and nobody had called her.
That was the first thing I noticed, and then the nurse left, and I let it go.
Fourteen months ago, in Reno, Declan and I had gotten married at a two a.m. chapel while we were both drunk.
By noon we had signed annulment papers.
At breakfast he said, "Glad we caught it before it counted."
I walked out of the hotel that afternoon without saying goodbye, and in all the months since, he had never said one personal word to me.
I had stopped waiting for one.
Now he sat three feet from my bed, and I wanted him to say something.
"You were in surgery for four hours," I said.
"I know."
"Did you sit here the whole time?"
"I had a call," he said, and turned the laptop a few degrees away.
The door opened before I could answer.
A woman walked in carrying a paper bag that smelled like soup.
Camille Draycott had golden hair and a diamond the size of a thumbnail, and she hugged me before I could get my good arm up.
"Hallie. Oh, thank God. I've been calling the hospital every morning."
She was Declan's fiancée.
They had announced it three weeks ago, a merger between his family's company and her father's.
She was also, I had to admit, the kindest person I had met in that building.
She had once covered a month of my lunch tab at the site canteen because the card reader was down and I was short.
"Dad's outside," she said. "He wants to say thank you."
Her father came in behind her, a tall man in a camel coat, with a thin man in a grey suit behind him holding a leather folder.
I knew the thin man's face from somewhere.
He wasn't looking at me.
He was looking at Declan, and Declan was looking at the laptop.
"Brave girl," said Garrison Draycott, and patted my good hand.
Camille already had her phone up.
"Hallie, do you mind? The crew wants to see you're okay. It's only for the company channel."
I nodded, because it was easy.
"Say hi, Declan," she said brightly. "Tell her thank you. On camera."
Declan closed the laptop.
He finally looked at me, and his face had nothing in it at all.
"Ms. MacAuley," he said. "Thank you for your concern. I'm told you were passing the site."
I stared at him.
"I work for you," I said. "I stood next to you for six months on that tower."
"I'm sorry," he said evenly. "I don't believe we've ever spoken."
Nobody in the room moved.
"Oh, he's hopeless with names," said Camille, and laughed. "He has a thousand employees."
The lawyer wrote something in his folder.
"We've never met," said Declan again, to the phone, to the room, not to me. "Hospital billing will be handled quietly. There's no need for her to be involved any further."
Camille turned the phone off.
Her smile hadn't moved at all.
My collarbone ached, and I felt very clear.
Yesterday I had thrown myself under a steel beam for this man.
I pulled my site badge out of the bag on the bedside table.
I dropped it on his closed laptop, and it landed with a flat click.
"Then I guess I'm not an employee either," I said.
I got out of the bed with my IV pole and rolled it to the nurse's station, and told her I was signing myself out.
I was in the elevator, still holding my shoulder, when my phone buzzed.
It was a number I didn't know.
"Don't sign anything the Draycotts send you. Please. D."
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