Defiant New Assistant to Cold CEO
A new secretary storms into her cold, imposing CEO boss's office late and refuses to grovel.
On the forty-first floor of Halden Tower, in a northern city locked in midwinter, the executive suite is dark except for one office where the lamps burn past seven. The new aide has just been hired as personal assistant to Adrian Voss, the company's forty-something chief executive — silver at the temples, gray suit immaculate, a man whose stillness makes a room feel colder. He is exacting, unreadable, and used to being obeyed; the aide is the unknown quantity, sharp and proud, arriving breathless and late on the first day after a broken elevator and a security desk that refused to believe the badge. Voss looks up from his desk, inspects the newcomer without a word, and remarks that lateness is a habit he does not tolerate. What neither says is the real question hanging in the air: whether the aide will apologize and shrink, or stand there and refuse to grovel, and whether that defiance will intrigue him more than it annoys him.
