Keeping the CEO's Secret

Chapter One

If there was one thing on earth that made my heart stop instantly, it was that incessant chime coming from my work desktop. Ping! Your doom is here, my friend. It made my blood run cold and that nauseous, spinning feeling began to creep up the inside of my chest. An IT request.

"Before you ask, I'm not doing it."

I turned to give my work colleague, Ollie, an exasperated and pleading look.

"Don't pull that face." Ollie hadn't even turned to look at me. "I fulfil ninety percent of the call requests around here. It's time you start pulling your weight; you've worked here for nearly two months now."

A shiver ran down my spine as I looked at my monitor in horror. The reason I loved my job in IT was because I never had to deal with humans, only computers, and now Ollie was ruining that for me. How selfish. I had been working on a trick where I waited for the requester to go home before I fixed their issue after-hours. Anything to avoid awkward conversations. That trick wouldn't work now, however, since it was just after lunch and we had many more hours before home time.

"Busy in IT? Yeah, fairly busy... What about finance? Oh, yeah, fairly busy." I acted out how the majority of these trivial conversations go. "You'll have to fill out a risk assessment form if I'm forced to go through that."

Soul sucking pleasantries are my worst nightmare. Ollie, however, chose to ignore my antics.

"Who sent the request?"

"I'd wager my soul that it's Diane in finance again; she thinks you have to call IT every time you right click the mouse."

Clicking on the popup, the name was highlighted in bold, red text: Callum Moore. The situation went from annoying to downright abysmal. Standing up from my chair, I began to pace back and forth, fanning my hands to calm myself down. Ollie pushed away from his desk to sail across the small office in his desk chair to sneak a look.

Ticket number: 454552

Requester: Callum Moore

Subject: "Slow computer."

"Well, that's unfortunate." Ollie tried to hide his glee but failed.

"You're not kidding," I cried. "It's just my luck that the CEO's request would come right at the moment you decide to go on strike."

"I'd get a move on, Millie. Mr. Moore doesn't like to be kept waiting."

Ollie's smugness was apparent in his voice, so I pushed his chair; he went sailing into his desk, knocking over the house of memory sticks he had spent this morning painstakingly building. Even still, his smug look didn't leave his face. That look ruined my day.

"He's an internationally renowned bachelor with money up the wazoo, of course he doesn't like to wait." I barked a laugh. "He never had to share as a child."

"Off you trot." He waved me away.

Sulking, I pulled my cardigan around me and called for the elevator. My mind was doing loops around me. I couldn't quite believe that I was about to see Callum Moore after all these years; I had only seen him in headlines on a glossy magazine or in random interview clips during evening scroll sessions for so long. A hundred different magazines, a hundred different women but always the same Callum Moore. The same smouldering, irritating expression, too.

I watched the light, indicating what floor it was on, fall from the top of the building down to the basement floor. My floor. It didn't feel like I was waiting for very long, but with each flicker of light my sense of impending doom grew. I wrung my hands in my nervousness. It was one thing to help Diane in finance with her buggy computer and bear the pain of small talk but Callum Moore really took the cake.