Page 19 of Ansel

My stomach clenched.

Michael drank nearly half the bottle. “You fucked her over, brother. And it wasn’t just business. It was—as she told you when she told you to fuck off—personal. Why did you even listen to this Vanessa woman?”

I closed my eyes and took in a deep breath. “Because I was scared that I wasn’t good enough for the job without Neha.”

“And so, what?”

“I wanted to do it on my own.” The moment the words left my mouth, I heard how fucking stupid they sounded.

“Do I even need to dignify that statement with a response?” Michael mused sarcastically.

I shook my head. “She made me look good, Michael, and that scared me. And the fact that every time she was in my office I thought about bending her over the table and fucking her until we were both raw didn’t help.”

Michael burst out laughing. “I can’t imagine howhardit must've been for you.”

“Don’t be a jerk.” I tried to be curt but I was smiling.

“The fact is that youintentionallylet her go. Even if she hadn’t heard the crap you said to this Vanessa person, you’d have fired her. You convinced yourself that youneededto let her go so that you could move upward.” Michael put a hand on my shoulder. “She made you look good, brother, and that meant you were a team.”

I nodded. “Yeah. Wewerea damn good team.” Until I fucked it up by being an insecure ass and then compounded that by going to her café and behaving like an arrogant one.

She was right, I’d gone to see her to make myself feel better. I hadn’t thought about her at all. Not what she wanted. Not what she deserved.

And that made me feel like the biggest piece of shit on the planet.

“So, what are you gonna do about it?” Michael asked casually.

I stared at my hands, flexing them against my thighs.

“I don’t know.”

“Okay, let me turn it around. What do you want?”

“Neha…but not as an assistant.”

“What else?”

“I want to see her smile,” I whispered. “I want to make her happy. I want to wipe away that horrible day,somehow. I want to give her what she deserves.”

Michael nodded approvingly. “That’s a good start. What are you going to do about this Vanessa woman?”

I cocked an eyebrow. “What about her?”

“She fucked with you, and she ended up hurting Neha. Also, I’m sure her campaign to get your job hasn’t ended.”

That was true. Now that I knew what she was doing, I was starting to see her attempts at making me look bad while she remained friendly with me. This wasn’t the first time someone did this to me—this was how the corporate world worked. It was dog-eat-dog and you wanted to be the dog who ate.

“Michael, this is how business is done.”

“Maybe it’s time then to find a new place to work, Ansel, because this is not how businessshouldbe done. It doesn’t have to be elbow jabs and covert fucking ops. This isn’t life or death! It’s just high finance!”

Michael was an academic, and I didn’t know how to explain to him that all of corporate America, in fact, the corporate world, functioned this way.

Vanessa fought dirty because she had to. As a woman, she had fewer opportunities than I did. I knew that, understood my privilege, which was why I tried to hire people of color and helped to promote women on my team—well, everyone except the one for whom I apparently had the hots for.

“For Vanessa, career is everything.” I ran a hand through my sweaty hair. “Hell, Michael, for me, too.”

“Ever done anything as underhanded as what she did?”

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