Page 15 of Empowered
Chapter 5
Sarah was used to compartmentalizing her demons and personality. It was how she got through the long, arduous workdays full of mundane tasks that had to be doneyesterdayand the astronomical tasks only billionaires could get away with requesting. It’s also what allowed her to go to sleep at night, even when her brain was stuffed with enough toxic crap to give a girl insomnia for the rest of her life.
Not to mention… Angel’s existence was born straight from Sarah’s ability to compartmentalize.
She was grateful for her skill after Lucas joined the Monroe offices for the rest of the foreseeable future. It allowed her brain to break away from the fact she had sex with him. And it made it easier to keep up the façade that she never met him before Monday.
Lucas Blackbourne, as Sarah came to find out over the course of that week, was the son of a Danish heiress and an American entrepreneur who married almost forty years ago for the sole purpose of creating an empire similar to the Monroes’. Yet while the Monroes mostly dabbled in developing properties and products that appealed to the middle class man, the Blackbournes were hardasses in publishing and technology. No wonder Damon called upon his best friend from Princeton to help him and his wife launch their new tech subsidiary in a world full of tech startups.
All well and good. Usually Sarah didn’t give a shit regarding the structure of her employers’ business as long as she got paid. But the arrival of Lucas Blackbourne changed more than her general disposition. It changed things around the office as well.
Mr. Blackbourne was granted a temporary office in the far corner. It was only half the size of Mr. and Mrs. Monroes’ separate offices, did not have its own private bathroom, and had some of the worst lighting after three in the afternoon. This sent Lucas out of his office more often than not, and this did not include every instance of him going to another office, the conference room, oroutfor work and personal matters. Sarah, who spent half her days at her desk making appointments, arranging schedules, making phone calls on behalf of her employers, and God knew what else, saw so much of the man she last slept with that she was liable to go fucking nuts if she didn’t enact every skill in her compartmentalizing arsenal.
It’s not bad. He doesn’t even recognize me.Angel had different mannerisms, vocal inflections, and appearances from everyday Sarah. The club had such low light that it was difficult to make out features anyway. Lucas was in the mode men adopted when having casual sex – fuck her and forget her. So what if he had inhaled and impaled her body? So what if he was the only one in the office to stick his dick in her? Sooooo what?
Besides, they rarely interacted. Even when Sarah had to accompany Damon and Lucas to their meetings, Lucas almost never spoke – and looked – in her direction.
Still, using that mental power to look past certain facts took up much of Sarah’s energy. Even though her workload hadn’t changed that much since Lucas’s arrival, she went home every night to collapse into bed for a deep, merciless sleep. Just so she could start all over the next day.
Her brother quickly noticed her change in mood.
People often mistook Nigel as the “submissive” twin due to his habit of deferring to his sister’s voice whenever they were in a room together. Sarah never saw it this way. Not only was the idea of a dominant twin vs. a submissive twin absolute bullshit in her opinion, but Nigel was simply observant. When they were a team at work, Nigel was the one who would take his sister aside and share his observations about what their boss asked them to do. Sarah balanced his work with her own by taking his observations and giving them a voice. While their marks had always been similar in school, she did have slightly higher oration scores. Besides, the men they worked with preferred listening to “soothing” female voices. While Nigel was taken more seriously thanks to his penis, of course.
So to come home to find her brother often standing in his bedroom doorway, arms crossed and eyes intensely focused on his sister’s haggard form? He had noticed.
He also did not ask. Sarah’s descent into having an affair with their boss’s father and the trauma they both subsequently suffered had driven an uncomfortable rift between them. Perhaps one day it would be bridged again. Until then, Sarah had to deal with Lucas on her own.
If she chose to deal with him at all, of course.
“How deplorable do you think cheating is?” she asked her brother one night over dinner.
Nigel looked up from his texting. A wooden bowl full of salad sat between them, Sarah picking at her leafy greens and completely ignoring the baked chicken breast on the side. Nigel ate his dinner with a bagel, but Sarah groaned at the thought of the extra bloating PMS already foisted upon her. “What kind of cheating? Relationship cheating?”
Sarah nodded.
“Well, it’s pretty bad.”
“Like… assume Dad cheated on Mum. How mad would you be?”
“I’d be bloody pissed.”
“Right. But is it worse than other things he could have done?”
“Come on, there are way worse things than cheating.”
“Right.Ah, never mind. I’m not making sense.”
Nigel put his phone down and looked his sister in the eye. His were surprisingly sharp. “Are you having an affair with a married man?”
“What?” Sarah dropped her useless fork.
Her brother steepled his fingers before his face. “When you go to New York. You’re seeing men, aren’t you?”
Sarah fixed her posture and shoved her food around her plate. Her haughty airs came directly from their British mother, who could clear a room with her sense of self-importance and inability to ever be in the wrong – a characteristic she was thankfully aware of and only utilized when actually in her favor.
“So, yes?”
“I hate you sometimes.” What was the point in hiding it? If her brother was right, he wasright.The man was impossible to successfully lie to. Likewise, he rarely got away with lying to her. “It’s none of your business.”
