It was a busy Monday morning, and the long line of weary faces at Costa proved the point. Aidan waited patiently, going through his emails on his Blackberry as he stood in line. Realizing that the queue was being held up longer than usual, he looked up from his phone to see a blonde woman in a suit, sheepishly rummaging through her bag for some loose change.
"I'm so sorry, I'm sure I have it in here somewhere."
The cashier rolled his eyes, contempt written all over his face, and tapped his foot impatiently as the flustered woman struggled to find the cash for her morning coffee. Irked at the nonchalance of others, Aidan was reaching for his wallet to help out when the brunette in front of him beat him to it and kindly proffered the necessary quarter. The blonde woman thanked her, grateful at the simple gesture of kindness, and he watched the brunette laugh off the situation with a friendly grin. That's when he noticed that she was very pretty.
She had the clean, sharp features that were so popular with high street models these days: deep set eyes, defined brows and a perfect nose. But while the models were dead set on looking bored, glum and just plain cool, her face carried a smile with such ease. He would've kept looking, but his phone buzzed angrily with a new email, and after shooting back a quick reply, he looked up and she was gone.
By 11 in the morning his temples were throbbing. The draft of papers needed for the Heyland acquisition were a mess, littered with poorly crafted clauses and overtly gimmicky language -- but worse still, he was in one of his moods. Clicking about revealed the criminal who authored the offending document -- a certain Gwyneth Kenner. He'd had a bad morning, and wanted to defuse, so he picked up the phone on the desk and punched 0. "Lucy, please send me -- Gwyneth Kenner. Thank you." Scrolling through the document revealed a progressively expanding mass of absolute gibberish, punctuated by the timely knock on the door. "Come in." And that's when she stepped in.
This was Gwyneth Kenner? The brunette from coffee this morning? She stood in front of him, her hands placed awkwardly behind her back, as she greeted him hesitantly. He was surprised, but it passed in a heartbeat -- the blood pounding in his head a reminder of the ghastly document on his computer.
"Right, Ms. Kenner. I have here a copy of your work for the Heyland file, and I just want to know what the fuck you're trying to do over here, because for the life of me, I don't see a reason for you to still be on this team." His voice sounded like bullets being fired out of a gun.
Shock rippled through her pretty face, although she remained composed, and quickly became puzzled. "But..." she paused "...but I'm not on the Heyland file. I'm with the Brooks and Whitmore merger, and have absolutely nothing to do with the Heyland account."
"So would you mind telling me why your name is on this document?" he swiveled the screen to face her. Bewildered, her eyes scanned through the document, widening at what she saw, her frown deepening as she went along.
"This...isn't my work." she scrolled through rapidly "I've written this part before. Months ago. This was for the RBS fund project -- but - how -"
She was clearly at a loss for words. Aidan leaned back in his chair and ran his fingers through his hair. "Of course. Plagiarized document. And the birdbrain who did this didn't have the brains to fucking change the author's name on the document," he punched at the phone again. "Lucy, who is updating me on the Heyland file? Gavin Cross. I see. Thank you." He hung up. β¨β¨Gwyneth closed her eyes. Of course it was Gavin. Scheming little bastard. Pretty boy could never get anything done right, and trust him to have leeched a file off her computer when she wasn't looking. She rolled her eyes and breathed sharply, unwilling to face the man behind the desk. The atmosphere in the room couldn't get any more awkward as she stood there, feeling wrong footed -- like a child being chastised in the principal's office on mistaken grounds.
He broke the silence. "Well, I'm terribly sorry about that," he said, in a much warmer tone. "It was very rude of me, and I take full responsibility -- and I'm sure the original work was well worth copying." He gave a wry smile. She half-smiled in return, too terrified to reply, and hastily excused herself from the office.
Holy hell. Aidan Scodelario was every bit as intimidating as she'd heard about. The prized son of the firm's founding family -- educated at both Oxford and Yale, he had a reputation for being one of the brightest minds in the legal field. His summer internship at Bear Sterns rocketed him to fame, even though he was all but nineteen of age - and as he sat for his final exams, he was already consulting major banks on the finer points of floating stock trades and investment bonds. But that wasn't all about him. 'Demanding' was the word most commonly used to describe him -- having been around the brightest minds since his school years, he expected no less from the people he worked with, and the icy glare he gave so freely earned him the office nickname Berg -- short for iceberg.
Being alone in the same room as him for the first time, and being so coldly interrogated by him allowed her to understand why he was so terrifying. He had inherited his father's ice blue eyes, a blue so pale they were almost crystal, accentuated by his uncharacteristically high cheekbones and a strong, angular jaw. Seeing that face clenched taut in anger had scared her into a stuttering, stumbling mess, something completely unlike her real self, and she had to admit that he was a force to be reckoned with, beyond the office myth.
She staggered back to her desk, still shaken by the experience. "Oooh," Dylan Foreman, who sat in the desk opposite hers, leaned forward eagerly, "What'd he say to you?"
"He thought I did the Heyland forms and asked me what the fuck I thought I was doing. And believe it or not, I think that was his opening sentence to me."
"Whoa, that's pretty brutal," he nodded, making a sturgeon face. "But wait, you're-"
"Yup. Told him that, and get this -- Gavin took my agreement for the RBS deal last year and worked his magic on it, " she paused for effect "then submitted it to the berg." Dylan's face lit up in a grin of disbelief.
"No way!" he chuckled "Well it could've been worse," he offered, trying to console her.
"Trust me, it was bad enough on its own. The man's a living nightmare. I mean, would it kill him to not be so intimidating every once in a while?"
"Oh come on, he's not that bad."
"Oh, really? How about you go into his office and help me get some files I need? I mean, since you're not scared of him at all..."
"Not a chance in hell. You know, I'm pretty sure if anyone was going to be Batman, he would be. He seems just like the type who roams the night as a vigilante, beating bad people with high tech gadgets..." he made punching motions in the air. "Just sayin'."
"So...you're saying that I just got yelled at by Batman?"
"Precisely."
"And how is any of this relevant to anything?"
"It's not," he said innocently, taking a sip of his coffee as he did so "just voicing out a cool point."