She built her life on principles: sustainability, independence, and never needing anyone’s approval.
Laetitia Delacre is the rising star of Comexp, the company reinventing “eco-friendly” shopping centers—sharp, disciplined, untouchable. In public, she’s the perfect executive. In private, she’s hiding the one truth that could destroy everything: her real family name links her to Comexp’s most dangerous rival.
Then, on a business trip to Bordeaux, the past catches up with her in the worst possible way… and Benjamin Fortet, her brilliant, infuriatingly attractive boss, realizes he has trusted the enemy.
He should fire her. Expose her. Ruin her.
Instead, he proposes a secret arrangement—one that turns punishment into obsession, control into confession, and a cold professional distance into a game neither of them can stop playing.
As Laetitia fights the pull of desire and the weight of her past, one question becomes unavoidable: is she losing herself… or finally becoming who she truly is?
A bold, addictive romance of power, secrets, and forbidden attraction—where love is the one risk they can’t calculate.
Chapter 1 – Part 1
7:30 p.m. Before heading home, I take a quick look at PostOn, then I shut down my computer. I check that everything is tidy and that the important cabinets are locked, because I won’t be back at my desk until Thursday and I like that—checking. Normally, before leaving, I go around to say a quick goodbye to everyone. But at this hour, only my boss is still here, and since he never says hello to anyone, I decided a very long time ago not to do it either, in the morning or at night. This, despite the fact that our two offices share a wall ever since I unfortunately inherited the one that was supposed to house his secretary. Except the man doesn’t have one, because it’s “too old-school.” So he knows my every move, and it royally pisses me off.
Some people call him the BoBo-boss, a nod to his (pseudo-)eco side and his modern Google-style management methods, minus the slides. Me, I call him the pretty-pretty-boss, because being pretty is the only thing he knows how to do. Well… he really is gorgeous, actually. Careful—I’m not saying I’m in love with him. Besides, he’s a work tyrant and he always looks like he’s sulking. Sometimes I tell myself it’s because, when he first started biking to work and eating organic twenty years ago, Mr. Benjamin Fortet had convictions. Now he does it out of obligation. Because otherwise, his company, Comexp—entirely built around a concept of eco-friendly shopping centers—would lose its shine. If people thought its legendary founder came to work by helicopter from the provinces, like some people I know (my father, for example), his shares would crash as hard as PostOn’s did on the day they went public. Being eco-friendly by obligation must be exhausting, but hey—maybe my theory is wrong. Some people sulk out of habit, even when they’re sitting on billions in assets and earning €90,000 a month, bonuses not included.
I call the elevator, which should arrive quickly given the late hour, when I hear footsteps behind me.
“Good evening, Miss Delacre… or should I say Miss Dela-cake?”
No way. What are the odds that Mr. €90,000 leaves at the exact same time as me? Without turning around, I murmur, “Good evening, sir.” Or rather, I grumble it. The kind that says: I’ve had a rough day, I’m tired, I don’t want to talk, and above all, above all not with you. I must have communication issues because apparently, he doesn’t catch the hidden message. He even tries to look kind as he says:
“Is your suitcase ready for tomorrow?”
Does he want me to talk to him about my panties or what? What girl wants to discuss her suitcase with her boss?
“Yes, sir.”
“I haven’t received your notes for Thursday’s meeting, have I?”
So that’s the answer to my surprise. The probability that I’m about to get a proper scolding in the next five minutes is inversely proportional to the one that would have had me sharing an elevator with him purely by chance. On top of telling me off like a little girl, he schedules me for Wednesday afternoon at 3 p.m. at the hotel bar to go over things, making a point of insisting that my colleagues will all be in a meeting together for a collective debrief—and that he’ll be missing that meeting to work with me. I press the elevator button again, annoyed. When it finally arrives and he steps in at the same time as me, I hesitate to shove him out right as the doors close, but I don’t think I’m strong enough to pull it off. And I’d look a bit stupid… We go down in silence, then exchange a Siberian “goodbye.”
When I get to my apartment, I take off my city clothes and put on jeans and an open-neck T-shirt. I’m absolutely determined to wear different clothes for work, even if at Comexp I’m the only one—since even Mr. Fortet comes in wearing Bermuda shorts in the summer. For me, when you work, you adopt a classic style in sober colors: heels not too high, skirts at knee length, no cleavage (exception for evenings, if the skirt isn’t too short!), no jewelry, not too much makeup. We’re not at a club or at practice. That’s all.
Usually, I like business trips, especially with my colleagues, because it breaks up the routine and gets me out of Paris. Living and eating in luxury hotels like Sofitel or Hilton also reminds me of the old me—the little bourgeois girl who had never taken the metro before the age of twenty, and who often flew by private jet with her parents for a few days in Marrakech, Stockholm, or Prague.
This time, those two days in Bordeaux don’t appeal to me much. Not only am I going to miss handball practice for the second week in a row, but I also have this kind of gut feeling, like I’m going to be bored out of my mind… or break a leg. It reminds me of when my parents used to ship me off to Malta for three weeks every summer to learn English.
Not very motivated, I call my favorite teammate, Marie, to ask her to warn our handball coach, who doesn’t really like it when we’re absent. Talking to her always does me good because, honestly, I spend so many hours at work that I don’t get much chance to talk about anything else. With Marie, I speak normally, and on her side she talks like she’s still eighteen, which hasn’t been true for quite a while. Maybe it’s because she’s an educator and spends more time around teenagers than adults (at least, that’s what she says).
“You’ll tell him I’m absolutely sorry? I’ll still be there Friday night for practice before the match against Provins, okay—he’s got that noted?!”
“No soucy. I’ll tell Joe his favorite won’t be coming, he’ll cry, I’ll comfort him, and I’ll sleep with him!”
“I don’t know why you torture yourself like that—if you like him? He doesn’t care about me and it’s mutual, so shut your big mouth and invite him to whatever you want!”
“It’s shut your big gob when you’re normal, Laetitia! What are you going to wear to your dreamy 4-star hotel packed with rich guys? I at least hope you’re bringing a super sexy nightie in case you meet the love of your life. But try to make it a Parisian, not a winemaker! (In Bordeaux there are only winemakers, everyone knows that!)”
That’s Marie and her clichés. Every time I see her, I have at least two laughing fits, and she’s the only person who laughs at my own jokes—so for three years now, she’s been one of my best friends. Well… kind of the only one. On the team, she’s the goalkeeper. Her five-foot-nine frame and her constant nervous energy probably have something to do with it. When she’s in goal, she can’t stay still—she’s bouncing non-stop like a Duracell bunny.
I have the pretension of thinking I’m the other pillar of the group—first because I really am a pillar, meaning I play pivot, the one up front, but also because I score a good half of the goals all by myself. As for me, it might be because I’ve been playing handball for twenty years—and it’s certainly not because of my 5’5″ or the not-at-all-Herculean strength of my one hundred and ten pounds. I chose this sport because a certain Franck—who I was in love with at the time—played it, and I discovered I had a gift for it. Unlike golf, which I played for fifteen years with my parents and at which I am terrible. Apart from Marie, my teammates don’t know that I used to play golf, or anything else connected to “the old me.” They only think I’ve got insane luck with my dream job and my €5,000 a month. But my boss makes €90,000! Besides, I couldn’t be getting cheated on because I’m single. It’s neither a choice nor a plague—it’s just how it is, and it doesn’t make me hot or cold.
After my call, I post a message on PostOn to let my many other friends scattered around the world know that I’m leaving for Bordeaux and that I’ll be away for two days, as if the Earth were about to stop spinning. PostOn is something that truly changed my life. When you’ve lived on several continents, your story is a bit unmoored, and you have very “close” friends who live very far away—people you don’t see anymore but who you genuinely miss. Sometimes I also tell myself that I know what they had for breakfast that morning, or that they bought the Thermo-thing, but I don’t know what they do for a living now. I have 456 friends. Only people I actually know, of course. About 35 are old friends from middle school, high school, or university that I was happy to find again but will probably never see again. There are a few cousins, more or less distant. There are also the girls I play handball with. A few coworkers. The others are people I met in the different countries where I lived, or sometimes during shorter trips. Among them, there are Swiss people I met in Turkey, my German roommates in England, English people I lived with in Australia, and Australians I met in India. Between them all, my friends represent forty-six different nationalities, and sometimes that’s pretty much the only thing that makes me think my life won’t be a failure.
I also have a blog called “Questions commerce” and a professional PostOn account. I write anonymously because this blog is absolutely incompatible with my current position at Comexp, since I defend independent, local business there. As its name suggests, I ask questions about commerce, I bring elements of an answer, and I let people decide for themselves. I get about nineteen hundred visits a day and I’m followed by twenty thousand followers on PostOn. That fairly decent result skyrocketed the day my question, “Tomorrow, all chains?” was retweeted by the Minister of Commerce, Crafts and Tourism in person. Even more when he did it again a few weeks later with the question, “Does a good shopkeeper really need digital?” I also talk about new regulations, new shopping centers, and trends. Everything I’m passionate about in life, basically.
On Tuesday at lunchtime, I get on the train with about thirty of my colleagues. A whole car is reserved exclusively for us and the atmosphere is pretty studious—especially for me, sitting diagonally across from my boss in the four-seater, with Mathieu and Vincent, the South and North development directors. It makes Miss Jessica Arcan, the head of the administrative department, furious, but she doesn’t dare say a word. That girl is everything I despise. Regularly, I tell myself I should refuse to work in big companies just to avoid people like her: manipulative, egocentric, jealous. Choosing the type of people I work with is a luxury I can no longer afford. Her skirt and her cleavage are inversely proportional to mine, as usual. She’s missing not a single piece of jewelry: earrings, rings, bracelets, necklaces—the full girly package. I have the honor of being the person she hates most in the world, since her office is three floors above Benjamin Fortet’s and mine is the closest to his, which pierces her with jealousy, as if I’d done it on purpose or worse—as if he’d wanted it. I have to admit it makes no sense; the administrative department really should be closer to the CEO. Sometimes, just hearing her talk makes me want to change jobs, I hate her that much. I’m not proud of it.
