Broome & Partners prided itself on being sleek and seamless—floor-to-ceiling glass, muted gray carpets, the faint hum of productivity in every corridor. Your laptop, however, had missed that memo entirely.

"Top of the line," the finance department had promised when they handed it over, like they were presenting you with the Holy Grail instead of a machine that would become your personal nemesis. You'd had your doubts then. Three months and countless freezes later, you knew better.

Numbers? Numbers you could handle. Pivot tables were your love language. Reconciliations, your meditation. Audits? Please. You could do those in your sleep. But technology had always been your Achilles' heel, and this smug little machine seemed to sense it like a predator scenting blood. Every time you dared open Excel and Slack simultaneously—a perfectly reasonable thing to do—it punished you for your audacity.

Like right now.

Your cursor blinked once, twice, then stopped mid-flicker, frozen in what could only be described as digital rigor mortis. The screen locked up, your half-finished budget forecast trapped in purgatory, mocking you with its incompleteness. You had a meeting in forty-five minutes. You pressed the power button. Nothing. Pressed it again, harder, as if the machine would respond to aggression. Still nothing.

"You absolute—" Something decidedly unladylike slipped past your lips. The intern two cubicles over definitely heard. You didn't care. Five minutes later, pride thoroughly trampled, you'd surrendered and submitted the dreaded IT ticket. The response came faster than you expected—a pop-up blooming in the corner of your screen like a digital flower: "Ethan Sherwood is requesting remote access to your device."

Your stomach did something complicated. Of course it was him.

You clicked "Accept" and watched your mouse drift across the screen without your permission, moving with a confidence your own hand never quite managed with technology. It should have been unsettling, this loss of control. Instead, it felt like someone had just slipped into the driver's seat of a car you'd stalled on the highway—steady hands taking the wheel while you caught your breath.

Ethan Sherwood. Broome & Partners' resident IT whisperer, technology sorcerer, and—if the office rumors were even remotely accurate—the reason half the administrative assistants suddenly had "urgent" computer problems every other week.

You'd never been one of those assistants. Your laptop crashes were devastatingly, humiliatingly real.

He rarely surfaced on your floor except for genuine emergencies, but everyone knew him. Tall enough that he had to duck slightly through the older doorframes in the building, with sharp shoulders that filled out his perpetually rolled-up dress shirts in a way that seemed almost unfair. Dark hair that always looked one good gust of wind away from falling into his glasses, and a half-smile that suggested he was perpetually in on some joke the rest of you hadn't quite caught up to yet.

Quiet in groups, almost awkward at the coffee machine, but undeniably brilliant at what he did. You'd noticed him before—caught glimpses in the break room, the way he'd lean against the counter while his coffee brewed, adjusting his cuffs with long fingers, listening intently to conversations he never quite joined. The faint scruff along his jaw that showed up around Thursday, softening his otherwise buttoned-up reputation. The way his eyes would drift to his phone, and that almost-smile would deepen, like whatever he was reading was far more interesting than Dave from Accounting's fantasy football update.

The cursor stopped at your login box. Then, instead of working in silence like every other IT person you'd ever dealt with, a chat window appeared: Ethan (IT): Another crash? What are we at now—three this week? Ethan (IT): I'm starting to think you're doing this on purpose.