Page 74 of Modern Romance January 2025 5-8

Because Irinka, Lynna and Maude were her work wives. And best friends. They’d started Your Girl Friday five years earlier with nothing but a dream, fantastic organizational skills and determination, and it was thriving now.

They were freelance assistants who operated with the utmost discretion. They assisted the richest of the rich with their lives, from managing their personal affairs—Irinka’s specialty—to providing culinary brilliance—Lynna—to the rehabilitation and management of the elaborate grounds of ancient estates—Maude.

Auggie was not as specialized as her friends. She was a wrangler, of sorts. An assistant of all kinds. Currently, for Matias, she was his air stewardess. But he spent all his time jet setting around the world in a private plane, and that meant she functioned as a traveling secretary too.

And whether he knew it or not, she did her best to keep his secrets.

She was—happily—coming to the end of her contract with him. Your Girl Friday wasn’t designed to ensnare them into full-time employment for one person. So when a job was all-encompassing it had a hard limit. Six months. But her contract with Matias was only for three.

Praise be.

She could tell the exact moment he perceived her. One of her greatest assets was her ability to function as wallpaper in whichever surroundings she currently occupied.

She was a chameleon.

One who had been spotted by the Pitbull.

She ignored the way that it affected her. The way that her stomach went tight when his dark eyes met hers. For heaven’s sake, he had awoman on his arm. He was her boss—even if for a set period of time. And she... Well, she knew him. She might well be the only person on the planet who did. The image that they painted of him in the media was laughable.

Matias Javier Hernandez Balcazar, beloved by all, was the son of Javier Balcazar, the most ruthless Spanish billionaire in recent times. A man wholly uninterested in ethics, in kindness, in basic human decency. A conquistador of the modern era, and on and on.

There were really only a couple of things a person needed to know about Matias to know him.

The first was that he could not be told. He did whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, as befitted his position as a billionaire. The second was that he hated his father. And from those two pieces of information flowed the truth.

The media spun a story of his life that just didn’t make sense, not when you had met the real Matias.

Somehow, they saw his entry into his own father’s industry as him taking what he had learned and building something with it. Not what it actually was. A cold-eyed attempt at taking over his family business and crushing it. She was certain that was what he was up to.

Of course, everyone imagined that he stood to inherit his father’s wealth.

Auggie thought that the truth was perhaps slightly more complicated. Though she didn’t have all the details, she knew that the truth of the matter was, Matias was anything but what he seemed.

“Augusta,” he said, his accent rolling over the syllables of her name in a way that made her want to purr. “Could you get myself and Charmaine a drink?”

“Of course,” she said, smiling like the decorative femme bot she was supposed to be and moving to the bar, anticipating exactly what he would have, and what the lady would be having. It was easy enough. She smiled as she poured his whiskey, and then mixed up an overly sweet drink with cherries in it for Charmaine.

Then she melted away into the background again, while standing quite in plain sight.

She picked up her phone again.

If I see another headline about what a glorious himbo this man is I will punch the next starry-eyed reporter I see.

Oh, come on, don’t spoil the public’s fascination with him.

This came from Lynna.

I won’t, because I signed an NDA, as you know. But I’m just saying, I don’t think I have ever met anyone whose public persona is as big of a lie as his.

Maude chimed in.

That can’t be true. Billionaires are notorious liars. They’re also usually okay with being the glorious bastards they are in full view of the public.

Is he awful?

That was Irinka asking.

No. But he’s not what he seems.