She Argued with Her Billionaire Boss’s Poster—Then Kissed It Without Knowing He Was Behind Her

Alexia Summers was having a terrible day.

She had spent 1 year as Elliot Hawkins’s executive assistant. One year of perfect coffee ignored, flawless reports accepted without a thank-you, and constant sarcasm delivered in the cool, clipped tone that made him famous inside the company. That morning, he had shot down her proposal in front of the board with 4 humiliating words.

“Interesting, Miss Summers, but no.”

By 8:00 p.m., the office was empty, and Alexia was alone, furious, and too exhausted to maintain the professional composure she had held together all day.

I was sitting at my desk, staring at the computer screen without actually seeing anything, trying to decide whether bursting into tears of frustration or punching something would be more productive. Neither option seemed appropriate for a 26-year-old professional who supposedly had control over her emotions.

I got up because sitting still only made everything worse. I started walking down the hallway with no specific destination, just trying to burn off the anger still boiling in my veins.

That was when I saw the poster on the reception wall, and something inside me broke.

The damn Forbes poster.

Elliot Hawkins’s perfect face smiled from the glossy magazine cover, captured in that studied 30 Under 30 pose that had probably been planned by an award-winning photographer who knew exactly how to capture his natural air of superiority, the one he wore like a second skin.

“You,” I said, pointing at the poster as if it could hear me.

Honestly, in that moment, the line between rationality and insanity had become very thin.

“You are impossible.”

The words came out before I could think better of them, and suddenly I was venting to a photo printed on glossy paper as if that were perfectly normal.

“One year, Elliot. A whole year, and you treat me like I’m part of the office furniture. The coffee I make every day exactly the way you like it, you don’t even look at it. The reports I prepare with every comma in place? Adequate. Adequate. I spent 12 hours on that last report.”

The poster kept smiling that annoyingly attractive smile, which only made everything worse, because he had no right to be so absurdly handsome while being completely insufferable as a person.

“And you know the worst part?”

I took another step toward the poster, my voice going up an octave.

“You’re hot. Ridiculously hot. Why the hell do you have to be so… so you?”

My hand touched the smooth surface of the poster almost without my realizing it, and suddenly I was there, standing in the empty reception area at 8:00 at night, caressing my boss’s printed face on photo paper.

If anyone saw me, therapy would definitely be necessary.

“I bet you don’t even find me pretty,” I continued, because apparently my social filter had taken a permanent vacation. “You only notice those leggy models you go out with. Sienna and all the other versions of her with their perfect hair and their perfect lives.”

I tilted my head, studying his image. Those green eyes, which in real life always seemed to look through me without actually seeing me.

“Do you want me, Elliot? Of course not. I’m just the efficient assistant who keeps your life organized and whose name you probably wouldn’t even remember if I weren’t always there with reports in hand and coffee at the exact temperature.”

“Oh, shut up,” I murmured to the poster.

Then, in a moment of absolute insanity my future self would definitely regret, I leaned in and kissed the glossy paper right on two-dimensional Elliot’s mouth.

It was pathetic. It was desperate. It was probably the lowest point of my professional career.

I was about to pull away when a voice behind me made my heart stop.

“Interesting feedback technique, Miss Summers.”

His voice was real. Three-dimensional. Coming from approximately 10 feet behind me, because the universe had a truly cruel sense of humor.

I spun around so fast I almost twisted my ankle in my heels.

There he was. Elliot Hawkins in the flesh, his suit still impeccable even after a full day of meetings, his expression impossible to decipher because my brain had gone into complete meltdown.

He had seen.

He had seen everything. Or at least enough to know I had just kissed his printed photo like an obsessed teenager.

The room started spinning in a way that had nothing to do with the heels and everything to do with the fact that my blood pressure had just plummeted to dangerously low levels. I heard my name spoken with some urgency, but the sound was distant and muffled.

Then everything went dark.

When I opened my eyes again, I was lying on the leather couch in Elliot’s office. He was kneeling beside me, holding a glass of water, wearing an expression that oscillated between concern and something that might have been amusement if I had not been too mortified to analyze it properly.

“You fainted,” he said, as if I needed the information.

“You saw me kissing your poster,” I replied, because apparently my brain had decided that since we were already in total humiliation territory, we might as well be direct about it.

“I did.”

“From the ‘you’re so hot’ part?”

“Actually.”

His lips curved into a half smile that made something strange happen in my stomach.

“Quite the performance, I must say. Lots of feeling.”

“Kill me. Please, just kill me now and get it over with.”

I covered my face with my hands because looking at him was beyond my emotional capabilities.

“Tempting,” he agreed in that dry tone he used when being sarcastic. “But I need my coffee tomorrow, and you’re the only person in this office who knows how to make it exactly the way I like it.”

I pulled my hands away from my face and glared at him with all the indignation I could muster, considering I had just woken up from a fainting spell caused by extreme embarrassment.

“You’re making jokes now?”

“Would you prefer we have a group therapy session about your tendency to kiss inanimate objects with my face?”

He tilted his head, and those green eyes fixed on me in a way I had never seen before, as if he were really seeing me for the 1st time.

“So, you think I’m hot?”

“I was venting to a poster. It doesn’t count.”

I tried to sit up, but he placed a hand on my shoulder, keeping me down.

“Alexia. You kissed the poster. Passionately, I might add. It lasted at least 5 seconds. I counted.”

I wanted the leather couch to swallow me whole.

“It wasn’t passionate. It was a moment of temporary insanity caused by extreme stress and exhaustion.”

“And attraction?”

The way he said it, casual but with something underlying the tone, made my heart speed up again.

“I’m going to resign,” I announced, trying to get up again. “Tomorrow. I won’t even come back. I’ll send the letter by email.”

“Denied.”

The word was said with such authority that I automatically stopped moving.

“What? You can’t deny my resignation.”

“I can and I will. You’re the most efficient assistant I’ve ever had, and now I’ve discovered you’re also a source of entertainment. I’m not giving that up easily.”

I finally managed to sit up, pushing his hand off my shoulder with more force than necessary.

“Entertainment. Great. Exactly what I wanted to be. The CEO’s clown.”

Something changed in his expression. The smile diminished a little as he sat on the floor beside the couch instead of getting up, which was strange because Elliot Hawkins did not sit on floors. He sat in $5,000 leather chairs in positions of power.

“That’s not it,” he said, his voice lower now. “You’re not entertainment, Alexia. You’re surprising.”

“Surprisingly pathetic, you mean?”

I took a sip of the water he was still holding, more to give my hands something to do than because I was thirsty.

“Surprisingly honest.”

He ran a hand through his hair, messing up the usual perfection slightly.

“How long have you been attracted to me?”

The water nearly came out through my nose.

“I didn’t say that.”

“You told the poster in detail about how ridiculously hot and insufferably attractive I am.”

There was something in the way he looked at me now that made my skin tingle.

“And you’re right, you know.”

“About you being insufferable?”

“About me never noticing that you’re beautiful.”

The words came out simple, direct, and completely devastating.

“How did I never notice?”

The silence that followed was charged with something I could not name, something that made the air denser and the distance between us seem simultaneously too large and dangerously small.

“You can go,” he finally said, standing in 1 fluid motion and extending his hand to help me. “But Alexia?”

“Yes?”

My voice came out weaker than I wanted.

“Tomorrow, no poster kissing. If you have feedback to give, you can come directly to me.”

The tone was ambiguous, somewhere between teasing and something more serious that made my stomach flip.

I accepted his hand because refusing would have been even stranger, and the touch of his fingers on mine was like an electric shock running up my entire arm. I left his office almost running, without looking back, my heart beating so hard I was sure he could hear it from the other side of the hallway.

Elliot stood at the office door, watching me disappear toward the elevators, and the smile that had been playing on his lips finally settled fully.

“Interesting,” he murmured to himself before going back inside.

The next day, I arrived at the office ridiculously early because the idea of running into Elliot after what had happened the night before was terrifying, and I needed at least 2 hours of mental preparation before seeing him again.

But of course, my plan failed spectacularly because he was already there when I arrived, sitting at his desk as if 7:00 a.m. were a perfectly normal time to start the day, which technically it was for him because the man apparently did not need sleep like normal people.

“Good morning, Miss Summers,” he said when he saw me, and there was something in his voice that immediately put me on alert. “Sleep well? No nighttime incidents with printed images of me?”

Heat rushed to my face so fast I probably set a world record.

“Mr. Hawkins—”

“Elliot.”

He leaned back in his chair with that relaxed posture that somehow seemed more dangerous than any formal one.

“I think kissing my poster puts us on a 1st-name basis, don’t you agree?”

“I don’t—that’s not—”

The words refused to form coherent sentences.

“Your coffee, Alexia. I need it to function, and you’re standing there looking like a tomato instead of making it.”

But he was smiling. Really smiling. It was not the polite, distant smile he used in meetings or the sarcastic one he reserved for people who annoyed him. It was genuine, and it did very confusing things to my ability to think.

I went to make the coffee with slightly trembling hands, painfully aware that he was watching me in a way he had never done before in a whole year of work. I managed not to spill anything, which I considered a victory given the circumstances, and placed the cup on his desk with as much professionalism as I could muster.

“Thank you.”

He picked up the cup, but instead of drinking it like he always did, he kept looking at me.

“You know, the coffee is particularly good today. Better than yesterday. Maybe venting to posters really does improve the quality of your work.”

I wanted to die right there. Just cease to exist because clearly life had decided I did not deserve dignity.

The day became an exquisite form of torture because Elliot decided, for some reason that only made sense in his mind, that constantly teasing me was an excellent use of time. Every interaction came with some subtle or not-so-subtle reference to the poster incident, and each time he observed my reaction with that attentive look that made my skin heat.

During the afternoon meeting, when I presented the quarterly numbers, he interrupted in the middle to say, “Excellent work, Alexia. Much better than adequate, wouldn’t you say?”

The reference to my complaint to the poster about how he always classified my work as adequate did not go unnoticed, and I felt my face heat again while the others in the room looked at me with confusion.

“Thank you, Elliot.”

It was the 1st time I had used his 1st name in the work environment, and the way his eyes gleamed told me he noticed.

Marcus, the VP and apparently Elliot’s best friend, pulled me aside after the meeting with a curious expression.

“Okay, what’s going on between you 2?”

“Nothing is going on.”

The lie came out too quickly to be convincing.

“Alexia, I’ve worked with Elliot for 10 years. Never, and I mean never, have I seen him smile like that at anyone.”

Marcus crossed his arms, studying my face.

“And he looks at you differently. Very differently.”

“He’s having fun at my expense. That’s different.”

I tried to get past him, but Marcus blocked my way.

“No. He looks at you like he’s seeing something he missed all this time and is trying to make up for it.”

His smile was almost paternal.

“And you’re blushing again.”

I managed to escape him, but his words stayed with me the rest of the day, echoing in my head along with every prolonged look from Elliot, every small smile, every gentle tease.

When Jade found me in the elevator at the end of the day, she immediately noticed something was wrong. Or very right. Or some confusing combination of the 2.

“What happened?” she asked as soon as the doors closed. “You look like you got hit by an emotional truck.”

Then I told her everything. Every humiliating detail, from the moment I decided talking to a poster was an excellent idea to Elliot teasing me all day with that smile that was slowly destroying my sanity.

Jade first went completely silent.

Then she started laughing so loudly that people in the lobby turned to look.

“You kissed your boss’s poster? That’s iconic. This needs to be in a book or movie or something.”

She was holding her stomach, tears of laughter running down her face.

“It’s not funny. He saw everything, Jade. And now he won’t stop teasing me.”

“It’s hilarious, and you know it.”

She composed herself a little, wiping her tears.

“And he’s teasing because he likes you.”

“He thinks it’s entertaining. That’s different.”

“Alexia.”

Jade grabbed me by the shoulders, forcing me to look at her.

“Men don’t spend all day teasing women they’re not interested in, especially men like Elliot Hawkins, who have models literally throwing themselves at them every week.”

“He dates models. Beautiful, sophisticated women. I’m his assistant, who apparently has psychotic breaks involving office supplies.”

“For now, he dates models. But I saw the way he looked at you at that gala last month.”

Jade had the look of someone who knew something I did not.

“And if he’s teasing you like this, it’s because he wants your attention. Wants you to think about him, which clearly is working.”

She had a point, but admitting it seemed too dangerous, like opening a door I had kept carefully locked for a whole year because acknowledging that I was attracted to my boss was the perfect recipe for professional disaster.

But maybe the door was already open.

Maybe it had been thrown wide open the moment I kissed that damn poster and Elliot had seen everything.

And maybe, just maybe, the way he was looking at me now meant the disaster could come in a form I had not predicted, one that included a genuine smile and green eyes that finally saw me for real.

A week passed after the poster incident, and I still woke every morning with dread mixed with something dangerously close to anticipation because I knew Elliot would find at least 3 different ways to tease me before lunch. It was like living in a constant state of emotional red alert, and my nervous system was starting to pay the price.

I was organizing the week’s reports when I heard the sound of expensive heels against the marble reception floor, the kind of sound that screamed money and confidence in each precise click.

I looked up and saw Sienna Marlowe walking into the office as if she owned the place: 5 feet 10 inches of endless legs, perfectly blown-out blonde hair, and a dress that probably cost more than 3 months of my rent.

She walked past me like I was part of the décor, her blue eyes fixed on Elliot’s office door with the determination of a heat-seeking missile. I found myself gripping the pen in my hand hard enough to leave marks on my fingers.

“Elliot, darling.”

Her voice was honey and silk as she practically floated into his office without knocking, leaning in to kiss his cheek in a way that got dangerously close to his mouth.

“I’ve been dying to see you.”

From my desk, I had a perfect view through the glass wall. I watched Elliot subtly pull away from her embrace, his expression polite but distant in a way I had learned to read after a year working for him. He was not happy about the interruption.

“Sienna. What a surprise.”

The tone made it clear it was not the good kind.

“I thought we could have lunch together, like old times. That Italian restaurant you love? My usual table is free.”

I should not have been paying that much attention. I should have focused on the reports in front of me, being the professional and invisible assistant I had been for 12 months. But instead, I watched every movement as if my life depended on it, hating the way my stomach twisted when Sienna casually touched his arm.

Elliot looked at me through the glass. Our eyes met for 1 charged second before he turned his attention back to Sienna.

“I have a meeting at 12.”

He did not.

I knew that because I was in charge of his schedule, and the next 3 hours were completely free because he had asked for time to review contracts alone.

“Cancel it for me?” Sienna tilted her head with a studied movement that probably worked on 90% of the planet’s male population. “I promise it’ll be worth it.”

That was when Elliot did something unexpected. He got up from his chair, went to the office door, and called me with a nod.

“Miss Summers, could you come here a moment?”

My heart did a strange jump as I stood and walked to his office, painfully aware of Sienna’s gaze assessing me from head to toe with the subtle disdain beautiful women reserved for other women they considered no competition.

“Yes, sir.”

I kept my voice professional even though my pulse was racing.

“I have a meeting at 12. Correct?”

His green eyes were fixed on mine with an intensity that made my skin tingle. I could have told the truth. I should have.

But something in the way he was looking at me, waiting, made the words come out before I could think better of them.

“Yes. Non-negotiable, actually. With the Japanese investors. Confirmed weeks ago.”

Completely made up.

But the way the corner of his mouth curved slightly told me he knew exactly what I was doing.

“See, Sienna?” He turned his attention back to the model with a polite and final expression. “Non-negotiable. Maybe another day.”

Sienna stood, clearly frustrated but trying not to show it.

“Of course. Another day then.”

She cast one last look in my direction, assessing and not at all friendly.

“It was a pleasure. Alexia, is it?”

“Alexia Summers. Mr. Hawkins’s executive assistant.”

I forced a professional smile.

She left with the same decisive click of expensive heels, and as soon as the sound disappeared down the hallway, Elliot turned to me with that small smile I was beginning to recognize as dangerous to my peace of mind.