She shook her head, but started to talk anyway. “Natalie thinks I have post-traumatic stress.”
Zane raised an eyebrow. “What do you think?” He didn’t know much about mental health, but he was personally willing to bet that most people who had endured what Ellie had been through were bound to suffer symptoms of post-traumatic stress.
“I suppose I probably do. I can’t hear a noise that reminds me of my time as James’s prisoner without getting nervous and scared. Sometimes I get flashbacks. That’s why I’d rather not acknowledge it at all. But it haunts me. My life is a mess because of what happened. I feel like I’ve lost my independence, my entire life because of what happened. And I’m still afraid of what’s going to happen to me.”
“Not a fucking thing is going to happen to you, Ellie. You’re home with people who care about you in this town. You’re not dependent just because you need some help from friends right now. You’ve been through too much to deal with this alone,” he told her reasonably. “Take the help I’m offering you. Your life will slowly return to normal. You just need time.”
Zane could literally feel her desperation and sorrow, and it nailed him in the chest like a knife. He wanted to make everything all better for Ellie, but he felt so damn powerless. He couldn’t take away her memories or the damage that fucking James had inflicted on her emotionally.
She trained her sapphire eyes on him as she answered, “That’s just it. I’ve never not been able to take care of myself. Things aren’t as bad as I thought they would be. Somebody has been taking care of my bills, and I have an enormous amount of money in the bank. It has to be Chloe, and I’m going to need to talk to her about it.”
“It wasn’t Chloe,” he confessed. “It was me. I paid your bills, and I put money into your checking to cover any bills that might be on auto-pay.”
She looked at him in surprise. “Why?”
Zane clenched his fists on the table. “Because I was never going to admit that you weren’t coming back, and I wanted your life to be as close to normal as possible when we found you. Since you weren’t here to deal with things, I did it for you. That’s what friends do, right?”
He wasn’t about to tell her that he’d needed to take care of her personal life, that he’d needed to do those things to convince himself that she would be back. In a way, it had been therapeutic for him, a way of convincing himself that Ellie wasn’t dead. Chloe had been dealing with enough troubles of her own, and he hadn’t wanted his sister to take care of Ellie’s personal responsibilities. He’d wanted to do it himself.
She was silent for a few moments before she answered solemnly. “Thank you. But I’m going to have to pay you back when I get a job.”
“You don’t need a damn job right now. You just need to focus on getting well,” he told her gruffly.
“I need to find a job, Zane. I can’t handle this. I can’t not want to feel normal again. For me, that means making a living.” She put her face into her hands in a gesture of defeat.
Zane’s heart fell to his feet. He hated seeing her this way. He wasn’t used to it. Ellie was a capable, anally organized, cheerful type of woman. Seeing her all but destroyed was killing him.
“Then work for me, Ellie,” he offered before he could even think about his words. “I need you. Look around this house and you’ll understand why. I need a personal assistant I can trust, and that’s hard to find. I need an organizer for things inside and outside of work.”
She moved her hands to look at him curiously. “Don’t you have an assistant?”
“No. The last one I had almost sold company secrets to one of my competitors. Luckily, we caught him in time. I haven’t trusted anyone enough since then, and it happened a few years ago. We have secretaries at varying levels of security at the lab, but most of them don’t have access to personal documents or research results.”
She frowned. “Somebody who worked for you tried to betray you?”
It hadn’t been the first time, and definitely wouldn’t be the last, but Ellie didn’t understand what people were willing to do for millions or billions of dollars. “I know you think I’m paranoid because everything is on tight security here, but when I’m home, I have a lot of information with me—research results and projects that some of our competitors would want for all the wrong reasons. It has to be secured.”
“There has to be a ton of people who are more qualified to work for you. I don’t have a college education,” she argued. “I don’t know anything about biotechnology.”
He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I just have to have someone I trust, someone to help me stay organized outside of the lab. I have faith in you, Ellie. If anyone can get me organized, it’s you.”
She looked at him for a few minutes before asking, “What would I do?”
He grinned at her, suddenly knowing exactly how he was going to get her to drive her new vehicle. “Whatever I say. The first thing you’d do is accept the car I gave you.” He saw her open her mouth to protest, so he held up a hand. “You’ll need a car. What if you have to run errands or do something for business?”
She glared at him, but dropped the subject. “What would my duties be?”
“Anything I want. When you’re feeling better, you’ll see how badly I need some organization in this house. My home in Denver is about the same, although it’s cleaner thanks to my housekeeper. But she never wants to touch my personal stuff. My brain is usually so busy thinking about current projects that I don’t get much else done.” The more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea of Ellie taking on the job as his personal assistant. It might put him in a hell of his own making by having her around him a lot, but it was better than worrying about how she was doing all the damn time.