Page 30 of Secret Baby Daddy

I open the Blackline archive and read back through six months of her messages, looking for every place the two women might have already given themselves away, every sentence I should have caught sooner if I had been paying the right kind of attention instead of simply enjoying the company.

I find a dozen.

Maybe more.

I do not write any of them down.

Somewhere in that archive is the sentence that would have told me sooner, if I had been the kind of man who reads for truth instead of comfort.

I close the laptop for the second time tonight, and this time I mean it.

7

PIPER

The press conference is my design from the crown molding down.

I chose the Merrick Foundation gala as the backdrop; soft lighting, old money, a room full of people who already like Sloane and only need a reason to keep liking her.

I chose the podium height so Sloane looks steady instead of small.

I chose the exact three sentences she is allowed to say if a reporter shouts a question about the fire, and I made her repeat them into a mirror this morning until they stopped sounding rehearsed.

I have spent three days building tonight from nothing but a guest list and a color palette, and there is a particular vertigo in watching all of it collapse into chaos in under four seconds.

I am prepared, on any given night, for a hostile question, a leaked rumor, a photographer who oversteps.

I am not prepared for the sound a two-hundred-pound man makes hitting marble at a dead sprint, or for how instantly my own body decides that sound means run.

I see him before security does.

That’s part of the job.

I spend every public appearance reading a room the way Calder reads an exit, except I’m hunting for the wrong face in a sea of right ones, the one person whose eyes aren’t on Sloane the way everyone else’s are.

He has that face.

Flat.

Fixed.

Already moving before his feet decide where.

I have three seconds, maybe less, to decide whether I am wrong about what I am seeing.

I have been wrong before, at galas exactly like this one, reading danger into a nervous intern or an ex-boyfriend who showed up uninvited.

I do not get the luxury of being wrong twice in the same career, so I move before I finish deciding.

“Sloane,” I get half her name out.

Then the world goes sideways and down, and two hundred and ten pounds of Dominic Calder is on top of me on the marble floor, one arm hooked hard around my ribs, the other braced flat beside my head, and every camera in the room finds a new, much less flattering story to tell.

For one disorienting half-second I cannot separate the crash of impact from the crash of my own understanding rearranging itself.

Whatever this is, it is not an attack on me.

It is Calder choosing to become the thing between me and whatever is coming, without once checking whether that choice made strategic sense.