Page 4 of Secret Baby Daddy

Neither of them asks what firm, what client, what building, what name.

The rules exist for a reason.

They have already broken enough of them tonight.

Atlas: Good luck tomorrow. Whatever it is.

Cassandra: You too.

Atlas: Goodnight, Cassandra.

Cassandra: Goodnight, Atlas.

She closes the laptop before she can watch his status change to offline.

Somewhere across the same sleepless city, a man closes his own laptop, presses the heel of his hand hard against one eye, and tells himself that tomorrow is just another meeting, in just another building, for just another impossible client.

1

PIPER

Rich people do not have emergencies.

They have expensive inconveniences.

The private elevator glides to a halt at the top floor of the Merrick residence.

The polished steel doors slide open with a soft chime.

I step out into a private foyer that smells of lemon oil and generational wealth.

The black marble reflects the click of my red-soled stilettos.

I adjust my grip on my briefcase, roll my shoulders back, lift my chin.

My emerald green blazer is perfectly tailored.

My armor is secure.

Ashworth Kline warned me last night that Cordelia Merrick needed me in Manhattan first thing this morning.

The preliminary brief was deliberately vague: old money, an urgent crisis, absolute discretion.

The details came at five forty-two, before my alarm and before my coffee.

Cordelia Merrick does not call about spilled champagne or a photographer who wandered too close to a hedge.

I was still in bed when she told me a video existed.

Ashworth Kline hired me eight years ago because I could out-argue anyone in the room by twenty-five, and I have spent every year since climbing toward the corner office that finally lets me run the Crisis and Reputation division instead of merely staffing it.

I was standing in my closet, phone wedged against my shoulder, picking between two blazers that both said the same thing—I am calm, I am in control, do not test me—by the time she told me who it implicated.

I chose the emerald.

Green photographs well under courthouse lighting and worse under camera flashes, which means I was already thinking about photographers before I had finished buttoning the jacket.

I called Wren from the car.