Page 17 of Baby for My Ex’s Dad

Breathe. Not optional, I struggle to remind myself.

Nope. No panic attack. Not here. Not in the front row, where, if I think about it, I’ll make a sound this microphone picks up. That one waits until I’m home tonight with Potato and something strong in the big cup.

Onstage, Max, Maxim, Mr. Vernigora, my boss, wraps up without ceremony. “Department heads will have meetings on their calendars by end of day. Everyone else, thank you. Go do good work.”

That’s when I let myself look two seats down the front row, stage left, where the executive team was seated for display purposes. I’ve been aware of the blue suit in my peripheral vision this entire time and unwilling to give it attention.

Klaus is not looking at his phone, which for Klaus is unheard of. He’s staring up at the org chart, and his jaw is set. A muscle in his cheek is jumping, and his hands grip his knees, white-knuckled, holding onto himself in front of four hundred people who have just watched his title walk out of the wings and take the podium away from him.

He looks pissed. He looks beyond pissed, actually.

A little voice inside my head pipes up. Good.

8

MAXIM

The personnel file on my desk is thin, and the woman it fails to describe is due in four minutes.

Rider, Dorothea. Twenty-seven. Hired eighteen months ago as executive assistant to the chief executive, which as of this morning is me. Performance reviews that read like citations for valor. A salary I intend to correct, because whoever set it priced the title and not the work.

I watched the work run a four-hundred-person gala from behind a pillar while its host licked a model’s ear. She deserves far more credit than she is paid.

I knew her from the stage in under two seconds. Front row, center, gripping an oversized coffee, holding my eyes when I found her, daring me to make something of it. I hadn’t known she’d be in that auditorium. The sight did more to my morning than the board meeting did, and the board meeting rearranged a company.

What I didn’t have, until Lev set the org chart annotations in front of me an hour ago, is that the woman from the twelfth floor isn’t just an employee of this building.

She’s mine. On paper. In the chart.

The executive assistant serves the office of the chief executive. The office of the chief executive is sitting at this desk with her hairpin in his breast pocket and no idea what he intends to say when she walks through that door.

A prudent man would’ve sent this to human resources and been in a different meeting when it resolved. That would’ve been the smart move. The mature thing to do. But she’s a genius at her job, and I’m not in the habit of removing geniuses from my orbit.

She knocks at eleven fifty-eight. Two minutes early.

I take one breath before answering and use it to review the plan. Professional, brief, forward-looking. For the second time, I tell her, “Come.”

She enters with a leather folio and a gray dress chosen for its blandness, as if that could hide her figure. She closes the door behind her with the click of a woman who has decided the hallway doesn’t need to hear what happens next. Then she turns and squares her shoulders and looks at me.

Neither of us says the obvious thing. She has her hair up, a different pin in it. The gray dress stops at the knee, and she’s wearing flats. I suspect the outfit is a decision not to be the woman from last night, and the decision isn’t working, because I’m looking at her collarbone and thinking about how it tastes.

Three seconds. In a first meeting between a chief executive and his assistant, that’s an eternity. In our circumstances it isn’t enough.

“Mr. Vernigora,” she says.

“Miss Rider.”

“So we’re doing last names.”

“It seemed prudent. The first ones caused difficulties.”

Her mouth twitches and fights itself to a draw. She crosses to the chair across from my desk, sits without being invited, and sets the folio on her knees like a shield.

“Sir… I want to say, before anything else, that I had no idea who you were. None. If I had known, I would never, and I want to be extremely clear about this, never have thrown wine at you.”

“The wine is what you regret.”

“The wine is the part I could have prevented.”