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His eyes bore into hers, imploring her to drop this. She stared back at him, and he could see her jaw begin to tick and her nostrils flare ever so slightly.
Damnit, he thought, with her persistent determination. If ever there were a time he needed her to not be her typical self, this was it.
Her eyes softened before she spoke again. “What if I went with you? Shea offered to keep Harley-”
“No!” he barked.
He realized he’d raised his voice a little too late when Harley startled and began to cry. He picked him up and rested him in his arms, trying to soothe him and smooth over his gruff response.
Farren continued to kneel in front of him, her eyes wide with confusion and disbelief. Shit, he thought. He had to save this. He could not have her coming along on this trip, not with what he wanted to do while he was there.
“Baby, I need you to be here to run things at work while I’m gone. I have a lot of projects in critical phases right now that someone has to be here to handle while I’m out of town. You’re the only one I trust to know how I want everything. You can do that for me, can’t you?”
He waited for her to respond as he tried to tend to Harley’s fussiness that was becoming more agitated by the second now.
She reached out to take Harley from his arms and pulled him into her chest, rising off the floor with him.
“Farren? Can you do that for me?” Rogan asked again.
She nodded but said nothing and turned to walk away toward the nursery.
*
Farren tried to hold back her tears as she bounced Harley in her arms to calm him and get him back to sleep. Once he was peacefully snoozing, she laid him in the crib and walked across the hall to their bedroom.
Rogan was still in the living room, she guessed, so she went to the dresser, pulled out a normal set of underwear to replace the Victoria’s Secret lingerie she’d been wearing beneath her fitted tee and pajama pants, and went into the restroom to change.
She came back out and headed to the game room to try out her new g
ame. She wasn’t sure if she was angry or upset, probably both, and in no small amount disappointed. At least with Overwatch, shooting stuff would help get some frustration out.
She put on her headset and pulled the game out of the GameStop bag. When she did, a slip of paper went gliding to the floor. She reached down to pick it up. It was the receipt, the one with Raphe’s number and gamer tag on it.
She looked at it for several seconds. Then she wadded it up and shoved it back into the plastic bag to be thrown away later. She put her headset on, lowering the volume so she could still hear Harley through the baby monitor on the table next to her if he started crying.
She started the game up, set up her own gamer tag, and when it asked for her team player account names, she hesitated. Before she knew it, she had entered in Raphe’s gamer tag, and they eliminated foes together well into the night.
She knew she’d have to face her real issues soon enough, but she needed time to sort them out to know how she really felt about everything, and she was too close to it all at the moment to reach any kind of productive conclusion when all she could picture was Edith in a black, lacy negligee in a ritzy hotel room with Rogan.
She wasn’t ready to admit to herself that she knew he was hiding something, but she knew, and he was already asleep when she came to bed that night.
TEN
“Great work, Edith. If all goes well, Rayner Technologies might just be looking at opening a new branch in New York City in the next few years,” Rogan commended, walking out of the glass, high-rise building into the crowded sidewalks of New York City.
“Thanks, boss, but I can’t take all the credit. The way you handled those execs,” she whistled, “I’m impressed.”
“Yes, well, you laid the foundation on this one. Great marketing pulls in great clients.”
They climbed into a cab, and Rogan gave the driver the address to their hotel.
“Don’t you want to go to dinner?” she asked.
It was getting late into the evening, and neither of them had eaten since lunch.
Rogan gave her a sideways glance.
“I’ll order in. I have some catching up to do on some other projects.”
