Rejected Luna: Pregnant By The Ruthless Alpha Ceo After One Night

chapter 8 : Before We Go

REMI'S POV

By Friday afternoon I had the twenty-page analysis on Dax's desk — seven pages on Meridian Tech, including Gerald Park's R&D accounting irregularities, the leadership succession problem buried in their board minutes, and three specific acquisition vulnerabilities; seven pages on Blackstone Holdings; six pages on Westfield Development, which turned out to be the most straightforward of the three and therefore the most boring.

I left it at four-forty-five. Dax was on a call. I knocked, entered, set it on his desk, left.

At five-fifteen, my phone buzzed. His extension.

"Stay."

I stayed.

At five-forty, he called me into his office.

He had the report open on his desk, his pen in hand, three sticky notes already placed. He didn't look up when I entered. "Sit."

I sat.

He turned to the Meridian section. "Park. The R&D accounting."

"It's technically within compliance. But the pattern of reclassification across six quarters is consistent with someone managing an earnings target rather than accurately reporting research activity. If you acquire and due diligence goes deep enough, you find it. Sterling's team would find it."

"Sterling's team has found it." He looked up. "They moved on Meridian eighteen months ago. Pulled out when Park refused to open the subsidiary R&D records." He studied me. "That's in their file. I gave you their acquisition history."

I thought back through what I'd read. "Page nine. The Meridian approach. You're right — I didn't connect Park's pattern to the reason they pulled out. I should have."

"Yes." He said it without heat. Not cruel — just accurate. "That connection is the most important thing in this analysis."

"I'll add a section."

"You'll add a half-page. Precise. I want it before I leave tonight."

"It'll be on your desk in twenty minutes."

He turned back to the report. "The Westfield section. You said it was straightforward."

"It is. They're clean, well-run, conservatively managed. No hidden problems. Which might be the problem — their conservative management has left them underleveraged in a market that's moving fast. They're a good acquisition if you want stability, wrong one if you want growth."

"What would you recommend?"

The question landed differently than I expected. I sat with it for a moment. "Blackstone," I said. "They have the growth profile and the leadership structure to absorb integration. Meridian has the IP you'd want but the Park situation is a negotiating chip, not a dealbreaker — you'd use it to lower the price, then address it post-acquisition. Westfield is the safe choice, which is another way of saying the boring one."

He looked at me for a long moment. "That's the analysis I'd have given."

"Then the report did its job."

He almost smiled. Just barely — just a shift at the very edge of his mouth, gone before it fully arrived. "The Park addendum. Twenty minutes."

I went back to my desk and wrote it in eighteen.

Saturday morning arrived with the particular quality of days that know they're going to be complicated.

I stood outside the boutique on Fifth Avenue at 10 AM in my thrift store blazer with my hands in my pockets, looking at a window display that contained three dresses that probably cost more than my monthly rent combined. Each one was beautiful and simple and entirely, effortlessly expensive in the way that things are when no effort has gone into looking expensive because they simply don't have to.

I pushed the door open.

A woman in her fifties looked up from behind a low counter — sharp eyes, the kind of effortlessly composed bearing that comes from twenty years of dressing people who can afford to be dressed well. "Miss Cole?"

"Yes. Hi."

"I'm Claire. Mr. Wolfe called ahead." She came around the counter. "Sunday dinner at the Wolfe estate. Let me show you what I've pulled."

She'd pulled six dresses. All of them were exactly right in a way I couldn't have specified in advance but recognized immediately — not flashy, not trying to compete with wealth, just quietly, precisely appropriate. The kind of clothes that say I belong in this room without having to announce it.

I tried on the midnight blue one and stood in front of the mirror and thought: this is the dress that will be on my body when I tell Dax Wolfe he's going to be a father.

Because I'd decided. This week had decided it for me.

I'd lasted ten days in this job. I'd found the Park accounting irregularity. I'd written twenty pages of acquisition analysis that he'd said matched his own thinking. I'd sat in two meetings with Jade Sterling and hadn't moved from my seat. I'd handled Vanessa Blackwood without flinching. I'd been useful, present, and competent in every interaction we'd had.

I was no longer someone asking for something from a position of pure desperation. I was someone who'd demonstrated value. Which meant that when I told him, it wouldn't be a confession. It would be information, delivered from a position of earned ground.

Tonight, I decided. Before we walk into that house.

"It's perfect," Claire said, from behind me.

"Yes," I said. "It is."

She added shoes — low heels, the kind that make you taller without announcing that they're making you taller — and a small clutch. She refused to let me pay for any of it. "It's handled," she said, in the pleasant tone of someone who had explained this many times and had stopped finding it complicated. "Between you and me, Miss Cole — in ten years of dressing his guests, he's never called ahead personally. The office usually handles it."

"I'm his assistant."

"Yes." She folded the dress into tissue paper. "So I'm told."

Sunday evening. Six-fifty PM.

I was ready. The dress fit. The shoes worked. I'd done something to my hair that fell somewhere between I tried and I didn't try too hard, which felt like the right register for going to dinner with the grandmother of the man whose baby you were hiding.

I stood in the middle of my studio apartment — the one with the bathroom down the hall, the elevator that still didn't work, the crack in the ceiling above the Murphy bed that I'd learned to sleep beneath — and rehearsed.

Not the words. I'd given up on scripting the words. Every version I tried sounded either too casual or too formal or too something.

What I rehearsed was the moment after. What I would do when his face went blank. What I would say when he came back from wherever the blankness took him. What I would not do, which was apologize for existing, for the pregnancy, for the timing, for any of it. I hadn't done anything wrong. I'd done something complicated, and complication wasn't wrongdoing.

Just tell him, Margaret had said.

My phone lit up. Dax: Downstairs.

No I'm here. No whenever you're ready. Just the fact of it, delivered.

I picked up the clutch — borrowed from Jade Kim, who'd texted back go get them when I'd explained I was having dinner with a billionaire's grandmother — and walked down the three flights of stairs because the elevator still didn't work.

He was leaning against the black Mercedes with his phone in one hand, suit jacket on, the familiar contained quality of him that I'd gotten used to in the office — except that outside, in the evening air, without the glass walls and the monitors and the professional context, he looked different. Still controlled. Still deliberate. But something about the open air and the city noise and the evening light made the control look like something he was choosing rather than something that was simply the default setting.

He looked up when I came through the door.

I watched his face do something. Something that moved through his expression faster than I could fully catch it before the professional neutral snapped back into place. It wasn't warm — not quite. But it was something.

"Miss Cole." His voice was slightly different. Lower. "You look —"

"Acceptable for dinner with your grandmother?"

"Beautiful." He said it like a fact he hadn't entirely intended to say out loud. He cleared his throat. "The dress was a good choice."

He opened the car door.

I didn't get in.

"I need to talk to you first," I said. "Before we go."

He went still.

"It's not nothing," I said. "Can we sit in the car? This isn't a sidewalk conversation."

He studied me for a moment — doing that calculation I'd learned to recognize, reading situation and adjusting. Then he nodded, once.

We got in. He didn't start the engine. Just turned in his seat and looked at me, and for the first time since I'd known him in this context, he didn't look like a CEO. He looked like a person waiting to hear something he wasn't sure he was ready for.

"Our one night together," I said. "Three months ago."

His jaw tightened. "I remember."

"Something happened after." I twisted the borrowed clutch in my hands. Found his eyes. Held them. "I'm pregnant."