The Boss's Secret Baby

Chapter 5: Demands

Maya knew the moment the office door clicked shut behind her that this was not a meeting.

Adrian stood behind his desk, and the air in the room had changed — charged, the way the sky went green before a storm. On the polished walnut surface between them lay a thin manila folder. He did not sit. Neither did she.

"Close the door, Maya," he said, though it was already closed. She had the wild thought that he needed to say it anyway, to make the room smaller.

"What is this about?" Her voice came out steady. She was proud of that. Inside, her pulse was a drumbeat against her ribs.

He opened the folder and turned it toward her. Photographs. Her building in Brooklyn, the walk-up with the chipped blue door. The gates of Little Lanterns. Leo's preschool. Her hands went cold.

"You had me investigated." It was not a question.

"I had questions," Adrian said. His voice was controlled, but she could see the fury in the white line of his jaw, the way his fingers pressed flat against the desk. "Five years ago you worked a charity gala at the Whitmore Hotel. A masquerade. The Cross Foundation's gala."

Maya's blood turned to ice water. "I was hired staff. I poured champagne for rich people. That's not a crime."

"No." He slid a paper across the desk — a photocopy of an old employment stub, her signature in faded ink. "You left before dawn. So did a guest that night. A man who has spent five years trying to find a woman in a silver mask whose name he never learned."

The room tilted. Maya gripped the back of the chair to stay upright. All these weeks she had told herself he couldn't know, that the mask had held, that twenty-seven-year-old Maya Renshaw looked nothing like a twenty-two-year-old girl in borrowed shoes. She had been a fool.

"Leo is four," Adrian said, and now the control cracked, just slightly, a fault line running through granite. "He has my eyes. There is no father's name on his birth certificate. On anything. You have kept him from me for four years, Maya. Four years."

"Don't." The word came out ragged. "Don't you dare stand there and — you don't know anything about those four years. You don't know the nights I — " She stopped, breathing hard. Leo's face swam in front of her: his laugh, his curls, the way he said "mama" like it was the safest word in the world. "You hired a stranger to dig through my life and photograph my son's school. You don't get to be the wounded party here."

"I'm not asking for your permission to be wounded." His eyes were storm-grey and blazing. "I'm telling you what happens next. I want a paternity test."

Silence, thick as smoke.

Maya laughed — one short, disbelieving sound. "You want to swab my son's cheek because a private detective told you his eyes look like yours."

"I want the truth. Clean, documented, undeniable." He leaned forward. "And if he is mine, Maya, everything changes. I will not be kept from my own child."

Fear moved through her then, real and cold — not of the test, but of him. Of what a man with his money and his pride would do with proof. Lawyers. Courts. Headlines. Leo, four years old, turned into a custody battle, a scandal, a Cross family embarrassment. She had raised him alone in a walk-up with secondhand furniture and he was happy, he was safe, and now this man could take that apart with a single phone call.

But she also knew, with a terrible clarity, that refusing would be worse. Refusal would look like guilt. Refusal would give him reason to come harder.

So she lifted her chin and met his eyes. "Fine."

He blinked. "Fine?"

"You want a test, you'll get a test. But on my terms." She ticked them off on shaking fingers. "An independent lab — not one your lawyers use. I'm present for the whole thing. And whatever the results are, they stay private. No board, no press, no family. Leo is four years old, Adrian. He doesn't get to be your proof of anything."

Adrian studied her for a long moment, and something in his expression shifted — respect, maybe, or recognition of an opponent. "Agreed," he said quietly. "All of it."

"Today," Maya said. "I don't want this hanging over us. Today."

He picked up the phone.

The lab was a quiet clinic in Midtown with frosted glass and the smell of antiseptic. The technician was a brisk woman in scrubs who explained everything twice and smiled at Leo — no, at the paperwork; Leo wasn't there, thank God, Maya had refused to bring him, and Adrian had agreed after one look at her face. The swabs were for the two adults first, the technician explained; Leo's sample would be taken at Maya's apartment, with her present, by a mobile collector. Clinical. Quick. A cotton swab, thirty seconds a cheek, sealed in a tube, signed across the seal.

Maya watched Adrian press his thumbprint to the chain-of-custody form, his hand perfectly steady, and hated him for his steadiness. She hated him for the investigator and the folder and the cold fury. She hated him most for being right.

In the elevator down, neither of them spoke. On the sidewalk, the October wind cut between the buildings, and Adrian turned to her.

"Three days," he said. "The lab quoted three days."

Three days. Seventy-two hours of pretending to work, of smiling at Leo over dinner, of lying awake cataloguing every way this could go wrong.

Maya looked up at him — at the scar on his jaw, the grey eyes, the man from a hotel room five years ago — and understood, with a sudden sickening lurch, that she was not afraid of the test at all.

She was afraid of what Adrian Cross would do with the truth.