The Boss's Secret Baby

Chapter 3: Keep Your Distance

Adrian Cross did not believe in ghosts. He believed in numbers, in leverage, in the clean logic of a deal. So he could not explain why his new assistant unsettled him.

It had started that first morning, when she turned from her desk and said, "Good morning, Mr. Cross," and something in his chest had gone still. Her voice. The way she moved — quick, graceful, economical. He had stood there like an i***t, searching her face for a reason, and found only polite, professional composure and dark eyes that would not quite meet his.

He had told himself it was nothing. New staff always took adjusting to.

But three days in, the feeling had not faded. It sharpened.

She was good at the job — unnervingly good. She anticipated his schedule before he voiced it, caught errors in the Berlin file his lawyers had missed, made his coffee exactly the way he liked it without being told twice. She was also, he noticed, determined to be invisible. She never lingered, never made small talk, ate lunch at her desk with her chair angled away from his door, as if proximity to him were something to be endured in small doses.

It irritated him. It intrigued him. He hated both.

On Thursday afternoon he came out of his office to find her on the phone, her voice low and warm in a way he had never heard it at work. "...I know, baby, I know. I'll be there at five-thirty, I promise. Be good for Miss Ana, okay? Love you."

She hung up and looked up, and the warmth vanished from her face like a door closing. "Mr. Cross. Did you need something?"

"A child," he said, before he could stop himself. "You have a child."

It was none of his business. He knew it was none of his business. But the question had escaped, and now her chin lifted a fraction, defensive and proud at once.

"A son. He's four."

Four. Something flickered at the edge of his mind — five years, a masked woman, a night he had never been able to forget — and he crushed it ruthlessly. Coincidence. Women had children. It meant nothing.

His gaze drifted, despite herself, to her desk. Taped beside her monitor was a crayon drawing: a stick-figure woman with wild dark scribbles for hair, holding the hand of a smaller stick figure. Underneath, in wobbly capitals: ME AND MOMMY. And beside the keyboard, in a cheap wooden frame, a photograph.

Adrian picked it up before he realized what he was doing.

The boy in the photo was maybe four, grinning toothily at the camera, a smear of what looked like chocolate on his cheek. Dark curls, olive skin — and eyes the color of a storm rolling in off the Atlantic.

His eyes.

Adrian's hand tightened on the frame. For a moment the office sounds — the hum of the air conditioning, the distant traffic — receded entirely. He stared at the small face, at those impossible grey eyes, and his chest did something it had not done in years: it tightened, hard, like a fist.

"Mr. Cross?" Maya's voice was sharp now, wary. "Is something wrong?"

He set the frame down with deliberate care. "No. Nothing." Thousands of people had grey eyes. Grey eyes were not a fingerprint. He was being absurd — a grown man rattled by a child's photograph because it reminded him of a woman he had held for one night five years ago and never seen again.

Except he thought of her constantly. That was the part he admitted to no one.

"Your son," he said, keeping his voice level. "His father — is he in the picture?"

The temperature in the room dropped ten degrees. "No," Maya said flatly. "It's just us."

She turned back to her screen, dismissal in every line of her body, and Adrian retreated to his office with the distinct feeling of having been put firmly in his place.

He worked until nine. He always worked until nine. But that night, the numbers on his screen kept dissolving into grey eyes — the boy's, the woman's, the ones from five years ago that had looked up at him from beneath a silver mask on a terrace above the city and asked for nothing except that one night.

He stood at the penthouse windows long after midnight, Manhattan glittering below him, a glass of scotch untouched in his hand. Five years. He had never learned her name. He had woken to an empty bed and a dent in the pillow, and he had told himself it was better that way — clean, uncomplicated, a beautiful accident.

But lately — since Monday, since a dark-haired woman had said "Good morning, Mr. Cross" in a voice that stopped his heart — the memory had come back with teeth.

He thought of the drawing taped to her monitor. ME AND MOMMY. He thought of the boy's storm-grey eyes, and the way Maya had gone still and guarded when he asked about the father.

It was impossible. He knew it was impossible.

And yet.

Adrian set down the scotch, picked up his phone, and stared at it for a long moment. Not yet — not an investigator, not a file, not anything so crude. But he would watch. He would pay attention. He would look a little closer at Maya Renshaw, and he would find out why a woman he had supposedly never met felt like the answer to a question he had been asking for five years.