per usual. Only this time it had landed her in serious trouble, with the man who signed her checks.
Everything was in his hands now. Her future. Her family. Her money.
“Time to learn to think before you talk,” she said into the empty office. Unfortunately, it was too late for that. Way, way too late.
Dante finished with the last item of work on his agenda and turned to his file cabinet, placing the last document on his desk into its appropriate spot. Then he put his elbows on the desk and leaned forward, staring at the newspaper on the shining surface.
He’d studied the news story again when he’d come back into his office. A scathing piece on how the impostor of the Colson family moved people around like pawns on a chessboard. It was stacked with details about the man, Carl Johnson, he’d fired last week for skipping out on an important meeting to go to a child’s sporting event.
The press had covered it a week ago, too, since Carl had gone screaming to the papers over discrimination of some kind. In Dante’s mind, it wasn’t discrimination to expect an employee to attend mandatory meetings, no matter whether it was the last game of a five-year-old’s T-ball season or not.
Still, it had been another of those juicy bits the media had latched on to to further stack the case against him and his possession of human decency. It generally didn’t matter to him.
But one thing in that article stood out to him: Can she reform him?
Could Paige Harper reform him? The idea amused him. He had the bare minimum of contact with her. She did her job, and she did it well, so he never had a reason to involve himself. But he had noticed her. Impossible not to. She was a blur of shimmer when she moved around the office. Boundless energy and a sense of the accidental radiated from her.
He would be lying if he said he wasn’t intrigued by her. She was a window into so many things he would never seek out: chaos, color, motion. So many things he would never be. Combined with the fact that she had a figure most men would be hard-pressed to ignore, and yes, he was intrigued by her.
But no matter how intrigued, she simply wasn’t the sort of woman he would normally approach. Until this.
“Can this thoroughly average woman reform the soulless CEO?”
He had no desire to take part in a reformation, but the idea of an image overhaul in the media? That had possibilities.
He could have demanded a retraction the moment he’d walked in that morning. Or he could let it run. Let them build off the image they’d created for him when he’d been thrust into the spotlight. A fourteen-year-old boy, adopted, finally, and suspected of being capable of all manner of violence and sociopathic behaviors.
His story had been written in the public eye before he’d had a chance to live it. And so he had never challenged it. Had never cared.
But suddenly he had been handed a tool that might help change things.
He turned around and faced the windows, looked out at the harbor. He could still see the look on her face. Not just the expression, but the depth of fear and desperation in her eyes. The press had a few things right about him, and one of them was that feelings, emotions, mattered little to him. And still … still he couldn’t forget. And he thought of the baby, too.
He had no use for children. No desire for them. But he could remember being one all too well. Could remember being passed around the foster care system for eight years of his life. Could remember what it was like to be at the mercy of either the State, or, before that, adults who brought harm, not love.
Could he consign Ana to that same fate? Or to a family who might not feel that same desperate longing that Paige seemed to feel for her?
And why should he care at all? That was the million-dollar question. Caring wasn’t counted among his usual afflictions.
The door to his office opened and Paige breezed in. Maybe breezed was the wrong term. A breeze denoted something gentle, soothing even. Paige was more a gale-force wind.
She had a big, gold bag hanging off her shoulder, one that matched her glittering, golden pumps that likely added four inches to her height. She also had a bolt of fabric held tightly beneath the other arm, and a large sketchbook beneath that. She looked like she might drop all of it at any moment.
She plunked her things down in the chair in front of his desk, bending at the waist, her skirt tightening over the curve of her butt, and pushed her hand back through her dark brown hair, revealing a streak of bright pink nearly hidden beneath the top layers.
She was a very bright woman in general, one of the things that made her impossible to ignore. Bright makeup, lime-green on her lids, magenta on her lips, and matching fingernails. She made for an enticing picture, one he found himself struggling to look away from.
“You said to come in and see you before I left?”
“Yes,” he said, breaking his focus from her for the first time since she’d come in, looking at the items she’d chucked haphazardly into the chair. He had a very strong urge to straighten them. Hang them on a hook. Anything but simply let them lie there.
“Are you going to fire me?”
“I don’t think so,” he said, tightening his jaw. “Tell me more about your situation.”
A little wrinkle appeared between her brows, her full lips turning down. “In a nutshell, Shyla was my best friend. We moved here together. She got a boyfriend, got pregnant. He left. And everything was fine for a while, because we were working it out together. But she got really sick after giving birth to Ana. She lost a lot of blood during delivery and she had a hard time recovering. She ended up … there was a clot and it traveled to her lungs.” She paused and took a breath, her petite shoulders rising and falling with the motion. “She died and that left … Ana and I.”
He pushed aside the strange surge of emotion that hit him in the chest. The thought of a motherless child. A mother the child had lost to death. He tightened his jaw. “Your friend’s parents?”
“Shyla’s mother has never been around. Her father is still alive as far as I know, but he wouldn’t be able to care for a child. He wouldn’t want to, either.”
“And you can’t adopt unless you’re married.”
She let out a long breath and started pacing. “It’s not that simple. I mean, she didn’t say that absolutely. There’s no … law, or anything. I mean, obviously. But from the moment Rebecca Addler, the caseworker, came to my apartment it was clear that she wasn’t thrilled with it.”
“What’s wrong with your apartment?”
“It’s small. I mean, it’s nice—it’s in a good area, but it’s small.”
“Housing is expensive in San Diego.”
“Yes. Exactly. Expensive. So I have a small apartment, and right now Ana shares a room with me. And I admit that a fifth-floor apartment isn’t ideal for raising a child, but plenty of people do it.”
“Then why can’t you do it?” he asked, frustration starting to grow in his chest, making it feel tight. Making him feel short-tempered.
“I don’t know why. But it was really obvious by the way she said … by how she was saying that Ana would be better off with a mother and a father, and didn’t I want her to have that? Well, that made it pretty obvious that she really doesn’t want me to get custody. And … I panicked.”
“And somehow my name came into this? And into the paper?”
Her cheeks turned a deep shade of pink. “I don’t know how that happened. The paper. I can’t imagine Rebecca … If you could have met her, you would know she didn’t do it. Maybe whoever handled the paperwork because I know she made a note.”
“A note?”
Paige winced. “Yeah. A note.”
“Saying?”