the disapproving glance from Meredith, who was still talking into her headset and pushing buttons on her phone, Charlotte settled Harry on her hip and gave him a discreet mother’s once-over.
The first thing she noticed, due to the telltale area of flattened black curls in the back, was that his hair hadn’t been combed. So that was a demerit right there. On the plus side, he’d brushed his teeth. On the minus side, though, he was sporting dried toothpaste on the corner of his mouth. Oh, and a swath of what looked like dried syrup on one chipmunk cheek. Nice.
Continuing on to the clothes front, there was bad news: he was wearing his Bugs Bunny pajamas. With the feet. Which might explain why his Velcro gym shoes were on the wrong feet, but, then again, might not.
The bottom line? Her adorable and generally clean son had returned from a night with his father looking like a refugee.
Typical.
Still, this two-year-old ragamuffin was the love of her life, and she was glad to see him, even if this was a very bad time. Nuzzling his chubby little face, she turned to his father, whom she was not glad to see.
Roger Miller stood there in blue scrubs and athletic shoes, furiously thumbing buttons on his smartphone.
Also typical.
For the last year of their relationship, which had ended about a year ago, the only parts of Roger she’d seen were the top of his head as he texted and answered emails, and the back of him, as he left to go back to the hospital, which was the love of his life.
She was not in the mood for waiting for the oh-so-important surgical resident to acknowledge her, but she hid her irritation behind a pleasant voice for Harry’s sake.
“What’s going on, Roger? You know I’m working.”
Lowering the phone, he glanced up at her with those brown eyes and managed to look moderately rueful. “I know, but I’m on call, and they called me. I have to get to the hospital in half an hour and scrub in. There’s nothing I can do about it.”
“But, Roger,” she said, as sweetly as she could with her spiking temper, “I’m also working. As you can see.”
He waved a hand. “Why can’t you get one of the other secretaries to cover for you until you can take him to day care after lunch? How big a deal could that be?”
Okay. Forget sweet.
“A very big deal.”
They glared at each other across the top of Harry’s head, and then Meredith intervened.
“I’m going to the kitchen for a snack,” she called over the counter. “Does anyone out there want a cookie?”
“Me!” Vaulting out of Charlotte’s arms like an Olympic gymnast in training, Harry ran across the reception area on his tiny little mismatched feet and took Meredith’s hand when she offered it to him. “And I want a double cappuccino iced tea, too!”
Meredith’s laughter disappeared down the long hallway to the kitchen. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thanks, Meredith,” Charlotte called.
Meredith waved.
Charlotte turned back to Roger and took a long minute to wrestle her temper under control. They were a team, and she needed to remember that. A united team with a single crucial goal: to raise Harry into a happy and contributing member of society. As a team, they needed to negotiate and compromise, and as a mother, she needed to not throttle her baby daddy.
No matter how hard said baby daddy made it on her at times.
“I can’t take him right now, Roger.”
A look of absolute befuddlement crossed over Roger’s features, giving Charlotte the feeling that she’d really challenged his imagination by suggesting that anything about her lowly job could matter to anyone.
There went her self-esteem, slipping another several notches.
As though Jake Hamilton hadn’t done enough of a job on it the other day by not remembering her from work. The whole time they were chatting it up at Starbucks, he’d had no idea that she was one of his employees.
None.
True, they worked on separate floors and had only interacted, in passing, at the firm’s occasional staff appreciation luncheons. He wasn’t involved in the firm’s hiring process and had probably never had the need to come to the catacombs, where she worked. True, she hadn’t laid eyes on him in several months, probably since the last staff Christmas party, and then only from a distance across the crowded conference room.
But, still.
How could she feel good about herself when she’d made such a non-impression on him? When she recognized not only him, but all the other Hamiltons who worked at the firm, because she made it her business to know the faces of the people who put food on her table? The bottom line was that she’d been here at the firm for years and he didn’t recognize her or know that he and his family were her employers.
He did not, in short, know her from Adam or Eve.
Yeah. That had been a swift kick to the solar plexus. Especially because she was so exquisitely aware of who he was and had been since the second she first laid eyes on him. She’d been a brand-new employee the day that he strode out of the elevator and gave her a crisp nod as she was getting on.
She’d been stunned.
What woman wouldn’t be?
And now, two days after their interlude at Starbucks, she was still deflated and agitated, her poor stupid head filled with images of the unexpected heat she’d seen in Jake’s eyes, and Jake probably hadn’t given her a second thought. He’d probably hooked up with Ashley the barista, Avery the disgruntled sex buddy, or any one of the dozens of women he probably kept dangling at any given time.
The jerk.
A sexy jerk, yeah, but still a jerk.
Anyway, the issue now wasn’t Jake Hamilton, or how much he’d seemed into her the other day, or how he’d asked her out to dinner, or how he was, in fact, nothing but an inveterate player who’d probably only hit on her at Starbucks because it was a reflex with him, like coughing when his throat was dry.
The issue was her self-esteem, which had been in a steady decline for ages, ever since she told Roger about her accidental pregnancy (ripped condom) and saw the look of absolute horror on his face. It was as though the only thing worse than having an unplanned baby at that point in his life was having an unplanned baby with her.
Then there’d been the breakup, which wasn’t quite as brutal as the one in that old movie The War of the Roses but had been tough nonetheless. Then they’d gone to court to establish everyone’s parental responsibilities, and then she’d shelved her plans to go to law school full-time because she had to also work and support a child.
Roger, meanwhile, had blithely continued with his education and career because his daddy had more money than God and was happy to foot the bill.
Must be nice, eh?
Now she was a typing drone in the secretarial pool, a single mother juggling diapers, toddler tantrums, unscheduled illnesses and pediatric visits, and a part-time law student managing a class a semester. He, on the other hand, was deep into his residency and well on his way to becoming a real-life Dr. McDreamy.
Not that she was bitter, she thought, crossing her arms over her chest and glaring at him. Much.
But at the rate she was going, he’d be a millionaire with a thriving practice and his first yacht while she was still trying to finish a first-year law student’s course load.
Was it any wonder she felt invisible half the time?
Well, she was sick of it. Sick of being a second-class citizen—and an invisible one, at that. If she didn’t stand up for herself and her needs, who would? Roger? Please.
She