Ms. CEO's Baby Daddy Is the Merchant of Death novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: Show and Tell

At eight o'clock on Monday, Abe walked into the boardroom on the fortieth floor in the same dark suit.

He'd let me straighten his tie in the elevator.

He'd let me flatten his cowlick, and it had sprung back up before the doors opened.

The woman in pearls stood up at her desk when she saw him.

She didn't say anything.

She just held on to the edge of the desk and cried, and he stopped and kissed her cheek on his way past.

Twelve directors stood when he came in.

The white-haired chairman pulled out the chair at the head of the table.

"Mr. Cruger," he said. "Your seat."

Abe looked at it for a long moment.

Then he sat down in it.

I took the chair against the wall, by the window, with my folder on my knee.

"The vote from Friday is reversed," the chairman said. "Unanimously. Welcome back."

The directors clapped.

Abe waited until they stopped.

"Thank you," he said. "I'm selling it."

Nobody spoke.

"The company. All of it. My shares, the tower, the contracts. There's a buyer in Virginia who's asked me every year for six years."

"I called him on Saturday night. He said yes before I finished the sentence."

The chairman sat down slowly.

"Abe. This is the Cruger name. Your grandfather built it."

"My grandfather built rifles for farmers," Abe said. "I built something else."

He put his hands flat on the table.

"I had a lot of time in a truck to think about what I built. I don't want my son to inherit it."

"I want him to inherit a man who can sleep."

The chief financial officer took her reading glasses off.

"And Langford Home?" she asked. "Forty million of our money is sitting in it."

Every head turned to me.

I stood up.

"It stays," I said. "As a loan, at five percent, over ten years. No seat on my board. No date attached to anything."

"Those are generous terms for you," the chairman said.

"They're the only terms," I said. "Your former chief executive wired it to buy a wife. You'll take it back as interest."

The chief financial officer smiled for the first time.

"I'll draw it up today," she said.

Abe looked at me across the long table.

He didn't say anything.

He didn't have to.

At two o'clock, we were sitting in tiny chairs at the back of the Pre-K room at Little Acorns.

Our knees were up around our ears.

It was show-and-tell.

A girl in pigtails had brought a snail in a jar.

A boy had brought his grandmother's false teeth, which his grandmother didn't know about yet.

Then the teacher said, "Finn?"

Finn stood up.

He didn't go to his cubby.

He walked straight to the back of the room and took Abe by the hand and pulled.

Abe looked at me.

"Go on," I said.

Finn towed him up to the rug at the front, in his suit, and turned him to face twenty children on carpet squares.

"This is my dad," Finn said.

Twenty faces looked up at Abe.

"Technically he's my show-and-tell," Finn said. "He's very big. He can fly a little bit. He pulled me out from under a truck."

A boy in the front row put up his hand.

"What's his job?"

Finn looked up at Abe.

So did I.

Abe crouched down so he was the same height as the boy in the front row.

"As of this morning," he said, "I don't have one."

"Then what do you do?"

Abe thought about it.

"I make pancakes shaped like dinosaurs," he said. "And I drive his mom to work."

"And I read the stegosaurus book every night, and I do the voices badly."

"Very badly," Finn said.

The class laughed.

The snail girl put up her hand.

"Can he do the voices now?"

He did them.

He was terrible.

Twenty children shrieked.

Finn stood beside him with his chest out.

That night Finn went to Hank's for a sleepover, with a toolbox of his own that Hank had painted red.

"Bring him back at seven," I said.

"Seven-thirty," Hank said. "Wife's making waffles. Don't argue."

Before we left, I went up for my earrings.

The little dish on my dresser, where I'd dropped the ring on Saturday night, was empty.

I decided not to ask.

Abe drove me downtown.

He didn't tell me where.

He pulled up under the brass awning on Michigan Avenue, and I knew it before the valet opened my door.

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