Call Me By Your Heart novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Ninety Days

Scott offers her a choice, arrest and firing or ninety days as his assistant; she takes it to stay near the boy.

I took my hand off Jamie's head, slowly.

Scott crossed the room in three strides and lifted his son off the couch.

Jamie hung over his shoulder with his shoe dangling.

"Dad, she's nice," Jamie mumbled. "She fixed my shoe."

"I know, bud."

Scott carried him to the door and spoke to a security guard waiting in the hall.

"Take him to the family lounge. Stay with him until I come."

The guard nodded and took Jamie.

The boy waved at me over the guard's arm.

I waved back before I could stop myself.

Then the glass door closed, and it was just the two of us and the smell of spilled beer.

"Brynn," Scott said.

Just my name, flat.

Seven years, and that was all.

My knees were shaking, so I held on to the cart.

"Scott."

"You work here."

"Three months. Night crew."

"I know how long." He set his cap on the bar. "Do you know what you're doing in this room?"

"Cleaning it."

"You were touching my son."

"He's yours?" I said. "Just yours?"

His eyes narrowed.

"He's mine. His mother is Delilah, my wife. You remember Delilah."

I remembered Delilah.

I remembered a girl in a white coat in the doorway of my dorm room, holding an envelope.

"He's adopted," Scott said, as if I'd asked. "That's all you get."

"He has a birthmark."

"A lot of people do."

"Behind the left ear. A crescent. So do I."

His face tightened for a second.

A flicker, there and gone.

Then it went smooth again.

"I see you've worked out a story," he said. "Congratulations. You've been in this stadium three months and you had your hands on a seven-year-old in a locked suite at one in the morning."

"He was asleep. I was only..."

"Security tape will show what you were doing." He took out his phone and turned it so I could see the little camera icon in the corner of the room.

My stomach dropped.

"I can walk out of here and call the owner," Scott said. "You lose the contract. The company that employs you loses its contract. And I call the police and tell them a woman I used to know is stalking my child."

"You wouldn't."

"Try me."

I thought about my rent.

I thought about Marge, who had given me the back room over her kitchen with no deposit and had never asked why.

I thought about the boy's grey eyes looking up at me.

"What do you want?" I said.

He went still.

Then he reached into his jacket and took out a folded sheet of paper.

It was already printed.

He had known he'd need it.

"You work for me," he said. "Ninety days. Personal assistant. You carry my schedule, my bags and my calls. Nine thousand a month, paid every Friday."

I stared at the number.

It was more than I made in a year.

"That's not an assistant's salary."

"It is for the one I want."

"Why would you want me anywhere near you?"

"Because I'd rather know where you are." He said it quietly. "You left once without a word. Ninety days, you stay where I can see you. After that you can go wherever you want."

It made no sense.

He had a thousand people who could carry his bags.

But the clause at the bottom said I would be at his house mornings, and the house was where the boy lived on Scott's weeks.

I looked up.

"Will Jamie be there?"

"On my weeks."

"Then I'll do it."

I saw it land in his face.

He had expected me to fight and I hadn't.

He thought he knew why, and he thought it was money.

I let him think it.

He put a pen on the bar and I signed.

My signature was the same as it had always been, a looping B and a big H with a slash through it.

Scott looked down at it for a long moment.

"It hasn't changed in seven years," he said.

I didn't know what he meant.

He tucked the page into his jacket and didn't say another word.

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