My Groom Chose His Mistress, Not Knowing I Was the CEO novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Roses on the Stairs

Carter arrives at her Bronx building with roses and she refuses him in front of the neighbors; Jack asks which Iris walks in on Monday.

At nine on Sunday morning, Carter stood on the third-floor landing of my Bronx building holding forty red roses.

Four of my neighbors had come out to watch.

I opened my door in a sweatshirt, with my hair still wet.

"Iris, baby." He gave the whole hallway his best smile. "I'm so sorry. Lydia was having an episode, and I panicked."

"She was having an episode in your shirt."

"You know how she is when she's upset."

"I do now."

He lowered his voice, but not enough to stop the old man across the hall from hearing.

"My mother's driver is downstairs. Come home, we'll talk at breakfast, and you can tell everyone this was a misunderstanding."

"It wasn't."

"Iris."

"I watched you take her to the guest room, Carter. I listened to the next hour."

A woman near the stairs lifted her phone and started recording.

Carter noticed.

His smile stayed where it was, but his eyes went flat.

"Then listen to this," he said quietly. "Your name is going on a license tomorrow morning at ten, and you will sign it. You've got a studio apartment and a school salary. Do you really want my mother's lawyers saying you abandoned your marriage on the first night?"

"Your mother's lawyers can say whatever they like."

"Where would you even go?"

I looked at the roses.

Forty of them, and he hadn't taken the price tag off the wrapping.

"Take them back," I said.

He didn't move.

So I took the bouquet out of his hands, walked it down the hall, and gave it to the girl from 3C who has been trying to ask her crush to prom for a month.

"Practice on these," I told her.

She grinned, and the neighbors laughed out loud.

Carter's face went red from the collar up.

"You're making a mistake," he said.

"Close the stairwell door on your way out."

He went down the stairs fast, and I listened to his shoes all the way to the street.

Then I shut my own door and leaned my forehead on it.

"He's gone," Jack said from my kitchen table.

I hadn't known he was inside.

He had driven me home from the Brantley gate at two in the morning, and he'd slept in the chair by my window with his jacket over him.

Now he sat with a coffee and a thick gray folder and his sleeves rolled to the elbow.

"You heard all that," I said.

"I heard him tell you where you'd go."

He slid the folder across the table.

"Brantley Holdings missed payroll twice this quarter. The lenders have given them until the end of next week. That's what the two hundred million is for."

"I know what it's for."

"Then you know they're not here to apologize, Iris. They're here to get your name on something."

I didn't open the folder.

I put my hand flat on top of it.

"Is the rest of the check in there?"

"All of it."

"Then it stays closed. I'm not reading about him in a file. I'm done with being told about Carter."

Jack nodded.

He looked tired, and he plainly had more to say, and he didn't say it.

"Two months ago you told the board you'd run a background check on him," I said. "I refused to read it."

"Yes."

"I told them you were jealous."

"You did."

"I'm sorry I said it where they could hear."

Something crossed his face and was gone.

"You were in love," he said. "It's all right."

"No, it isn't. But I need you to do this with me, and I need it to stay plain. Until Carter and his family are finished, you're my chief operating officer and I'm your chair. That's all this is."

He held my eyes a moment longer than a coworker would.

"Understood, Ms. Bannon."

"Iris."

"Not until he's finished," he said. "That's the rule."

I sat down across from him.

My hands had started to shake, and I put them under the table.

Jack saw that too, and he said nothing about it.

He turned his phone toward me.

"Here's the schedule. Ten tomorrow, city hall. They'll all be waiting for your signature. At two, the Brantleys sit in our boardroom expecting the chair of Dunhill Group to sign their rescue."

"They think the chair is a man named I. D. Bannon who never leaves his office."

"They think he's a reclusive old man. Carter's mother asked our receptionist three times if you were somebody's nephew."

I laughed once, and it hurt.

Jack's face was serious.

"So I need to know," he said. "At ten o'clock, which Iris walks in?"

"The teacher."

"And at two?"

I looked at the folder under my hand, and then at the phone with the clock counting down.

"Both," I said.

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