Nights with My CEO novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: Footnote Fourteen

"Yes," I said. "I wrote it."

Reed closed the laptop very gently.

"I tried to tell you on Saturday."

"In the bath. I remember." He pushed both hands through his hair. "I kissed you. I told you rule two. I said nobody works."

"You were keeping my rule."

"I was being an idiot who thought he knew what a woman in a bath was about to say."

"Reed."

"No, let me have this." He looked up. "I've spent two days wondering why Sargent shook my hand like a man reading lines. I've spent two days thinking he seemed wrong somehow. And the whole time you were standing at the back of that room."

I pulled the blanket around me and sat on the edge of the bed.

"Ask me," I said.

"Ask you what?"

"You don't believe me yet. You don't have to. Ask me anything about it that Colby couldn't answer."

He stared at me for a long moment.

Then he asked.

He asked what the third yard on the northern line was called.

He asked why I had chosen a Saturday, and what time the first freight went out, and how I knew a switching crew was short two men that day.

I answered every one.

I told him about the cold, and the coffee in a gas station cup.

I told him about the foreman who wouldn't let me past the fence until I gave him my gloves.

I told him I'd counted eighty-one departures, and what I'd done when the stopwatch froze.

Somewhere in the middle he stopped asking questions.

He just listened, with his chin in his hand.

"Colby doesn't know any of that," I said.

"No," Reed said quietly. "He doesn't."

His voice had gone strange.

"What?"

"It's my father's railroad," he said.

I stared at him.

"Calder. It was my father's. Hal Callender ran it for twenty-two years, until a board pushed him out nine years ago. He never said it was a push, but I was thirty and I knew." He looked at the dark window. "He died last month. I bought your firm because it owned the one piece of research that said Calder was worth saving."

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