Surprise Baby For The Bossy Single Dad (Kings of Manhattan #5)

1. Imogen

Imogen

“That’s enough.”

The voice drops the room ten degrees.

He comes in from a hallway I didn’t clock on the way through, tall, dark hair, a suit cut so close it looks grown rather than bought. He crosses the floor toward his little boy, hands open at his sides, and crouches. For one charitable second I think, all right, here comes the dad part.

There is no dad part. Whatever I braced for, it doesn’t show up.

“Luke. Eyes on me. We don’t throw. We’ve talked about this. You’ll collect every card, you’ll apologize, and then we’ll discuss what happens next.”

It’s the word apologize that lights the six-year-old’s fuse. He hurls his last fistful straight up so it rains back down on both their heads. Out of him comes a sound with no language in it, just volume and fear. The man’s jaw goes so tight I can see the muscle jump.

“Luke.”

“She already LEFT. She’s gone, you can’t make me say sorry to nobody!”

“You can, and you will—”

“NO.”

The man brings two fingers to the bridge of his nose and presses, holding his own head together from the outside.

He’s not talking to a kid. He’s issuing terms to a tiny hostile party across a table, like if he just keeps his voice steady enough the boy will see reason and sign.

The impressive part is that he has no idea why it isn’t working.

He glances at me then, and the glance has an order folded inside it.

Leave. Same elevator, off you go. I’m meant to do exactly what the woman in scrubs just did, decide this is several pay grades above me, and let the building lower me back into my real life, where there’s eleven hundred dollars in checking, a thesis defense in March, and a letter of recommendation I need from someone with a name that unlocks things.

Instead I get down on the floor.

Not toward him, but toward the boy. I sink to the carpet at the edge of the wreckage, close enough to be in his orbit, far enough that I’m not crowding him, and I pick up a single card. Number four.

“Okay, real talk,” I say to the card, not to Luke. “These are the most boring flashcards I have ever seen. Who made these? Was it somebody who got fired from a fun job and swore revenge?”

The screaming stutters. It doesn’t stop so much as run out of road, downshifting into wet, ragged breathing, and two suspicious eyes swing toward me, red-rimmed and furious.

“They’re for math,” he says, like he’s reporting a felony.

“That they are,” I agree, grave about it.

I turn the four so it faces him. “But you already threw most of them, which means they’re not flashcards anymore.

They’re cannonballs. And I have a rule, a really important one.

We do not waste good cannonballs.” I set the four faceup between us, no sudden moves.

“So here’s a new game. I just made it up, like, right now. I’m the wall. You’re the cannon.”

“That’s not a real game.”

“It’s super real. And the rules are tough.

You only get to fire a card at the wall if you say a number bigger than the one on it.

You say a number that’s too small, a baby number, then the wall gets to fire back at you.

Walls don’t go easy on anybody.” I hold up the seven, the one that got me. “Seven. Beat it or the wall wins.”

He stares. Above us the father has gone still as furniture, and I keep my eyes on the cards, not on him, because none of this is for him.

“Eight,” Luke says.

“Eight? Wow. I’m embarrassed for you.” I flick the seven so it flutters into his lap, as gentle as I can make it, and he flinches hard, then registers that it didn’t hurt, then snatches it up like a prize. “Your serve, cannon.”

“A hundred.” He whips the nine at me. It bounces off my collarbone, and a laugh falls out of him.

It’s small and startled, like it got out before he could decide whether he was allowed to. His shoulders come down from around his ears, and the breath he takes after goes all the way to the bottom.

I scoop a few cards into a pile, hand him his own stockpile so the war has two sides.

We go a handful of rounds, hundred, thousand, a million-billion, the numbers melting into nonsense until it’s just a kid pelting a stranger with paper and breathing like a regular person, which I’d bet money he hasn’t done since breakfast.

I don’t look at the father until Luke gets absorbed in lining his cards up edge to edge, a tidy little battalion, the storm gone out of him.

When I finally glance up, the man isn’t glaring.

He’s watching his son like a man watching the weather break, clear sky after weeks of rain, arms hanging off his shoulders like he forgot he owned them, mouth parted on a word he didn’t get to. Then he feels me see it, and the shutters slam down so hard I half doubt I saw the man underneath at all.

He straightens his cuffs because of course he does.

“My office,” he says to me. “Now.”

It isn’t a request, and I’m not in a financial position to treat it like one, so I peel myself off the floor and trail him into a glass box of a room where the city has started switching its lights on behind him, a thousand little windows, somebody home in all of them.

He doesn’t sit. He turns, sets both hands on the back of a chair, leans his weight into it, and drops his voice to the register people use when they’re not asking.

“If you take this job, you follow my rules. All of them. No exceptions, no inventing sports on my living room floor.”

“That sport calmed him down in ninety seconds,” I say, before the part of me with rent to pay can muzzle the part of me that’s been on the carpet with his kid.

“He’s calm because he wore himself out,” he says. “It isn’t a strategy. It’s a crash.”

“Funny. It looked like breathing to me.”

His eyes come up to mine, dark, unimpressed, and underneath it the kind of tired that doesn’t go away on weekends.

“I have rules because the alternative is chaos,” he says at last. “You want to work here, you learn them. You don’t like them, there’s an elevator.”

“You’ve had how many people through that elevator in the last month?”

“The job’s yours if you want it. That’s the offer.”

I open my mouth with far more backbone than eleven hundred dollars can afford.

A small hand closes around mine. Luke has crossed the whole apartment without either of us catching the sound of him, his face turned up to mine with his father’s exact dark eyes and not one piece of his father’s armor, holding on like I’m the only fixed point in a room that won’t stop tilting.

“Please don’t leave.”