Page 14 of Secret Baby Daddy

It is not an attractive quality, this refusal to yield a single inch of ground even when yielding would cost her nothing.

I find, unhelpfully, that I would rather negotiate with her for the next six weeks than spend one more hour with someone who simply agrees with everything I say.

We are trapped.

I cannot move the pieces on the board without her approval, and she cannot spin a story without my evidence.

Every decision requires two signatures.

“Fine,” I tell her. “We share the authority. But the second you compromise a security protocol for a photo op, I will drag you out of this building myself.”

Piper smiles, a terrifying, brilliant expression.

“You can try.”

She gathers her laptop and walks toward the study Cordelia has assigned her, and I watch her go longer than the situation requires.

I catalogue the details out of habit, the length of her stride, the tension still in her shoulders, the way she does not once look back to see if I am watching.

Everyone looks back.

Piper Vale apparently does not need to check.

I turn to the window instead.

Rain streaks the glass, blurring the park into a smear of gray and green.

Somewhere in this city, someone is building an extortion on the bones of a dead man I failed twelve years ago, and the only other name I remember from that alley is Roman Vasseur’s.

Somewhere in this building, the woman I have spent a year finding insufferable has just agreed to share command with me without flinching.

I do not know which fact unsettles me more.

I suspect, before the week is finished, I will.

3

PIPER

I sit at the massive dining table in the Merrick penthouse, the bitter espresso cooling in my cup, rain against the glass.

My phone chimes.

A direct message from a senior editor at the Tribune.

I have been sitting here for forty minutes, drafting three different versions of a statement Cordelia has not yet approved me to send, deleting each one before I reach the second paragraph.

The truth is I do not know yet what story I am telling.

A crisis manager without a narrative is just a woman refreshing her email and hoping the worst version of events arrives slowly enough to prepare for.

It does not arrive slowly.

Check the secure drop. You have twenty minutes before we go live.

My thumb hits the link.

A video file buffers.