The Boss (The Boss 1)

“Fair enough.” His small, sad smile pierced my heart. This whole time, he’d been hurting, and he’d hidden it to make things easier for me. “Elizabeth never mentioned her... yearning for motherhood, if I can sarcastically borrow her phrase, in the two years that we dated and later lived together. It was only after we signed a prenuptial agreement that held a clause for child support that the idea seemed to organically occur to her.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know anything about prenuptial agreements. I had no idea they could cover child support. “I take it that it was a lot?”

“Fifty thousand per month in addition to whatever family court awarded. For two children, it went up to seventy-five thousand, then an additional ten for each child thereafter.” His eyes met mine. “When we came back from our honeymoon, she admitted she’d had her IUD removed a few weeks before the wedding. That was a rather difficult blow to my trust.”

“But you stayed with her?” I wasn’t sure if I could have stayed with someone who seemed to be playing me like that.

“I stayed. For a year, a year and half. It took me a long time to face that our separation wasn’t going to end in reconciliation. I wanted to make things work. Partially for Emma. She and Elizabeth hit it off right away, and they were very close.” He paused. “And partially for myself. I loved her. I didn’t want to believe she’d had her change of heart because of the prenup. I’m still not entirely sure it was. And I believe that Elizabeth’s affection for Emma was genuine, but Emma is quite hurt by the whole thing. She’s angry at Elizabeth, and at me. I think she blames me for not protecting her from a person who ended up disappointing her.”

Emma was my age, so she would have been nineteen or twenty when her father had gotten involved with Elizabeth. “How old is Elizabeth?”

“Thirty-six.” He raised an eyebrow. “Don’t worry, I don’t have a string of twenty-four year olds in my past.”

I rolled my eyes at him. “That wasn’t what I was worried about. I was just thinking how devastating it would have been for me, at twenty, to make friends with a woman who was older than me, to develop a supportive, encouraging relationship with her, and then have to doubt that friendship. She probably doesn’t blame you for not protecting her. She probably blames Elizabeth for hurting you. And herself, for not protecting you.”

He studied my face for a moment, and I worried briefly that I might have said the wrong thing and insulted him. Then he said, with a slow smile of admiration, “You’re a very intelligent person, Sophie.”

“I do okay for myself most of the time.” I leaned over and kissed him. “You got divorced. Shit happens. It’s not like you got married planning to get divorced. You don’t seem like the temporary marriage type. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I think you’d make a pretty awesome husband.”

“Oh my, that does raise some red flags, coming from a woman who’s too afraid of commitment to accept the offer of space in the medicine chest.” He kissed me again, smiling against my mouth. “But I’ll hold onto hope.”

My stomach lurched. I didn’t want to examine that statement too much.

Chapter Twenty

The next morning, Neil and I went through our usual routine. We woke up, pretended we would get out of bed, didn’t, talked about getting out of bed some more, didn’t, then finally got up when it seemed like we might be in serious danger of another weird morning meeting with Emma.

“Since it’s so close to lunch time already, would you mind if we just sent Sue out for bagels?” Neil had to raise his voice over the sound of my hairdryer. He was shaving at his bathroom sink, a towel around his hips, his hair pushed back and wet from the shower.

I shut off the hairdryer and fluffed my mostly-dry brown waves, frowning at myself in the mirror. “Um, I think I’ll pass on breakfast. Something about meeting your daughter again is giving me serious butterflies.”

“I don’t know why,” he said, frowning as he tilted his head back to drag the razor up his throat. “It isn’t as though I’m looking for a new mother for her. If she doesn’t like you, or if you don’t like her, you’re both adults. I assume you can both be civil to each other.”

“As the day is long,” I agreed, but mentally, I added, at least I can be.

Sure, the last time I’d seen Emma had to have been a shock for her. If I had walked into my mother’s house and overheard her having sex with some random stranger, I would have put my head in the oven.