CEO Humiliated the Single Dad at Christmas — Then Her Father Called Him “Boss”
Chapter 2
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Celeste Sinclair was 38, and she had been chief executive of Sinclair Meridian for four years—long enough to redecorate the executive floor twice and replace 11 of the 14 people who originally reported to her. She wore a column of ivory silk that had been altered three times that week, and she held her champagne the way a person holds a prop rather than a drink.She had seen Luke the moment he entered, the way a woman with a good eye for fabric sees a thing that does not belong on a shelf, and she had crossed 40 feet of parquet to correct it. She did not raise her voice; she never raised her voice—that was the part people found hardest to describe afterward."The maintenance entrance is downstairs," she said pleasantly. "Off the service corridor, past the loading bay. Who let you in here?""I was invited," Luke said.She smiled the way a person smiles at a child who has mispronounced something. Her gaze moved down without hurry, taking inventory the way an appraiser walks a room: the coat, the boots, the phone with a hairline crack across the corner, the plain wrapped box clearly wrapped by somebody in a kitchen rather than a store.Through the tall windows, she could see the guest drive, where a low hedge of German sedans and two Bentleys surrounded the valet stand, and at the far end, a gray pickup with a ladder rack and salt crust along the rocker panels. She let her eyes rest there half a second longer than politeness required so that he would know she had seen it."Invited," she repeated. "By whom, exactly?""Your father, originally," Luke said. "The company confirmed it last week.""My father invites a great many people," she said. "He has always been generous about that. It's one of the things that made this transition necessary." She glanced at the box under his arm. "Is that for somebody here? Or did you simply not have time to drop it at home first?""It's for somebody here."She waited for more, and none came, and the absence of it annoyed her more than an argument would have. Most people in that room, when Celeste Sinclair turned her attention on them, produced an explanation: they produced credentials, or context, or a mutual acquaintance, or the sort of nervous over-deferring that told her exactly how much leverage she had. This man produced nothing: he stood with his hands loose at his sides and waited for her to finish.And there was something in his stillness she could not classify, so she reclassified him instead: plant management, she decided—one of the lifers her father collected like stray dogs, a man who could rebuild a gearbox and had therefore been given a seat at a table where he would understand one sentence in five.