CEO Humiliated the Single Dad at Christmas — Then Her Father Called Him “Boss”
Chapter 4
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The glass broke at 20 minutes past 9:00.A guest turned too quickly near the bar, and a flute went off a tray and hit the parquet. It was the good crystal, so it did not shatter politely: it broke into three long curved pieces and a spray of smaller ones, and the sound cut through the quartet and made the nearest 40 people turn their heads. A server was already moving with a bar towel and a small dustpan eight feet away, professional and unhurried, and the entire matter would have been finished in 90 seconds and forgotten in 100.Celeste raised her hand, and the server stopped where he stood."Luke," she called. She used his first name the way a person uses a dog's name—brightly, so everyone can hear that the animal has one. She waited until he had crossed the floor, and until the directors around her had arranged their faces into the neutral attentiveness of people who have decided in advance not to intervene. "You know how to clean that up, don't you? You've got the hands for it."Somebody made a noise that was trying to be a cough and came out as a laugh. The server with the dustpan looked at the floor. Celeste held Luke's eyes and waited, and the waiting was the point, because she had already won regardless of what he did: if he refused, he was a difficult man who could not take a joke; if he obeyed, he was a man who obeyed.And Luke Carver—who had signed a term sheet nine days earlier committing $840 million to keep this woman's company from defaulting in February—crouched down on one knee on the parquet floor and picked up the three long curved pieces of crystal, edge first and carefully, the way you handle broken glass when you have spent enough years around it to know the small pieces are the ones that hurt you.He set them on the tray the server held out. He said quietly, "Watch the piece under the bar rail. It'll get somebody's ankle."Then he stood, took the napkin the server offered, wiped his palms, and handed it back. He did not look at Celeste: he walked back to the table near the kitchen doors and sat down.Within 90 seconds, the room had returned to its ordinary hum, and Celeste Sinclair experienced the specific pleasure of a person who has tested a boundary and discovered there wasn't one.After that, she stopped lowering her voice at all. She began to speak about him in the third person while he sat eight feet away, which is a thing people do only when they have decided a man is furniture.