Page 6 of A Baby Surprise For My Billionaire Boss

“You don’t have to start looking right away,” Tess assured her. “There’s plenty of time for that.”

“No, it’s all right.” Maddie wanted to begin the search, if she was honest. Now that she knew what lay ahead, there was no sense in putting it off. It would be awful to linger around this house, watching Tess move on with her life and knowing that she herself hadn’t done so yet.

Maddie had felt as if she was lagging behind her friend for years. When they had left college, they had been in the same place in their lives — looking for jobs, going out on casual dates on Friday and Saturday nights. They had both worked as bartenders for a few years, and it had felt like their lives were on the same track. But then, all of a sudden, Tess had landed a job as an office manager at a law firm and had started pulling down a much larger salary, one that had allowed her to pay the rent on this house. Maddie had considered getting an office job, but after a few of her applications had yielded no results, she had given up. She didn’t want to work in an office anyway, and to do so would have felt like giving up on her dream of opening a ballet studio.

But that didn’t make it any easier to see Tess doing so much better than she was. Moving forward in her life, while Maddie felt as if she was stuck in place and might never move forward.

Leaving the house she had shared with Tess would be a change. She wasn’t sure if she was ready for it.

But maybe it was a step she needed to take.

CHAPTER 3

ELI

“Iwant to go to the beach,” Charlie whined.

“I have to work, Charlie,” Eli said. “You know that.”

He hadn’t been able to go in to the office thanks to the fact that Katie had quit, leaving him with no childcare to speak of. But work still had to get done. Unfortunately, neither Eli nor Charlie were used to this configuration. Eli had a home office, but he rarely used it, and he had never bothered to establish rules about it for Charlie. As a result, Charlie seemed to feel that it was fine to come into the office at any time and to interrupt his father’s work with requests to go to the beach.

“Katie was going to take me to the beach today,” Charlie said. “She promised.”

“When did she promise that? I know she didn’t say anything about the beach to you yesterday.” There was no way Katie would have done that while she was in the process of quitting. It had been inconsiderate of her to leave so quickly the way she had, but she wasn’tthatinconsiderate. She wouldn’t have made Charlie a promise she couldn’t keep.

“She said we could always go on Saturdays,” Charlie explained. “And we always did. Today was supposed to be beach day.”

“I didn’t know you knew it was Saturday. When did you learn the days of the week?”

“I’m six, Dad,” Charlie said. “And there’s a calendar in my room. Plus, it says the day of the week on my tablet.”

“Okay, okay.” It was moments like this that left Eli feeling a little ashamed of himself. He should be more aware of what his son knew and didn’t know. These were the things you missed out on when you were away from home as much as he was.

But it couldn’t be helped. Work was important. It wasn’t just that Eli loved his job. He did love it, of course. He took pride in the tech security software he had developed and knew that it was the best on the market. He also knew that having the job he did meant that his son would never want for anything in his life. Charlie had lost his mother at such a young age that Eli wanted to make sure he had everything else he could possibly want or need.

The trouble was, right now what Charlie wanted was to spend the day at the beach.

It was a perfectly reasonable thing for a child to want, and Eli knew it. Of course Charlie didn’t want to sit around the house in front of the TV while his father worked all day. Of course he wanted to do something fun.

It wouldn’t be able to be like this every day. But maybe Eli could take him to the beach for a few hours. It wasn’t as if he would have to unplug completely to do it. He could bring his phone along with him and try to get some emails answered.

“All right,” he said. “Go change into your swimsuit and I’ll meet you in the kitchen.”

“Aren’t you going to change?” Charlie pressed.

“Yeah, I am.” Eli was wearing nice pants and a collared shirt, and even though he had no intention of going in the water, that was no attire for the beach.

He went up to his room and changed into track shorts and a tank top. By the time he came downstairs. Charlie was ready to go and had been trying to spray himself with sunscreen. It was clear that he had missed his skin more often than he’d hit it — there was going to be a cleanup job to do later. The house cleaners only came every other day, and someone would slip on that sunscreen if it was allowed to sit there.

But right now, Charlie was bouncing on his toes and was clearly beyond eager to get going. Eli grabbed a couple of towels from the linen closet and tossed one to his son. “All right,” he said. “Just a few hours, okay? And when I say it’s time to come back, no arguing — it’s time to come back.”

“Okay, Dad.”

The public beach was only a few blocks away, so they were able to walk there. Eli didn’t enjoy the walk. He was deeply conscious of his phone in his pocket and the amount of time he had spent without looking at it. So many emails might have come in during that time, and what if one of them had been urgent? What if he had a client waiting to talk to him, wondering why they couldn’t get hold of him? Eli prided himself on his ability to respond quickly to his clients, and he knew they valued the fact that he didn’t keep them waiting when they needed something. If he hadto go through very many days like today, that reputation might be damaged, or even lost.

By the time they reached the beach, he felt like he was coming out of his skin. “I’m going to check a few emails,” he told Charlie.

“You’re not going to play with me?”

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