Ego Maniac(53)

I stood and spoke to Alan. “Excuse me for a minute.”

“Take your time. Your new tenant and I can get to know each other while you’re gone.”

Just perfect.

I didn’t stop the door from slamming behind me as I shut myself into my office and picked up the phone. “Drew Jagger.”

“The woman who answered the phone is annoying.”

I let out an irritated sigh. “What do you want, Alexa? I’m in the middle of a conference.”

“I’m staying in Atlanta another two weeks.”

“Like hell you are. My visitation starts on Friday, and you’ve already been there a week longer than the two weeks we agreed on. I haven’t seen my son in more than three weeks.”

“You can come here for your visit.”

“I can’t drop everything and fly to Atlanta every other week because you want to play with your friends. Beck needs to be home, back in school, and back to his routine.”

“He also needs to get to know his father.”

I knew exactly what she meant. “Fuck you, Alexa. He knows his father!”

“His biological father. Levi wants to get to know him. It’s important.”

I felt the rise of my blood pressure. “Really? If it’s so important, why didn’t you tell him seven fucking years ago when you found out you were pregnant? And why hasn’t he made an attempt to know our son when he’s known the truth for more than two years now? Not to mention, has he started paying support yet?”

I wasted the next ten minutes of my life in another useless argument with Alexa. For Beck’s benefit, I stretched my patience as thin as it could possibly go and didn’t hang up on her. I didn’t trust my ex-wife to not play the only card she had left in her very worn deck: taking me back to court to reduce my visitation. Even after paternity had been proven and Levi’s name replaced mine on my son’s birth certificate, her redneck ex-boyfriend had never attempted to get to know Beck. We’d settled out of court on the custody arrangement, and I’d agreed to pay hefty additional alimony and child support even though I could have made a motion to stop support once paternity was disproved. But in the back of my mind, I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop—especially now that she was apparently speaking to Levi again. My son still had no idea who the man was.

Knowing how vindictive Alexa could be kept me from doing a lot of things I wanted to do to make her life miserable, like hanging up on her today.

After a minute of silence, Alexa finally got to the point she’d been calling to make. I kicked myself for taking the argument bait she’d set for me.

“If you feel that strongly about Beck coming back to New York, I suppose we could work something out.”

“What do you want, Alexa?”

“Well, Levi has a big race coming up next week, and I want to be here for it.”

For some reason I didn’t harbor the same anger toward Levi as I did Alexa. A part of me actually felt bad for the idiot. She’d blown the sucker off, referred to him as a grease monkey, if I remembered correctly, in favor of snagging herself a husband with a fatter bank account. But now that the grease monkey was a sponsored driver on the NASCAR circuit, he was suddenly good enough to speak to again.

“Is there a point to this story?”

“Well, it does get loud at the races, anyway. I suppose if you wanted to fly down here and take Beck back with you for the week, I could stay down here alone before coming back to New York. Although, I’m running a little short on cash right now, and I’d need some extra spending money to travel to see the race.”

I wanted to tell her to go fuck herself, but instead I said, “I’ll get tickets for me and Beck. I’ll text you the time my flight gets in, and you’ll bring him to the airport to meet me. You’re getting a thousand cash, and don’t call me for more.”

“Fine.”

After I hung up, I sat at my desk for another minute, trying to compose myself. That woman made me want to drink hard liquor before lunch. The extra minute or two helped just slightly, although whatever anger I’d managed to tamp down bubbled back to the surface when I returned to the conference room and found Alan still chatting with Emerie. She was laughing at something he’d just said.

“Finished so soon? Don’t you have any more calls you need to make? Emerie and I were just getting to know each other.”

“Maybe you should have spent the last fifteen minutes figuring out how your client is going to pay your bill when I leave her with nothing but her medical license.”

“Glad to see your call has improved your mood, Jagger.”

I grumbled something along the lines of stick it up your ass and went to sit back down.

“Drew?” Emerie said. “Before you get back to work, can I speak to you for a minute?”

I nodded and followed her into her office. She shut the door behind us. “Alan seems nice.”

“He’s a womanizer.” I actually had no idea if he was—it just came out.

Emerie smiled. “I can see why. He’s handsome, too.”

I glared at her. “You want to fuck Alan?”

“Would that make you angry?”

“Are you kidding me right now? Because I just hung up with my ex-wife, and I’m already in a piss-poor mood without you telling me you’re interested in the first guy who walked into the office after you got up out of my bed this morning.”