Page 12 of The Nanny and the Nerd
He turned to his longtime assistant. “When were you going to tell me this?”
Jerome pulled his phone from his pocket and tapped the calendar icon. “I told you last week. See, the party is on your calendar.”
Rowen glanced at the display. “I thought that was a joke. You know I don’t do parties, and we’re pressed for time with the release,” he said, then stared at the table in the center of the room and spied a cake. Revulsion leeched through his stomach as his belly did a flip-flop.
Another Rowen Gale rule was to never eat sweets and to never indulge. He ate clean. It kept him sharp.
“Is that a cake?” he questioned with a scowl.
“Yes, but you don’t have to eat it. Don’t you worry, boss man, the kitchen is stocked with your Paleo, non-GMO, organically sourced—” Jerome began.
“Jerome,” Rowen cautioned, but he liked the man, or perhaps he’d grown used to him. Either way, he only tolerated a handful of individuals.
Jerome gave him a warm grin. “A little cake wouldn’t kill you, Rowen.”
This is where his assistant was wrong—dead wrong!
“It absolutely could. Do you know what sugar does to a body?” he threw back.
“Makes it happy?” Jerome replied, not missing a beat.
Rowen released a weary sigh and stared at the confectionary catastrophe in the middle of his office. “Who’s going to take her place?”
“That’s something we’ll need to figure out. You rejected the applicants I sent you, so the position is still open,” the man replied.
“Shit! That’s right!” Rowen said under his breath. “Fine, let’s get this party appearance over!” He gave the sorry-ass video game glitching on his monitor another look, then followed Jerome out into the main workspace, where his employees chatted while forking overprocessed sugar into their mouths.
“Everyone, your attention, please,” Jerome announced as he approached the group, and the conversation stopped. “Our fearless leader, Rowen Gale, would like to say a few words.”
Rowen felt his heart rate kick up. He clenched his jaw and went over his familiar mantra.
They’re not staring at some nerdy kid. That’s not you anymore!
“Well, Chantel,” he began, spying the woman, who was surrounded by smiling employees. A large man stepped out of the way, and he was able to see all of her and…HOLY SHIT! Rowen reared back. “What happened to you?” he asked, unable to stop himself. The woman was the size of a house! She never looked that big sitting behind the desk.
“Chantel is pregnant with twins. I figured you knew that!” Jerome said under his breath through a smile that would impress a ventriloquist.
Rowen’s jaw dropped. “Jesus! Are you sure it’s only twins? I don’t know much about babies, but it looks like you’ve got more than two of them in there,” he finished, gesturing to the woman’s protruding mid-section.
With her fork loaded with a bite of empty calories, Chantel stood stock-still, staring at him as if he’d insulted her.
“Rowen, what a kidder!” Jerome said with a forced chuckle.
A kidder? He was completely serious.
“Everyone wishes you well,” Jerome continued, then flashed a look that said go with it. “And we wanted to give you this double jogger stroller from everyone at Gale Gaming. Rowen picked it out himself,” his assistant added, pointing to a man who then lifted a sheet off a giant contraption.
Rowen glanced from his assistant to the gift. “Yes, it’s a great device for transporting small humans.” Or plowing a field—but he kept that observation to himself. You’d need one hell of a truck to take that thing anywhere. It was huge—almost as big as Chantel!
Rowen surveyed his stunned employees, then focused on the massively pregnant woman, who still hadn’t eaten that bite of cake.
This is why he preferred interacting with non-human entities.
He shifted his stance. “Good luck with having two babies. And if it turns out that there are three in there, the stroller looks big enough to cram another kid in it. You should be good.”
Chantel hadn’t moved a muscle during the entire exchange, and the office remained dead quiet.
He should stop talking.
