He’s not telling me anything I don’t already know.
“She could use a vacation. Do something fun.”
I pick up the pace on my run. “Are you trying to tell me to take her out today?”
He shrugs. “I wouldn’t tell you what to do, Nikolai. It’s not my place.” He looks over at me with a smug grin. “But I don’t think it’s a bad idea you have there.”
I shake my head.
“Concentrate on your run.” I reach over and hit the speed up button a few times for him.
And then I start thinking about where I’m going to take my good girl out today so she can have some fun and not worry so damn much about everything.
* * *
Charlotte is sittingcrisscross on the bed leaning over a laptop when I search her out. The leather-bound notebook she brought with her is open beside her. She’s been awake for a few hours, but I’ve been holed up in my office. It’s past noon already when I find her sitting in my bedroom tapping away on a computer.
“Where’d you get that?” I gesture toward the computer, shutting the bedroom door behind me.
She looks up from the screen. “It’s mine. When I stopped home yesterday, I grabbed it.” Her hair is bound up in a high ponytail; all traces of the makeup she’d worn last night are gone. She doesn’t need it anyway.
“What are you doing with it?” I already know the answer.
“I’m doing research on marketing.” She goes back to the computer, clicking and scrolling, picking up the pen and jotting notes down in her notebook.
“For the deli?” I lean over her to see her scribbles. Business ideas. She has notes written in every direction on the pages before her.
“No. For a fish store,” she deadpans as she looks back up at me. “Yes, for the shop. The chains are starting to push us out. We’ve been in the neighborhood for longer, but the young people moving in don’t care about that. They trust the chains; it’s getting harder to get new customers in.”
“Have you thought about buying into one of them?” Franchising isn’t as horrible as she probably thinks it is.
“I asked my father about it once.” She smiles. “It wasn’t a positive experience. He definitely did not want to do that.”
I nod. “He built the deli. I can understand that.”
“He and my mom, yeah.”
“But it’s your shop now, right?”
“Mine and Oliver’s.” She pauses. “I mean, sort of. He sold me most of his half when he needed cash about a year ago.”
“You had the cash to do that?” The more I think I have her figured out, the more she surprises me.
“It wasn’t long after our father died, so there was money left from the estate. I just used that.” She frowns. Her parents were important to her, I can sense it in the way her tone drops when she mentions them.
“Do you enjoy working at the deli? Or do you keep it open because it belonged to your parents? ” My future has always been laid out for me; choices weren’t really something I contemplated. But she has a choice here, even if she doesn’t realize it.
“Of course I enjoy it.” There’s force in her tone, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. In her eyes is conflict. She looks away, shakes her head, then goes back to the computer. “I have to find a way to get more people in the door.”
I walk over to the bed and gently push the computer closed. “You don’t have to do that right now.”
She looks around the room. “I have nothing else to do. You have people to do everything for you here, so I can’t clean, or cook or do laundry or anything. I can either do this or…” Her cheeks heat.
As much as her blush heats my blood, that’s not what I came in here for.
“Or you can change into one of those outfits Alina delivered last night, and we can get out of here for a little while.”
Her brow wrinkles. “What outfits?”