"Don't you like it?" I asked, nodding at her plate. "You haven't eaten much."
"I was waiting for you."
She smiled shyly, which for some reason always got my dick excited, so I jumped onto my stool and started eating as a way to avoid looking at her. The food did taste pretty good. Maybe I couldn't keep a girlfriend, but I had three things I rocked at---computers, sex, and now food. Serving as Eve's sous chef, in the days before we hired actual kitchen staff, had taught me a lot about cooking.
Not that sandwiches and salad counted as cooking.
Mara moaned again while devouring her sandwich.
I shifted uncomfortably on my stool and focused on my own plate. Never in my life had I eaten as fast as I did now.
"Really hungry, huh?" Mara said.
"Kinda," I mumbled through the food I'd stuffed into my mouth. Swallowing, I said, "Tell me more about you. I know your family's rich, but what about you? Do you work?"
"Yes." She swigged her lemonade. "Mm, this is delicious too. I do have a business. Kind of. Like I said before, I'm basically in real estate."
"Right, I forgot you said that. What exactly do you do?"
She hunched her shoulders, staring down at her almost-empty plate while picking at the crumbs on it. "I sort of, um, own a building."
"You own a building?" I probably gaped at her like a moron, but jeez, I'd never met anyone who owned anything that big. "What kind of building is it?"
She winced. "An apartment complex."
I gaped some more. A minute, maybe longer, ticked by while I tried to cobble together words, any words, in the hopes I wouldn't come off as a total idiot.
"That's amazing," I finally said. "Do you run the place or just own it?"
"Everyone and everything in the building is my responsibility." She shut her eyes for a moment, then sighed and looked at me. "When I was twenty-two, fresh out of college, my parents bought the building and gave it to me as a graduation present. They said I needed to grow up and take responsibility for something, so I could prove to them I'm a mature adult."
"How did that go?"
"The building was empty, had been for a few months. My first job was to get the place in shape for tenants---the high-end kind, not the riffraff---and then attract those tenants."
"Sounds like a big project." I watched her face, though she'd turned it away from me to gaze toward the window above the sink. "You seem really smart, so I'm guessing you pulled it off."
Her gaze swerved to me, her eyes wide. "You assume I did a good job? That's not how anybody else felt. My parents were sure I'd screw up. They didn't say it outright, but I figured they must feel that way. I screw up all the time."
"Did you mess up with your building?"
She hugged herself, scratching her arms. "It wasn't easy. I hired contractors and decorators to fix up the place, always mindful of the fact I had to pay back the loans my parents had helped me get. Once the building was ready for occupancy, I came up with a marketing campaign to attract tenants. The complex was at full occupancy within two weeks after it opened."
"Your folks must've been proud."
She laughed, though it didn't sound cheerful. "My mom said she was glad I hadn't gone bankrupt yet, but that it would take several years to know whether I'd made the business successful. It's been years, and still she acts like it's a work-in-progress. Like I'm a work-in-progress."
"They never say they're proud of you, do they?"
"My dad does."
I studied her for a moment, trying to figure out why her Mom treated her like she was a mess. Mara was so sweet, not to mention funny and sexy and awesome at business stuff. I wished I had her skills at that. "I don't get it. You made your building a success, so why does your mom think you're a screw-up?"
"For all the reasons I told you earlier."
"Because you can't speak Japanese." I leaned over the gap between our stools, grasped her hands, and looked her square in the eye. "That's bullshit, Mara. I've known you for a day and a half, and already I can tell you're an incredible woman."
"It's more than not speaking Japanese." She glanced down at our hands. "I drove my husband away."