“Did you think we wouldn’t?”
“I thought it might be a close call. They didn’t seem to questionwhywe’d gotten married, either! At least not to our faces.”
“It’s probably all they’re talking about now.” He frowns, extending an arm to me. “How much did you have to drink?”
“Not a lot. Just what they offered.”
“They offer all the time. You don’t have to accept.”
“Thanks, Dad,” I mutter.
He rolls his eyes and drops his arm. “Right. You’re not wobbly at all.”
“It’s my shoes,” I say, walking after him through the lobby. “They look great, but they’re not very steady.”
Steven’s waiting for us outside. Victor holds the car door open for me, an inscrutable expression on his face.
I unbuckle my strappy heels the second we’re inside. “Ah. Relief.”
He snorts, but he doesn’t look away.
My head feels light. “Your friends are lovely.”
“They’re my business partners.”
“You don’t consider them friends?”
“Of a sort, I suppose. But we have shared investments, so I won’t get too friendly.”
I pull up a leg beneath me on the plush leather seat. “They don’t seem to think that way.”
“They have different values than me.”
I raise an eyebrow and he turns to me fully, draping an arm behind the headrests. Something sparks in his eyes. “You take issue with that.”
“No,” I say. “It’s just so you.”
His voice deepens. “So me? Care to elaborate, Miss… Cecilia?”
“Well, that’s an example of it, actually. It’s been weeks, but you still find it difficult to call me Cecilia. You want to go for Miss Myers.”
“It’s a force of habit.”
“It creates even more of a boundary between us, and that’s something you like,” I say. “Isn’t that right? Because you and I are business partners.”
“We are.”
I’m on a roll, champagne and adrenaline making my words flow. “Do you know, that in the entire year I worked for you, I never once saw you laugh on the phone? Make a joke with an employee?”
“You kept track?”
I roll my eyes. “No, I didn’t. But I can’t remember a single instance. Your separation between church and state is absolute.”
“As opposed to you, who prefers to mix them incessantly.”
“I mix them?”
He raises an eyebrow. “Do you think I never noticed how much you and Eleanor’s assistant talked? Some afternoons you chatted for hours.”