“No, that’s ok,” I said. “I’ve got a ton to catch up on here. I’ll see you tonight.” It was Wednesday at Grado which meant family night. “I’m fine.”
“Are you really?”
I sighed. “No. But I will be. You’d think I’d be used to that. Why do I hate confrontation so much?”
“No one likes it.” His velvety smooth voice reminded me of last night. I’d been to his house, one of the lakefront cottages on the Grado property. He’d come from behind me where I sat at his kitchen counter, and with one whispered word, we forgot completely about the reason he invited me over. It wasn’t until after nine o’clock we actually ate dinner.
“You do.”
“No, I don’t. I just have a lot of practice at it.”
“So did I,” I argued. “I was a lawyer for five years, remember. And then law school before that.”
“You think the fact that you hate confrontation makes you weak somehow?”
He was so good at reading me. My moods, my thoughts. It was because he listened so intently, one of the things I loved most about him.
Not that I had fallen in love with Marco Grado. That would be an extremely stupid thing to do.
“It certainly doesn’t make me strong.”
“So...you haven’t met my parents yet.”
An odd change of topics. “They come home this weekend, right?”
“Yep. And when you do meet my mother, you’re going to be enthralled with her. She’ll make you feel like a long-lost daughter. She’s the kind of person who can talk to anyone, from the governor of New York, who was at Grado just last month, to a bus full of Hello Kitty superfans.”
“Excuse me?”
“A bus filled with Hello Kitty superfans came to the Wine Cellar a few years ago for a tasting. I found my mother sitting with them, a cat headband on her head, reminiscing about when Sanrio first became popular in the sixties. I shit you not.”
I sat back in my chair, really curious now where this was heading. “I assume my discomfort on that call with Jerry has something to do with a bus full of Hello Kitty superfans?”
“It does. My mother is a brilliant businesswoman. She built the life of her dreams here at Grado. She’s personable and smart, like you. But she despises confrontation. In this business, there’s less of it than you’d expect. Your competitors are also colleagues. Vendors are also small businesses, most of them local, and virtually none of them with the killer instinct you’ll find in Jerry’s Brooklyn boardroom. But occasionally, there’s a media outlet gone rogue or something that needs someone with more of an edge. In those cases, my mother simply delegated. Sometimes to my dad, but later on, to me. It’s not a weakness, Rae. Just a difference in personality.”
“I can’t wait to meet her,” I said. “Why I thought law school was for me, I have no idea.”
“Better late than never,” he said. “Some people live their entire lives without finding something they love. Doing a job simply because it’s the one they feel they’re stuck with.”
I smiled, thinking of him, sitting at his desk, feet extended and crossed. Dangerously, I wished we were together right now. Surely I could go an entire day without seeing him.
“You’re awfully philosophical today.”
“I was a philosophy minor in college.”
“Seriously? I had no idea.”
“You also have no idea what I plan to do with you tonight. Happy to show you if you’ll stay at my place.”
I was getting deeper and deeper every day. There was just so little of me that wanted to resist. “Ok,” I said, after refusing to do so up until now, knowing myself too well. Knowing how quickly I was falling for him. “But just for tonight.”
“Just for tonight,” he agreed in a tone that told me we’d be having this conversation again tomorrow afternoon.
“What exactly do you have planned?”
“That’s for me to know,” he said in a deliberately low, sexy tone, “and for you to find out.”
TWENTY-EIGHT