“I can grab some wine from the lounge on seven if you’d like some,” she offered.
“No, thank you.”
Dad turned to me, brows dipping down. “You sure?”
“I’m sure.” I waited until Stephanie left. Mostly because after she showed up last Friday, dripping in sweat and fury and screaming at us, she’d walked away muttering, “Well, there goes another potential assistant.”
Dad wanted Stephanie to have some help due to his busier schedule with the new projects we had rolling out, and Stephanie had been stubborn up until six months ago, refusing, saying she didn’t need it.
Truth was, she did. Between him and I, and as self-reliant as we were, Stephanie had her hands full.
After Stephanie left, I turned to Dad. “Lilly can’t have alcohol. It’s a parole condition.”
“Oh.” His brows rose slowly on his forehead. “I didn’t know that.”
“And last week when I ran into her, I didn’t tell you she was coming out of an AA meeting.”
“Yikes.” He cringed. “It’s a good thing you remembered then.”
“She said she didn’t have a problem. Actually, she said she’d never had wine before.”
Dad shook his head, understanding and compassion clouding his features. “Damn shame. So damn young to lose much of your life. The best years…”
He trailed off and I gave him a minute. Melissa was twenty-eight when she died. Being around Lilly reminded him of his own daughter, but in different ways.
As much as I liked Lilly, as much as I was attracted to her, I wasn’t lying on the campus that day.
Her entering our lives was going to create a mess I wasn’t sure I could clean up.
“You should tell her. Everything.”
He shook his head. “Time isn’t right yet.”
My fingers thrummed the conference table. “When will it be?”
“When it is,” he said, right as Stephanie reappeared. She wore her patient and professional smile as she stepped back and announced, “Miss Huntington is here to see you.”
“Lilly, please,” she corrected Stephanie.
“And thank you.”
She wore another thin, inexpensively made dress much like she wore the last time she was here. On Fridays, most of the office emptied out by three o’clock but while we were here, the office was casual. All except Dad. He always wore dress pants and a dress shirt. On Fridays, his idea of a casual dress was forgoing his standard tie.
As for me, I wore black slacks and a short-sleeve polo.
Lilly out dressed us both in her navy and white striped dress, a thin yellow belt tightened at the waist. Her shoes, navy sandals, looked new.
And it hit me. None of this was secondhand. None of it was faded and reused.
She made an effort with this. Both times.
And she did it while looking beautiful and put together and most likely, exactly how she would have dressed all those years ago.
Yes, Lilly was surprising in all the best ways.
“Mr. Valentine, Hudson,” she said to us, nodding in each of our directions.
“How many times—”
“David,” she corrected immediately with a shy smile. “Unless you prefer employees to call—”
“David. Everyone calls me David. In fact, you’re the only one who’s called me Mr. Valentine in probably thirty years.” He grinned at her and motioned for a chair. “Please. Sit.”
Like last time, she took a seat on the other side of the table.
This time, she did look at me, and when she did, I caught that darkening pink on her chest and throat. Hopefully it wasn’t an anxiety attack but something better. Melissa used to call them butterflies.
I called them hormones.
Regardless, I knew exactly what I was feeling while Lilly took her seat, opened up the file folder, and after a brief catch-up with my dad about her new apartment, she slid a piece of paper in his direction and said, “I’d like to apply for this job.”
Yeah… that feeling was respect. And I was feeling a whole hell of a lot of it.
“This is…” My dad trailed off and bit the bottom corner of his lip. His head lifted enough to glance suspiciously at Lilly. “This is really what you want?”
She sat across from us, poised and professional. Her hands were clasped together, softly, at the edge of the table and her back was straight. Like all the other times I saw her outside the diner, her makeup was minimal. Her hair was down this time, in a shining sheet of caramel and honey. Blue eyes sparkled.
Probably, if I leaped over the table and slammed my mouth to hers to taste her glistening pink lip-gloss that wouldn’t end so well.
“What one?” I asked and Dad slid the paper in my direction.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. With as much effort as Lilly put into fighting help, that she chose the job we offered with the smallest hourly pay and least amount of qualifications should have been a given.
Yet, I now understood Dad’s question. She could have worked with Stephanie, and I felt that same disappointment Dad showed. We’d wanted her to choose that job. And she hadn’t gone the design route with Miles which surprised me, too.
“You sure?” I asked. “You’ll be working with Brandon, a great guy, actually. But he does the financial planning for our projects.”
“I’m sure. It’s what I’m going to school for. You might be giving me these opportunities, but I can’t accept the others. It’s too much.”
“Lilly—”
“No.” She meant it fiercely and hell if my chest didn’t swell with more respect. Unfortunately, her chin wobbled as she struggled to take a breath. Next to me, my dad tensed.
“I’ve lost a lot,” she said, voice catching over her words in a way a pain went straight to my soul. “I’ve lost almost everything. The one thing I can salvage is my pride, and while I will accept help, I will not accept anything more than what I know I’m capable of. So I would like to interview for this position.”
Goddamn. The fire in her eyes was something so different than I’d seen before. So much less anger, so much more determination.
If I wanted to kiss her before, it was nothing to what I wanted to do to her now.
Next to me, my dad, in a thick and hoarse voice, said, “Go get Brandon. He’s still here, correct?”
Peeling my gaze off this woman and focusing on my dad was difficult. “Yeah.”
“Then go get him.”
I didn’t bother with the elevator. With employees leaving early on Fridays, it was always busy. I chose the space and seclusion of the stairwell, thundering down the two levels until I reached the sixth floor and headed straight to Brandon’s office. He never left early, most nights stayed late, so I wasn’t surprised to see the light on in his office and an earpiece tucked into his ear while he paced the room.
Like me, Brandon had a hard time sitting still.
Unlike me, his was due to years of anxiety from living in an abusive home life he left shortly before we met.
I waited at his doorway while he finished the call. Jenna, based on his dopey lovely grin. Also, he called her sweetheart.
“Hey,” he said, tapping a button on his phone. “It’s late. What are you doing here?”