I can’t listen to this anymore. “I’ve got to go, Jenna,” I choke out.
She nods. “Good luck.”
I show up at Luke’s office at exactly eleven. Well, it’s more like 10:59AM, as I’m unable to squash my anal-retentive desire to be early. As I pass his gorgeous secretary Michelle, she’s bending down to pick something up, and I get a glimpse of her smokin’ ass. For a moment, I am overcome with emotion I can’t identify.
Jealousy? No, definitely not. I don’t care if Luke’s secretary is gorgeous—the same sort of gorgeous blond sorority Barbie he used to date all through college. Anyway, it looks like his taste hasn’t changed much.
When I enter Luke’s office, he’s hard at work on his computer. I remember how deeply tanned he used to be in college (from all those summers in Greece), his already blond hair highlighted with gold from the sun… but now he’s bordering on pale.
“Hi, Ellie.” He glances at his watch. “Exactly on time. As usual. Tell me—do you wait outside the office to make sure you show up at the exact moment I told you to arrive?”
“No.” He’s wrong—I wait outside the elevator. “So, um, Michelle seems really good.”
“Yeah. She’s a good assistant.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Just an assistant?”
“Well, she’s also a notary.”
“Okay.” I nod. “So… that’s all?”
“She also makes travel arrangements,” he says. “And she makes really good brownies too.”
“Oh. I see…”
He throws back his head and laughs. “Why don’t you just ask me straight out if I’m sleeping with her?”
Oh God. “I didn’t… I mean, I wasn’t implying…”
“I’m not sleeping with her.” His brown eyes meet mine. “She’s just my assistant. And a damn good one. Okay?”
“I don’t care,” I mumble.
“Uh-huh…”
Something he said a minute ago struck me. “Do you travel a lot?”
He winces. “More than I’d like. All business, no pleasure.”
“Do you ever go to Greece anymore?”
The way Luke looks at me blankly pretty much gives me my answer. “Oh God,” he groans. “I haven’t been there in years. How did you know about that?”
“You mentioned on the first day of expos that your family had a villa there,” I remind him, emphasizing the word “villa.”
“Did I?” He grins. “Wow, I was such a pretentious prick. No wonder you wouldn’t hook up with me. Anyway, it’s more like a house than a villa. I don’t even know what the hell a villa is… I was probably just trying to impress everyone.”
“Why don’t you go there anymore?”
“No time,” he says with a shrug. “Anyway, I try not to fly any more than I absolutely have to… I end up getting shuffled around like a piece of luggage at the airport. My chair gets stored under the plane, and I’m always scared they’re going to break it. And the beaches and the old streets are a bitch to wheel around—Greece is especially challenging.”
I narrow my eyes at him. “Hey, I always wondered: Are you really fluent in French, Greek, and German?”
“What, you think I was a liar too?” He shakes his head. “Yeah, I’m fluent.”
“Say something in French.”
He thinks for a minute, then says in perfectly accented French: “Je suis en amour avec vous.”
“What does that mean?”
He smiles. “It means, ‘I value your friendship.’”
“Aw,” I say.
“So what languages do you speak?”
“Oh, lots,” I reply. “C, C++, Java, Python, Visual Basic…”
“I get it, those are computer languages.”
“Muy bien.”
Luke grins. “Still a nerd.”
Our eyes meet and my tummy inexplicably does a little flip-flop. I’m surprised at myself. Luke wasn’t my type sixteen years ago and he’s even less my type now. Yet… well, I don’t know. It’s weird. There’s just something about him.
Luke clears his throat. “We better get to work. Do you have the numbers I asked you for?”
I hold up the papers that have grown slightly damp in my fist. “I’m ready.”
We spend the next hour talking shop. I don’t even realize how hungry I am until Michelle interrupts us with a big brown bag of Chinese food. I guess in addition to being his assistant, his secretary, and making brownies, she also orders him lunch. I skipped breakfast this morning and the smell is so unbelievable, it’s physically painful.
“I can leave so you can eat,” I say. “I’ll come back after lunch if you want.”
He shakes his head. “No, we’re not done. I ordered enough for two.”
Thank God. I brought a dry turkey sandwich for lunch and I wasn’t looking forward to eating it. I do feel guilty chowing down on top of Luke’s ridiculously expensive mahogany desk, but he tells me not to worry about it. I dig into my chicken with broccoli and practically moan in ecstasy. We’re right near Chinatown so there’s a lot of good Chinese food in the financial district, but this is the best I’ve ever had by a mile.
We put in another hour talking through the project. Luke turns to his computer and brings up a page of notes that he made. I’m amazed by how carefully he was listening to everything I said yesterday. We talk and he types in my thoughts using just his index fingers. I wonder if he does that because of his injury or if he was always a two-finger typist.
“Thanks for your help, Ellie,” he says at just after one o’clock.
“My pleasure.” I yawn because I’ve eaten way too much. Jenna once commented that she wished this country would institute siestas. Although that probably wouldn’t help our company’s productivity.
“You’re just as sharp as you used to be,” he says. “And you work even harder—I wouldn’t have believed it was possible.”
“You’re not exactly a slacker yourself.” I shrug. “Anyway, a lot of people worked really hard in college. Insanely hard. Like, you remember Joe Singleton?”
He shakes his head.
“Roger Porter?”
“We didn’t exactly run in the same crowd,” he acknowledges. That’s true. There were about fifteen-hundred people in our graduating class, and we probably didn’t have one friend in common. “Hey, what happened to that roommate of yours? The one with the lips. Daphne?”
“Delia?” I don’t know what he’s talking about with “the lips.” Men notice the oddest things.
“That’s right.”
“She does family medicine in Idaho,” I tell him. “She’s married and has two kids.”
“Idaho?” Luke crinkles his nose, which I have to admit, is the same look I gave her when she told me she was moving there.
“I know,” I say.
“And what about that boyfriend of yours?” Luke asks.
I didn’t know Luke was even paying attention to me at the point that I started dating Neil. I met him in my complex analysis class during junior year: Neil Weinstein, God of Mathematics. Above all, I respected intelligence back then. I ogled smart men like other women ogled movie stars. If it were socially acceptable to have a pin-up of Albert Einstein, then… well, I probably still wouldn’t have, but you get the idea. In retrospect, the way Neil spouted out answers in our math section was not entirely different from the way Luke mouthed off his opinions in our expos class, but somehow I found myself in awe of Neil’s brilliance. And unlike Luke, he seemed like a good fit for me.