Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
“Get in the car.”
“No.”
A pause. The rain fills it.
“Please.”
The please is what does it. Not because it’s polite but because it’s unexpected, and the unexpectedness cracks something in my resolve, and I open the rear door and slide onto leather that smells like his cologne and money and I’m close to Anton Almazov in a car that costs more than my parents’ house and I’m dripping on his upholstery and his mouth is doing the half-lift thing and I want to scream.
He doesn’t speak for a moment. He lets me drip. He lets the heater do its work. Then:
“Have dinner with me.”
My hands, which have been wringing water out of my cardigan onto his leather seats, go still.
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s not appropriate. You’re a client.”
He turns his head. In the dim interior of the car, with the rain streaking the windows and the city blurred to watercolour, his grey eyes are close and clear and unbearable.
“Nothing about this is appropriate,” he tells me, and his voice is low and direct and carries no smile at all, and I understand, with a clarity that frightens me, that he is not talking about dinner.
The car pulls up outside Keyes, Inc. I reach for the door handle.
“Think about it,” he tells me.
I don’t think about it. I think about it for the rest of the day.
KAYE CALLS ME INTO her office late afternoon.
“Mr. Almazov has invited you to dinner on Friday,” she tells me. She’s at her window, the harbour behind her, her hands clasped like a woman delivering good news at a press conference. “It’s an important client relationship, Fletch. He specifically requested your company.”
“I already told him no.”
Her smile doesn’t change. “Sweetheart. This is the Almazov account. This is the biggest retainer in the firm’s history. When a client of this calibre extends a social invitation, the appropriate response is yes.”
I want to tell her about the coffee and the car and how he said nothing about this is appropriate like a man drawing a line in wet concrete. I want to ask her what, exactly, I’m being invited to.
I don’t ask. Kaye is my aunt. Kaye got me this job. Kaye braided my hair at Thanksgiving and sent me a first-day card with a lipstick kiss on the envelope.
“Okay,” I tell her.
Her smile widens. “Wear the green dress. The one we bought last weekend.”
I didn’t know we were buying a dress for a purpose.
THE RESTAURANT HAS no sign.
It’s on a street behind the casino district, where the buildings are old and pale and the doors are unmarked and the assumption is that if you need a sign, you don’t belong. The car drops me at the kerb and a man in a dark suit opens a door I wouldn’t have found on my own, and inside is a room with white linen, candles that gutter in glass holders, and a hush so dense it feels like a fabric.
Anton is already seated.
He stands when I come in. The suit tonight is navy, not charcoal, and the tie is the colour of ink, and I have the disorienting thought that he has been sitting in this chair waiting for me while I was standing in my apartment in Kaye’s green dress trying to talk myself into cancelling.
“Miss Fletcher.” He pulls out my chair. His hand doesn’t touch my back but it’s close enough that I can feel the heat of it through the fabric of the dress, and I sit down too fast and nearly knock the water glass.
“Mr. Almazov.”
“Anton.”
I don’t repeat it. If I say his name in this room, in this light, in this dress my aunt bought me for reasons I’m only beginning to understand, something will become real that I’m not ready for.
The waiter knows him. Of course the waiter knows him. The waiter brings bread and oil and murmurs something in French that makes Anton smile, and the smile is warm and practised and given with the ease of a man who has been making people comfortable his entire life, and I sit in my green dress and wonder if the smile he gives me is the same one.
He orders for me. Not aggressively. He glances at the menu, glances at me, and tells the waiter something in French that includes the word sole and the word *l**é**ger*, and when the food arrives it’s exactly what I would have chosen if I could read a menu in French, which I can’t, which he somehow knew.
“How?” I ask.
“How what?”
“How did you know I’d want the fish?”
He picks up his wine glass. Turns the stem between two fingers. “You’re from Idaho. Landlocked state. People from landlocked states either hate fish or crave it. You told me you like the coffee here, which tells me you’re open to new things. And you held your menu a while without opening it, which tells me the French is a problem you’d rather not admit to.”