chapter
Twenty-two
Isaac’s office door didn’t stand open anymore. That was the first change I noted.
On occasion it was shut when I passed, but more often it was cracked open a few inches. Enough to say I’m here and also Keep out. The latter was more than likely I’m busy, but I was taking everything he did or didn’t do personally, from his now-commonly-shut door to his seeming avoidance of eye contact during meetings and even when I was in his office, reporting on client progress. He listened and replied in conventional ways, but his eyes were on his monitor or a printout in his hand. Instead of looking at me, he straightened his desk or filed something while I was speaking.
When forced to look at me by Western conventions of conversation, he stared at my ear, or my nose, or the pulse beating at the base of my throat. Anywhere but my eyes—or my mouth. As before, my questions were answered, my opinions validated or negated in a professional manner, and that was the end of the interaction. No crackling current remained between us. It was like it had never been there.
I did my job autonomously for the most part, and when that should have been and maybe was a sort of praise, a gratifying endorsement of my proficiency, it wasn’t. I didn’t know why.
I contemplated pushing his door open and asking, “Why are you avoiding me?”
He would raise one derisive brow and affect a perplexed, confused frown. “What do you mean? I’m right here,” he would say, or something similar. Not so long ago I would have believed it was all in my mind. Silly Erin. Isaac Maat never looked at you any differently.
A kiss had changed everything.
I was in the break room, inspecting a salad I’d brought for lunch—salads and leftovers were no longer indiscriminately trusted to not contain murderous spores—when Isaac entered, coffee mug in hand.
I saw him from the corner of my eye as he pulled up before entering and came to a full stop in the doorway. He took a step back, planning to steer clear of the room until I’d left it, no doubt. Whipping around, I said, “Hi.”
He froze and stared at my ear, forcing his face into a pleasantish façade. “Hi.” Walking straight to the sink, he rinsed his mug and made it clear he had no intention of making conversation.
I rolled my eyes behind his back, poked at my perfectly fresh salad a few more times, and took a sniff. Is that odor from the goat cheese or a lethal microorganism? I wasn’t sure.
“Hey, Erin.” Joshua did not hesitate at the door or stop with a greeting. He left his unrinsed coffee cup in the sink for the janitorial staff to deal with. He ignored Isaac. “Keep that salad for tomorrow. I’m in the mood for Zushi—we haven’t been there in forever.”
The visual juxtaposing of these two men didn’t happen often. In a larger organization, they would have had little to no contact. But JMCH was a small firm—a family place, Daddy said—so it was like a small town. Everyone knew everyone. Even so, Sales was front end. Finance was back end. If not for the client liaison responsibility he’d assumed, Isaac would have been chest-deep in numbers all day with little to no direct interaction with the people we built homes for. By the time he saw them, the sales department’s job was done.
Isaac stiffened at Joshua’s invitation. There was an enmity between them that had nothing to do with me. The earliest things Joshua had said regarding Isaac exposed entrenched animosity, not jealousy that had begun with my arrival. That said, I felt like one of those miniscule neutral territories between two warring factions. I was no one’s property and never would be, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that they both saw me that way in relation to each other. I didn’t like it.
“Sure. Lunch sounds great. I’m not trusting this salad anyway.” I stepped on the floor lever of the trash can and dropped the boxed salad in. “I’ll run up and grab my bag. Meet you at the front.”
I glanced at Isaac as I moved between them. He was toweling his mug dry, but his eyes were on me. For the first time in almost three weeks, his eyes met mine, and he was not happy. His eyes were black, whether from fluorescent lighting or dilated pupils, and they would have scorched me to the wall if they’d had their way. I would have been a sooty cutout. A full-sized Erin silhouette.
My step faltered and I tore my gaze from his. This was what the phrase playing with fire meant. I left the room and sprinted up the stairs instead of walking for no reason except the absurd feeling that I was being pursued. I owed him nothing. He’d kissed me and pushed me away. Literally. Beyond that, I had never allowed anyone to dictate my friendships and wasn’t about to start now.
My imagination, which hadn’t ceased its almost nightly Isaac fantasies, now pictured Joshua and Isaac standing in the break room below. Well. Isaac was standing. Joshua was on the floor, holding his rapidly bruising jaw. Don’t speak to her again. No lunches, no coffee dates, no conversation whatsoever. Do I make myself clear, Swearingen?
My breath caught as I entered my office and stood there for a moment, hand to chest, breathing erratically, aroused as hell, and trying to remember why I was there.
“Holy shit.” I steadied myself, one hand on my desk, the other assessing the wild beat of my heart. My fantasies hadn’t intruded on my workday before, for chrissake, nor had any of them ever included another person. Okay, there was one time I included another girl, but I dismissed her a minute later. I don’t share, I’d said as she vanished, taking her voluptuous body (because if I was going to imagine a girl in my bed, I was going all in) with her. Neither do I, he’d answered.
In a flash, I knew why there had been no invasive daydreams, even in the place many of my nighttime fantasies transpired. Isaac had rendered me invisible to him here, and my mind knew it, even if my heart—I mean my body—didn’t. Here, we were colleagues, nothing more. Here, we weren’t friends. I hadn’t told him my deep dark secret. He hadn’t recounted the worst, most heartbreaking memory of his childhood. We hadn’t kissed. I hadn’t met his dog.
He and Joshua could decide on pistols at dawn for all I cared. Their bad blood had nothing to do with me.
I closed my eyes and took a slow breath. When my brain rebooted, I asked myself why I was standing in my office, remembered, and grabbed my purse from the hook on the back of the door. I passed Isaac’s office as his door was snapping closed.
By the time Joshua and I reached his car, I regretted my decision to join him for lunch. Whatever retaliation I had heaped on Isaac in the moment had ricocheted and clobbered me in the head. Joshua spent the entire mercifully short drive boasting about his sales for the current month in comparison to his female counterparts. He didn’t come right out and attribute his success to his superior gender, but he skirted close.
Overall sales hadn’t been good, per usual in November because few people approach the holidays and say, “Let’s begin a custom home project!” I knew for a fact there were only three new contracts, and one of them was already having complications—one of Joshua’s two deals. If it fell through, Megan would move ahead because her one sale was the highest of the month.
I didn’t bother mentioning it. His momentum was so strong he was having a one-way conversation.
We were eating before he interrupted his monologue with a series of progressively personal questions. “So, what’re your plans over Thanksgiving? I’m heading to Jackson Hole with a couple of buddies to do some snowboarding. They’ve already had like seventy inches.”
I’d erected a little barrier of glasses and condiments between us to thwart any food stealing. “My family goes to my grandparents’ cabin in Colorado every year.”
“Ah—the venerable Leonard P. Welch.” He chewed a slice of tuna sashimi and continued talking around it. “Is it true he’s a billionaire?”
He knew my maternal grandfather’s name? What kind of stalker shit was that?
“I… don’t…”
“I know McIntyre Welch Inc. operates under the name Jeffrey McIntyre Custom Homes, but it’s common knowledge—well maybe not common knowledge, but it’s no secret—that your grandfather bankrolled the company in the beginning, along with Ted’s grandfather and a secret stakeholder they eventually bought out. He’s not on the Forbes list yet, but he’s probably really fucking close, right?”
I knew Ted Sager’s father had held the VP of Operations position before he did, but I hadn’t known his family was involved in founding JMCH. I had no idea of my grandparents’ net worth either, not that I would chat about it over lunch with some guy I barely knew, for fuck’s sake. Also, Joshua had searched the Forbes Billionaire List, looking for my grandfather?
“Um, I don’t feel comfortable discussing my family’s financial assets.”
My maternal grandparents were loaded; that was plain. Their “cabin” in Colorado was as impressive as my parents’ place, but with mountain views, thirty acres of land, a wine cellar, a private stocked pond, and a horse barn. They had live-in help, and the horses had their own caretaker. Mom had been raised like that from birth; Daddy hadn’t. He’d embodied his up-by-his-bootstraps story and never let my brothers forget it. Never mind his early aggrandizement by way of Grandpa Welch.
“All right, all right—it was just for bragging rights, you know? ‘I work for a billionaire’ would be a cool claim.”
I assumed lots of people worked for billionaires, technically speaking, but I wanted to escape the awkward topic. “So Jackson Hole—that’s in Wyoming, or Utah?”
• • • • • • • • • •
Isaac pulled his office door open as I passed it. “Please get me those updated numbers before you leave tomorrow. End of month is Friday.” He either had incredible timing or he’d seen me return from his window.
The wispy hairs at my nape bristled at the thought of him tracking my return from lunch with Joshua. “You aren’t working over Thanksgiving, are you?”
He’d begun to shut the door but stopped at my question. “I’m not leaving town. Just picking my cousin up from the airport Thursday morning and driving us to my aunt’s place in Arlington. I can get a lot done Wednesday and Friday and hold on to the vacation days.”
“I guess it will be kinda dead up here those days. Less interruptions.” His shirt today was a deep orange, a shade that would look hideous on ninety-five percent of men. On him, it was gorgeous. “You look like a tribute to the return of pumpkin spice.”
He glanced down and touched fingers to his tie—angled stripes in silver, forest green and shades of orange. One brow hitched up and his mouth quirked to the side as he looked down at me.
“That’s not an insult, I swear! I really like pumpkin spice.”
“So it’s no celery, I guess.”
His comment, an allusion to the night at his apartment, snuck beneath my breastbone and pinched my heart. I couldn’t reply. I just shook my head slowly.
“All right, then—”
“I’m not seeing him.”
He straightened but didn’t look convinced or appeased. If anything, his body seemed to shrink from mine even though he hadn’t stepped away. I was losing my mind.
“Or any part of him.”
“Not really my business, is it, Ms. McIntyre?”
“No, I suppose it isn’t.” I dug my nails from one hand into the palm of the other, an always handy method I had discovered in childhood to keep the pain focused somewhere other than my trampled pride or my unguarded heart. By some miracle, I even managed a smile. “I’ll have your numbers to you tomorrow, Mr. Maat.”
• • • • • • • • • •
My seat was next to Leo on the flight to Boulder, with our parents in front of us. Our middle brothers had always staged a best-of-five rock-paper-scissors match to decide which of them had to sit next to Leo inflight, but Foster the workaholic was flying in Thursday morning and back out on Friday, and Pax and his fiancée, whom we’d never met, were en route from Albuquerque and would meet us at the cabin.
My eldest brother wasn’t a conversationalist, and our first-class seats were roomy enough that he couldn’t manspread into my space without making a malicious effort. His laziness won out. He spent the flight dozing, drinking, and playing games on his phone. I popped in my earbuds, started an audiobook, and stared out the window at the field of white clouds below, bare landscape peeking through here and there.
It was Wednesday morning, the day before Thanksgiving, and Isaac would be at the office along with one or two other people. I wondered if he’d wear his usual shirt and tie or if he would dress down. Knowing Isaac, he would cut the difference. Jeans and maybe a soft sweater—dark jewel toned, fine merino wool, worn over a T-shirt.
I had to rewind my book a number of times; I kept losing the thread of the story. After the fourth or fifth time, I gave up and switched to music, accepting the fact that I wanted to daydream about Isaac. I wanted to dress him up or down like a Ken doll in my mind. I cycled through the outfits I’d seen him wear and invented others.
Lumberjack Isaac, an ax balanced on his shoulder and a gallant I just chopped down a tree to keep you warm this winter look on his face. Swim trunks Isaac, walking out of the ocean like a glistening aquatic god. Tuxedo Isaac, hand outstretched to request a dance… or my future.
I breathed a sigh that became a soft chuckle. Jesus take the wheel, because I am about to drive off the mountain.
Once upon a time, my boyfriend of two years had proposed to me. As I’d stared down at that solitaire, there had been no vacillation in my mind, only shock followed by self-contempt that I’d been so cavalier with someone else’s heart. I hadn’t premeditated the end of us. I hadn’t planned my exit. I had let myself be a carefree girl enjoying her life. I had allowed the finale of Chaz and me to play out, with devastating results.
And here I was, fiercely aware of the different answer I would give a man I’d known a matter of months. A man I hardly knew at all. A man who would not cross trip-wired battle lines for me. A man who viewed me as something he might desire but would never allow inside his heart. Despite all of that, I sensed the jigsaw fit of us to my bones.
I pulled up the appropriated photograph on my phone, the screen angled away from my brother. I knew that smile, as rare as it was in the man that little boy had become. This was my penance for being careless with Chaz, then. To find I was capable of falling in love after all—with a man who would never love me.