Elise walked out of Cohen & Smith with grace and restraint. She was the picture of professionalism as she stepped onto the elevator, nodding at its other occupant. Crossing the marble-floored lobby, her heels clacked, and she made sure to keep the spaces between the clacks even and long, like she was a bridesmaid walking down an aisle.

She even managed to walk like a normal person—a normal person in a little bit of a hurry, maybe—once she got outside to the sidewalk. But the farther away from Jay’s building she got, the more she sped up. By the time she burst through the doors of a coffee shop around the corner, she had abandoned all pretense and was literally skipping.

“You got it!” Her friend Wendy looked up from her computer. Wendy worked downtown and had insisted on lying in wait near the interview for moral support purposes.

“I got it!” Elise couldn’t resist a little twirl as she sank into the chair opposite Wendy. She pulled out her phone. “Hang on, I just have to text Gia.”

“No, you don’t.” Grinning, Wendy turned the computer around to reveal a Skype session populated by Elise’s bestie among besties, Gia, a model who jet-setted around the world and was currently in Berlin, and Jane, the fourth member of their tight-knit crew, who was at home on the west side of town.

“Ahhh! Hi!” Elise’s squeals were echoed by the girls on the screen. “And!” She laughingly infused some drama into her voice. “Not only did I get the lobby job, he asked me to do his office, too!”

“Did you get a deposit?” Jane asked. Elise’s friends knew all about her financial troubles.

“Because if not,” Gia said, “You know I will gladly wire you some—”

“I’ve told you guys, I can’t take your money! That wouldn’t be any different than taking Daddy’s money.”

Wendy held up a palm. “Okay, that’s objectively not true. It would be totally different.”

“The whole point of starting my own business is that it’s mine. It’s not propped up by family money—not that there’s any of that being offered.”

Not remotely. Her father had been happy to give her an unlimited allowance as long as she spent it on frivolous things. He’d even been tolerant when, after graduation, she’d started working part-time helping an interior designer who did a lot of homes in their neighborhood. But that was because he’d considered it a hobby, one she would drop when she got married.

Once Elise decided she’d had enough of Persian rugs and monogrammed towels in Rosedale and announced her plan to start her own business, the shit had majorly hit the fan. It hadn’t helped that she’d recently turned thirty and had failed to settle down with any of the entirely suitable boyfriends she’d had.

“Right,” Gia said. “But unlike your father, we believe in you. It would be a loan. You can pay it back when your business takes off.”

Elise grinned even as she got a little choked up. She loved her girls so much. Without them, she never would have had the guts to break out on her own. Her whole life, she’d had things handed to her: an expensive education, designer clothes, an address in a tony neighborhood. Watching her awesome friends work for what they had—work hard—had been an inspiration. Their unwavering support meant everything.

“Anyway, I don’t need it! I’m stopping by tomorrow to sign a contract and pick up a huge deposit.”

“So he went for your whole Toronto-themed thing?” Gia asked.

“He did! I even kind of insulted his current décor, but he didn’t seem to mind.”

“Who’s he?” Wendy asked.

Elise and Gia talked or texted almost every night, so Gia knew some of the nitty-gritty details about the job that Wendy and Jane didn’t. “One of the partners. This guy called Jay Smith.”

“Was he as boring as he looks?” Gia asked.

Elise felt her cheeks warming.

Tell me what you were going to say.

Her mind had been replaying that sentence since she left Jay’s office. On the surface of things, it had been an entirely unremarkable sentence. But the way he had issued the directive—with a tone that was half impatience, half entitlement even as he’d looked at her like what she had to say was the most important thing in the world just then—had stuck with her.

“He was…not boring.”

The girls shrieked in unison.

A wolf whistle rang through Jay’s office. He turned from where he was tying his bow tie in front of a mirror on the wall and grinned at his friend Stacey, who had let herself in.

“Haven’t you ever heard of checking in with reception?” he teased.

“Puh-lease.” She came over and finished tying the tie for him. “Reception is for keeping out the people you don’t like.”

He laughed. “You look nice. How’s the trial going?” He knew Stacey from when she’d been working in the government, prosecuting tax fraud. They’d met when one of his clients, back when he’d been working at a big firm, had been audited. Years later, when she’d branched out to open her own tax law practice, he’d lured her to this building.

“Terrible!” she trilled. “But there is an open bar with my name on it at the Four Seasons, so let’s blow this popsicle stand.” He glanced at his watch, and she must have anticipated an argument because she said, “Jay. You know I admire your work ethic. Your famous control over your empire and all that. But it’s time to party.”

She smirked, but her expression quickly morphed into a more affectionate one. She was always needling him about what she saw as too much work and not enough play. But since she was a close friend, she knew that he’d worked hard to get where he was. That his legendary discipline was what had made him into the man he was: a man different from the men he’d grown up with. A man who was putting a stop to the cycle of toxicity that was his family legacy.

“I am fully prepared to party. I just need a few minutes. We’re redoing the office, and the designer is coming over with the contract. She’ll be here shortly.”

“Can’t you just have her leave it with the receptionist I so blithely ignored?”

He could. There was no reason not to. He could leave the check and tell the receptionist to tell Elise he’d courier the signed contract back tomorrow. But…

“Nope.”

Stacey cocked her head at him.

He couldn’t interpret her expression, which was unusual. “What?”

Instead of answering, she performed an exaggerated sigh, walked over to the sitting area in his office, and plopped down on the sofa. Which was beige. Of course. What the hell was the matter with him that he had never really even noticed, much less taken issue with, all this beige?

His assistant, Patricia, popped her head in. “Elise Maxwell is here.”

“Send her in.”

Stacey really did look great. She was dressed in a black ball gown that had a pretty, sparkly overlay of some sort. Elise, though. She wasn’t as dressed up, but she was…something. There was a put-togetherness about her. And that compelling mixture of out-there style juxtaposed with more classic, restrained pieces. This time, she was wearing a royal blue dress that buttoned up like a shirt. On its own, it was kind of conservative. But she was wearing a wide red fabric belt, and her hair was up in some kind of twist with a big red flower stuck into it. You could have told him she was going to the same gala he and Stacey were or to a board meeting at a bank and he would have believed it—she would have fit in at either setting. Well, she would have stood out at either setting, but in a—

“Ahem.” Stacey was making a production of clearing her throat as she stood.

Right.

“Elise Maxwell, this is Stacey Tran. Elise is our new designer. Stacey is—”

“Jay’s ex-girlfriend.” Stacey stuck out her hand and ignored the look Jay shot her. He’d been going to say that Stacey was a friend. Because that was true. Yes, they’d dated for two months several years ago, but they’d parted amicably and that part of their relationship was ancient history. Neither of them gave it any thought, much less brought it up—usually.

“Oh!” Elise shook Stacey’s hand but seemed flustered. Not the same woman who’d given him the speech about how boring his office was. Her eyes flickered over to him and widened a little as she took him in.

Right. Her appearance had made him forget, momentarily, the uncomfortable penguin suit he was currently wearing. “We’re going to a gala—a charity thing.”

“Well.” She pulled some papers out of her handbag. “I’ll just leave this, then, and let you get going.”

“No, no.” Grabbing a pen from his desk, he moved to the sitting area. “I’ll sign it now.” Stacey smooshed up right next to him on the stupid beige sofa, which was a little weird, and Elise took the chair across.

“Don’t you want to read that first?” Stacey was giving him her skeptical lawyer face.

He had flipped to the last page. But she was right. He was not the kind of person who signed contracts without reading them—normally. Stacey had been joking when she’d referenced his “empire,” but he had clawed himself out of his impoverished background and made a successful life. And he had done that by being devoted to details. You could change the course of a project—or a life—by paying attention to enough cumulative details. Some people might call it micromanaging. Some people might call him uptight. He did not give a shit about some people.

So he went back to the start. The document was labeled OPERATION: ABANDON BEIGE.

He cracked up. Stacey, unapologetically continuing to invade his space, read over his shoulder.

“Yeah, I’m just going to go ahead and sign this.” And he did, details be damned.

Then he handed it back to Elise, who took it with one hand while gesturing with the other to the Scrabble game that rested on the coffee table between them. “You play?”

“When I can get someone to play with me. Kent—my partner and co-founder—and I used to pull all-nighters early in the life of the company, and we’d take Scrabble breaks. But these days I can’t pry him away from his phone—it’s all Candy Crush or whatever.”

She laughed. “Right? Why is it so hard to get people to appreciate classic board games?”

“I take it you appreciate them?” Stacey asked, her voice and her eyebrows high. Jay kept forgetting that Stacey was there.

Elise smiled. “I do. I have quite a board game collection, actually. But I always have to guilt my friends into playing with me.”

Well. A gorgeous, talented woman looking for someone to play board games with her. That was…something.

Clearing his throat, Jay stood and moved over to the desk to grab Elise’s check. “This is for you.”

“Thanks.” She walked over and took the check and then the hand he had extended for her to shake on the deal.

“Your hand is freezing,” he said before he could think better of it. He hadn’t meant to be overly familiar—he wasn’t one of those guys—but it had just popped out because of how true it was. It was like shaking hands with a snowman.

She smiled. “Yeah, I’m one of those clichéd women who’s always cold.”

He wanted to give her the coat of his tux, but that was something you did after the party. And she wasn’t coming to the party with them. Which was a little disappointing, actually.

“So if it works for you,” she said, “I’ll pull together some more samples than just the ones I showed you yesterday—assuming you’re still good with the photographs—and we’ll start there? Maybe we can meet next week.”

“Yes,” he said. “Definitely still good with those photos.” He turned to Stacey. “You should see these amazing photos she found.”

“So I’ll call your assistant to set something up?” Elise said. “Same woman who scheduled the interview, right—Patricia?”

He pulled a card out of his breast pocket and wrote his cell number on it. “No, just text me directly.”

Stacey coughed, but when he looked over at her, she was all wide-eyed smiles.

He turned back to Elise. “Let’s meet at your office.” It would be fun to see how the designer did her own space.

She cleared her throat. “I, ah, don’t have a studio. I work out of my apartment.”

“Oh, that’s fine.” But wait. Was he overstepping? He wasn’t trying to invite himself over to her house. She must have a home office, though, right? Her brow furrowed. Okay, she clearly didn’t want to meet at her place. “We can meet here. I was just thinking it might be good to get away from all this…” He gestured vaguely around the space. “Beige.”

She chuckled and reached for the business card he was still holding.

Her hand brushed against his as she did so. Before he could think better of it, he closed his hand around the tips of her icy fingers, struck with an almost involuntary impulse to warm her up. But as quickly as he did so, he pulled back because, hello, that was wildly inappropriate.

“Meeting at my place sounds great.” Her cheeks had gone pink. Even though her hands were cold, her face looked…warm. “I’ll text you.”

“Well!” Stacey clapped her hands together. “By my calculations, Jay, we only have forty-five minutes of open bar time before the program starts, so chop chop.”

Right. Stacey. The gala. He grabbed his keys and gestured for both women to precede him out the door. No one spoke as they were waiting for the elevator. When they got on, it was occupied by a woman named Annabelle. She worked in another company in the building, and they had a friendly elevator-and-parking-garage relationship.

“Looking good, Jay,” she teased, and he dipped his head in acknowledgement, a bit embarrassed. He’d had kind of a crush on Annabelle when he first met her, and she knew it.

Annabelle got off on another floor. “That was another of Jay’s ex-girlfriends,” Stacey said.

What? “That’s just plain not true.” What the hell was Stacey’s problem today? Had she gotten started on the open bar early? He turned to Elise. “I asked her out once. Years ago. She said no. And because I’m not an asshole, that was it. Now we chat in the elevator like normal people.” God. Why was this so embarrassing?

“Okay…” Elise looked uncomfortable as the elevator hit the ground floor. And maybe he was an asshole because why had he felt the need to give her that big disclaimer in the first place?

And why did his chest suddenly feel tight, like he was having trouble getting in a good breath? It must be the stupid bowtie. He concentrated on filling his lungs as he held the elevator door open for the women.

As they emerged onto the street, Elise turned to him. “I’ll text you to set up the meeting.”

“We’re going to hail a cab,” he said. “Can we drop you somewhere?”

“Thanks, but no. I’m meeting a friend who works downtown.”

And then she was gone. And he could breathe again.

He turned on Stacey once they were in the cab. “What the hell was all that?”

“What was what?” She took out a compact and examined her reflection in its mirror.

“You’re not my ex-girlfriend.”

“I am, though.”

“Stacey. I’ve known you for ten years. And we dated—not very successfully—for, like, two months in there near the beginning.”

Stacey smiled at her reflection. “I was testing the waters.”

“What does that mean?”

“I wanted to see what the reaction would be.”

“What the hell are you talking about? Whose reaction?”

“Yours. Hers. Either.” She turned to him. “You like this woman.”

He sighed and slumped against the seat. There was no use denying it. Stacey could sniff out laundered offshore bank accounts buried under mountains of decoys. She didn’t miss anything. “So? She’s way too young.”

“She looks like she’s thirty, tops.”

“Which is too young.”

“Jesus Christ, Jay, for a guy who’s generally one of the good ones, you can be such a misogynistic jerk sometimes.”

“Excuse me?” Jay would admit to his faults, but he was fairly certain misogyny wasn’t one of them. No, that was one of his father’s faults. And Jay was not his father.

“How arrogant do you have to be to just assume that every woman you meet under the age of forty-five wants kids? To just assign that stance to her? Some women—even young ones—don’t want kids. Don’t you think it’s better to find out before you just write off—”

“And what am I supposed to say? ‘Hello, I like you, but I don’t want kids. Might you, too, not want kids?’ That’s a great way to approach a first date.”

“Why not? It’s not like things are working out with your chosen demographic.”

He tried to object, but Stacey held up a hand. “Don’t interrupt.”

Resigned, he settled in to listen to her little speech.

“I mean, yes, you can date older women exclusively”—she gestured at herself—“but it’s not like you’ve found one of us to ride off into the sunset with.”

“But that’s just bad luck,” he said, though it was probably useless to argue. “That’s just life.” She raised her eyebrows at him. “Anyway,” he pushed on, still knowing it was pointless, “I’m closer to forty than thirty now. The gap is shrinking.” He made a face, going for humor. “Soon I’ll be able to date women my age.”

She was not amused. “Are you listening to yourself? Could you be any more inflexible?”

Okay, now he was getting annoyed. What business was it of hers who he chose to date? He didn’t want kids. So he made it a priority to avoid women who were likely to want them. Women who hadn’t yet aged out of being able to have them. There was nothing wrong with that. That wasn’t inflexibility. That was honesty.

But whatever. He wasn’t getting into it with Stacey. Arguing with a lawyer was never a good idea. So he just rolled his eyes and looked out the window.

“Or…” She drew out the word in overly dramatic fashion. “You could, you know, actually examine this whole rabid stance against having kids and stop letting it rule your life.”

“No.” He wasn’t going to bicker fruitlessly with her, but he couldn’t let that stand.

“You’re not your father.”

“What the hell, Stacey?”

“Or Cam’s father.”

He looked at her sharply. He’d been thinking, back in his office, that Stacey knew why he pushed himself so hard, why he maintained such discipline over his affairs. But knowing about that was different than talking about it. She’d gone too far.

And she knew it. “I’m sorry.” She laid a hand on his arm. “I’m not trying to be mean. I just sometimes think you’re too wrapped up in a certain vision of yourself. One that is…less fulfilling than it could be.”

The phrase abandon beige popped into his head.

“And honestly?” Stacey went on. “I know you won’t believe me, but I think you would be a great dad. I wish you would just give yourself a chance.”

Elise wondered if Jay had a thing for older women or if it was just a coincidence that his two ex-girlfriends—or ex-crushes, or whatever—she had happened to meet were both closer to fifty than forty.

And both stunningly beautiful.

And self-assured.

There had been no aspiring with either of those women.

They probably had proper offices that didn’t also double as their living rooms.

Their tiny living rooms.

But whatever. She smoothed down her shirt—she’d gone with a classic white blouse and a pair of jeans, given that the meeting was at her place and she didn’t want to look like she was trying super hard, even though she was, in fact, trying super, super hard—and reminded herself that it wasn’t a crime to be in the early phase of her career. Everybody started somewhere. Not that long ago, Jay and his partner had taken a risk by starting their own company, and she was doing the same thing.

She surveyed the space. The flowers on the coffee table would just get in the way of their work, so she moved them. Then she restacked the magazines and games she stored on the bottom level of the coffee table. She wanted everything to be perfect.

Even though she was expecting Jay, she jumped a little when the doorbell announced his presence. She lived on the third floor of a Victorian that had been converted to apartments, so she had to hoof it down to the front door to let him in.

“Hi,” he said, and oh. It was Friday at two o’clock, and they must have casual Fridays in his office, because he was dressed in jeans and a blue polo shirt. Nothing special, yet the blue made his impossible eyes even more impossible—they looked like they were going to twinkle right out of his skull. And, standing on her porch backlit by the sun, he looked like a Disney prince. He was so—

Okay, enough. No stroking clients, Elise.

“Come on up.” When she ushered him into her apartment, she said, “You didn’t look at my portfolio the other day, so you don’t know that I’m a new business owner. That’s why I work out of my place—I’m trying to keep the overhead low initially.”

She was cuing up a rehearsed speech for when he asked what she had done before she struck out on her own, but he just said, “That’s smart.”

Then, looking around, he said, “This place is amazing.”

She smiled. It was pretty amazing. She’d worked hard to make it so. Elise would admit to being a bit of a perfectionist. Her friends were always needling her about it like it was a bad thing, but she didn’t see anything wrong with having a vision and sticking to it. That’s how you ended up with results like this. Ironically, though, this was not how she would have designed a public-facing office. Her apartment was all exuberance and color, whereas in a place she’d meet with clients, she would probably have leaned more classic.

But she was stupidly gratified by his praise. It felt like he’d seen a glimpse of the real her, and that he approved.

He walked farther in and stopped in front of the sofa. “Hold on, though. Is this a beige sofa?” The appearance of those crow’s feet said he was teasing.

She bit back a smirk and picked up one of the brightly colored pillows from the sofa. “The judicious use of beige has its place. You couldn’t have all these crazy pillows on top of a sofa that was already a bonkers color.”

“I don’t know,” he teased. “I thought I signed up for Operation: Abandon Beige, and now I find out that the largest piece of furniture in my designer’s house is actually…” He made a show of sitting down on the sofa and sort of comically manspreading over it. “Beige?”

She threw the pillow at him.

And immediately regretted it. In addition to not stroking clients, throwing things at them was not a great idea.

But it was okay, because he cracked up and threw it back at her.

She caught it, suddenly breathless like she was catching some kind of…sports thing instead of a pillow. She wasn’t sporty enough to finish that metaphor properly. “You want something to drink before we get started? Coffee?”

“Nah, I’m done for the day—done for the week. I decided to make you my last meeting.”

She wasn’t sure what that had to do with declining coffee. Should she offer… “Wine?” She jokingly looked at her watch. “It is after noon.”

He looked at her for what felt like a beat too long—yet also not long enough—before saying, “I’d love a glass of wine.”

There was no reason for Jay to still be at Elise’s house three hours later. He’d loved everything she’d shown him and had approved it all. She clearly had enough creativity and talent in her little finger to create the best damn lobby in Toronto. If this had been any other designer, he would have given her carte blanche to do what she wanted. And that would have been a big item off his to-do list. Would have let him get back to his actual job. To micromanaging things he was actually qualified to micromanage.

But, damn, he wasn’t going to do that. Because watching Elise Maxwell work was such an enormous turn-on, it was ridiculous. She was clearly passionate about design. She had a vision for his office, and she was willing to fight for it. He liked that. A lot.

So he kept asking questions. Sometimes he took issue with some detail, just so he could watch her defend said detail even as she quite sincerely took what he was saying into account.

“I’m going to have to veto that one.” He sipped his third glass of wine as she showed him a wallpaper sample she was suggesting for the small lavatory inside his office. “Way too crazy.”

He was lying. It was not too crazy. The dark green horizontal stripe pattern was, in reality, just the right amount of crazy. She’d somehow picked up on his penchant for green without his having said anything.

Her brow furrowed slightly as she tilted her head and stared at the sample like she was seeing it for the first time. There was something about the wrinkling of the usually smooth skin on her forehead that made him shift in his seat.

“This”—she pulled out another sample, this one covered with tiny palm trees—“is too crazy. The stripes, by contrast, are classic with a little twist. Masculine yet fun.”

“Masculine isn’t usually fun?” he teased. But, damn, he needed to cut this shit out. He’d hired her to do a job. He couldn’t be getting all suggestive. He was not that kind of man.

He suddenly had a flash of his little brother Cameron’s dad “flirting” with the receptionist at the used car dealership he’d worked at. That’s what Angus had called it—flirting. Even though Jay had only been nine or ten at the time, he had been pretty sure the receptionist, who always responded to Angus’s overtures with pained, tight-lipped smiles, wouldn’t have called it that. And he knew his mother wouldn’t have, either, based on the fights he’d overheard over the years.

So, he could like Elise from afar—honestly, there was no way to make himself not do that—but anything more was a bad idea. He set down his wine. Time for cooler heads to prevail.

“Oh, no,” Elise said. “I misspoke. Masculine is fun.” The way she said fun, all low and sort of stretched out, suggested that maybe he wasn’t the only one having trouble keeping things strictly professional.

But still. She was working for him, and that meant he was morally prevented from hitting on her. End of story. So, time to lean on that legendary self-discipline Stacey had been haranguing him about the other day. And discipline wasn’t discipline unless it was hard, right? Even if he was interested in breaking his rule about not dating younger women—which he wasn’t—nothing could happen with Elise until she was done with the job.

Then she did that lip scraping thing again.

Shit. He’d been going to suggest a rousing round of Boggle after their work was done—it was visible under her glass coffee table, and he hadn’t played since he and Mrs. Compton from the trailer park used to battle it out. But that wasn’t a good idea. He had to get out of here. Now.

“I have to go.”

She blinked as he stood. “Okay.”

He’d been sitting on a sofa, and she on a chair next to him. As he came around toward the front door, they ended up doing one of those stupid back-and-forth dances where they were trying to get out of each other’s way but were in fact getting right in each other’s way. She giggled. That giggle lit up her face even as it sliced though his chest.

She laid her hands on his forearms, jokingly, making a production of moving him to one side and keeping him there so they could get past each other.

Her hands were freezing, just like they’d been the other day in his office. Maybe it was the fact that they weren’t in his office with Stacey watching like a hawk. Or maybe it was the wine. Something made him pull her hands up so they were in a prayer position and then enclose them in his.

“I told you I’m always cold,” she said apologetically.

He smiled. “It’s not a character flaw.”

Also, cold was not the word he would use for her, on balance.

All right, though. Down, boy. He was on his way out of here.

It was harder than it should have been to let go of her, but he did. She walked him down to the main door. He opened it to find an older man standing on the porch, hand raised like he was about to ring one of the doorbells.

“Daddy?” Jay hadn’t been looking at Elise, but the shock was audible in her voice. “What are you doing here?”

He could tell from the way she asked the question, from the way the bold confidence he loved—liked—about her had been replaced by hesitancy, and by the scowl on the man’s face, that this was not a warm father-daughter relationship.

“And who are you?” the man said to him. There was an edge to the question, a possessiveness, that got Jay’s hackles up.

Elise jumped in. “Jay Smith, this is my father, Charles Maxwell. Dad, Jay is a client.”

“Is that what they’re calling it these days?”

Whoa. Jay didn’t know what was going on here, but he knew he did not like it. He knew Charles Maxwell—or knew of him. He was one of the richest men in Canada, and the second-generation head of a boutique hedge fund company—and, by all accounts, a real asshole.

Which meant Elise came from serious money. So it was interesting that she was living in a small apartment in this not-great part of town. And that she was working out of said apartment because she was concerned with keeping overhead low.

Jay stuck out his hand. “Partner at Cohen & Smith.” His firm wasn’t huge, but it wasn’t nothing. Charles Maxwell would have heard of it. He made his tone completely flat so that when he said, “Pleasure to meet you, sir,” he could have been conveying the opposite sentiment. “Your daughter is extremely talented. She’s doing quite the job on our office. You must be proud.”

When Charles Maxwell only flared his nostrils, Elise said, “Can I help you with something, Dad?”

“Your mother insisted I drop by and give you this.” He held out a check. He wasn’t even subtle about it. It was like he was trying to embarrass her. Jay’s fingers flexed, almost of their own accord.

She held up her hands like he was robbing her. “I don’t want your money.”

“You wanted it six months ago when you gave me that ridiculous presentation about starting your business.”

“And that would have been a loan,” she said haughtily. “A loan I no longer need.”

“That’s not what your bank account says.”

“And how would you know that?”

“I have friends at Scotiabank.”

She gasped. “That was a gross invasion of privacy, not to mention illegal.”

All right. Jay had no doubt Elise Maxwell could hold her own against her villain of a father, but he couldn’t stand here and not say anything—that wasn’t the way his mama raised him. “Sir, I think you should leave.”

Charles Maxwell’s eyes slid over to him and then back to Elise. There was no warmth in them. His mind landed back on his recent conversation with Stacey. Jesus Christ, he would make a better father than this asshole.

Theoretically.

Elise’s father turned and left without a word, which Jay was thankful for, because he wasn’t sure it was a good idea to get into a fight—verbal or otherwise—over his interior designer’s honor. He would have done it in a heartbeat, but he was trying to be a responsible, professional client here. That’s why he was leaving in the first place. And he was pretty sure responsible, professional clients didn’t land punches on their designers’ fathers, no matter how much they deserved it.

“Oh my God,” she said after her father had cleared the porch steps and the walkway. “I’m so sorry you had to see that.”

Her voice was muffled. He turned to find her with her head in her hands, clearly mortified.

“Hey.” He moved instinctively to touch her but checked the impulse. “No problem. Believe me, I know shitty fathers.”

“Really?”

She looked up, so apparently relieved that he kept going. “Really. In fact, I had two of them, so I’m pretty sure I’ve got you beat.”

“Two!” Some of her spark was back. “Gay parents?”

“Nope. There was my father, and then when he left, there was my younger half-brother’s for a couple years, too. A bonus shitty dad, if you will.” But he didn’t want her to start feeling sorry for him, so he added, “Luckily, I have an amazing mother who more than made up for it.” Which was only sort of true. The amazing part was absolutely true, and she’d done her best, but Jay knew those early years with his dad, and then the time later with Cam’s dad, had fucked with him. There was no way for it not to have.

“Still. I’m so embarrassed.”

“Embarrassed? Why? I don’t know the whole story, but from where I’m standing, it sort of looks like your father doesn’t approve of you starting your design business, but you’re doing it anyway. That’s something to be proud of.”

He wanted to ask a million more questions. Why didn’t her father approve? What about the mother who had reportedly sent him with the check? How much money was in her bank account?

Why were her hands always so cold?

And what could he do to warm them up?

But no. None of those questions were anywhere near to being his business. So he smiled and said, “Have a good weekend, Elise. I’ll see you next week?”

She nodded. She was coming to the office next Tuesday, after work, to supervise the start of the flooring installation. He was stupidly excited.

Dangerously excited.

Once he’d rounded the corner and was out of sight of her house, he got out his phone and glanced at the time. Five-thirty. His brother, who was at home in Thunder Bay after a deployment as a reservist in the Canadian Forces, worked as a bartender. Hopefully he wouldn’t be at work yet.

“Hey!” Cameron picked up right away.

He wasn’t in the habit of calling his brother, so he was glad of the warm reception. Cam and Jay, though they’d been close when Cam was young, didn’t have the best relationship these days. But it sort of seemed that after a rough young adulthood, Cam was in the process of straightening himself out. He had joined the reserves. He was working a steady job while waiting for his next deployment. He had a girlfriend. Jay wasn’t a huge fan of Christie. She seemed kind of self-absorbed. But whatever. It wasn’t his place to have an opinion. He was just glad things seemed to be improving between Cam and him.

“What’s up, bro?” Cam asked.

“Do you think I would be a good father?” It was out before he could think better of it, but fuck it, that was what he wanted to know, wasn’t it?

“Oh my God, did you get someone knocked up?” Cam cracked up. “I thought that was my thing.” Cam had indeed gotten his high school girlfriend pregnant. Jay sometimes wondered about what had happened to her—and to the baby—after her parents hustled her out of town. But there was no way he could ask his brother that without totally alienating him.

“Ha. No. I’m just…wondering.”

Cam must have heard something in his tone, because he sobered right up. “You would make a great father.”

“Did you know that children who come from abusive situations are thirty to forty percent more likely to become abusers themselves?”

“I did not, but I’m not surprised. Shit that happens when you’re a kid can fuck you up.” He laughed, but this time there was no genuine mirth in it. “Look at me.” Before Jay could protest that Cam seemed to be getting his act together, he added, “Which is funny because of the two of us, you have way more cause to be a fuck up. They were both gone before I was born.”

They referred to Jay’s father, and to Cam’s father, Angus, who’d left when their mom was pregnant with Cam. After years of emotional abuse and manipulation, he’d hit her one day—in front of eleven-year-old Jay—and she’d finally sent him packing. Cam’s dad shoved their mom so hard that day that Jay had worried constantly about the fate of his unborn baby brother until the moment his mom came home from the hospital and placed him in Jay’s arms.

It was funny. He had one emblematic memory of each man, and in both cases, it was the day they left. Jay’s dad had not left in a fit of physical violence like Angus, but in some ways the wounds he had left ran deeper. That day was still crystal clear in Jay’s mind. His dad and mom had been fighting—more than usual. His dad had packed his shit into his truck, shrugging off his mom’s pleas to stay and try to work things out.

“What about Jay?” she’d said, once she’d finally accepted that he was going.

His dad had asked for a word with him alone, which his mom had granted.

Jay had tried so hard not to cry. Crying in front of his dad was never a good idea. It was a sure way to earn his disgust.

So he had been shocked when, despite the tears he could not hold back, his dad looked him in the eye and said, “Sorry, kid. It was inevitable. We Smiths are leavers. My dad left my mom. I guess it’s my turn now. So how do you want to play this? Do you want to pretend that we’re going to have a relationship? And I’ll see you one or two more times before I tap out? Or do you want to just call it here?”

“I want to just call it here,” he had responded. It had been a lie. Even though his dad was an asshole, he was…his dad. But, ironically, Jay had thought that was the answer that would make his dad think more highly of him.

Jesus, that was fucked up. As an adult, he could see just how much.

He consoled himself that he was ending that cycle. If you didn’t have kids, you couldn’t leave them. That’s what people like Stacey didn’t understand.

“Anyway,” Cam went on, pulling Jay from his terrible memories. “You’ve always said you don’t want kids. So what’s happening?”

“Nothing.”

It was the truth. Nothing was happening. What was the matter with him? Okay, he had a crush on a woman who was too young for him based on the rules he’d established for himself. But how had he gotten from that to this overwrought stroll down memory lane?

Even if he allowed something to happen between them—not now, but when she was done with the job—it was still nothing. If he allowed his attraction to Elise to go somewhere, it didn’t mean they were going to have kids.

He thought of Elise’s tendency to scrape her teeth against her lower lip.

He had been thinking about that a lot lately.

Maybe Stacey was right. Maybe he could relax his rule just a little. Just this once.

“You’ve met a girl!” Cam the mind reader said triumphantly, sounding every bit the annoying younger brother. “What’s her name?”

“Never mind.”

“Never mind? Hmm. Jay and Never Mind sitting in a tree… I don’t know, dude, it doesn’t sound too good. Maybe you should keep looking.”

Shit. Now that he had given the idea a few seconds of airtime in his mind, he couldn’t shake it.

He couldn’t shake her.

And suddenly, he didn’t even want to try anymore. He just wanted to…give in.

But not now. Not while she was still working for him. He was willing to bend one rule, but not that one. He wasn’t the kind of man who exploited his position of power like that. So he would have to wait. Exercise some discipline.

“Seriously, what’s her name?” Cam asked.

“I gotta go,” Jay said.

Because, yep, he needed his phone to text Elise and ask her how long she thought the job was going to take.