CHAPTER 6
LANA
I had my driver park in front of the address Joe had texted me. It was a single-family home in an average neighborhood out in the suburbs of Portland. It was close enough to walk to the Java Beans location that Joe had previously been working at. However, the commute to the office building, if he didn’t have a car, had to be hellish. An hour at least, each way, on public transportation.
I texted him that I was here and a minute later, Joe and his sister came out of the house.
He was dressed much like he’d been yesterday—suit and tie, gorgeous, drool-worthy. He also carried a small duffle bag, I guess just in case this trip took longer than a day, which he held close against his chest.
His sister had dark curly hair like him, the same blue eyes, rimmed in several circles of eyeliner and mascara, and she was dressed—surprisingly—decent in a blouse and skirt. I wondered if Joe had made her put on something business appropriate.
Joe knocked on my window and I opened the door. “You have a driver,” he commented, speaking to me while still standing outside. “You made it sound like you’d be driving.”
“Sometimes I hire a company, that way I can work while I travel. Is that a problem?”
“No. I just wasn’t expecting it. This is Kitty— or Kathrine. My sister.”
Kitty nodded in my direction before slipping headphones on over her ears. “I’ll sit up front,” she said, then she reached for the door, yanked it open, and climbed into the passenger seat.
Opening the back door wider for Joe, I scooted over to the other side of the backseat, leaving plenty of room for him to climb in beside me. He did just that, with his bag still clutched tightly against his chest. He let out a sigh as he put on his seatbelt.
“Want to put that in the trunk?”
The bag didn’t move from his chest. “No.”
Okay then. “Let’s get going then.”
Little was said for the first hour of the car ride. Kitty was quiet in the front seat, listening to her music, being just as Joe said she would—simply another body in the car. I worked on my laptop while Joe looked out the window, saying very little. Eventually he relaxed and set his duffle bag in the space between us on the seat.
Around the two-hour mark, after battling some nausea from looking at my computer too much, I gave up trying to work. Working while riding just wasn’t happening for me today.
I glanced over at Joe. One of his legs was bouncing up and down incessantly, while his hand moved over his face, rubbing at where he’d shaved, rubbing it raw actually.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Huh?” He glanced in my direction, not fully looking at me. “Fine.”
Kitty turned around in her seat. ‘Kitty’ was not an appropriate nickname for this girl, maybe ‘lioness’ or ‘alley cat’ or anything fiercer than a simple kitten. Apparently, she hadn’t been listening to her music at all because she’d heard me speak to her brother. “Joe doesn’t do great on long car trips. It’s his ADHD. He’s like a four-year-old. He can’t sit still and gets bored easily.”
“Thanks for that, Kitty,” Joe said to her, gritting his teeth. “I’m fine. I know how to ride in a car.”
She rolled her eyes at him. Then she turned around in her seat, headphones going back in place.
“I guess I’ve never known an adult with ADHD before,” I commented, trying to be polite, yet secretly wanting more information from him.
“Yes, you have.” Joe looked at me straight on, and his stare had a way of slicing through me. “You just don’t know that you have. It’s more common than you think. Most people just hide it better than I do. Usually I’m good at hiding it, too. I’m just out of sorts lately.” He glanced away.
I was the person putting him out of sorts. This new job was putting him out of sorts. It occurred to me that never once had I stopped and asked him if he even wanted this job. I’d simply dropped it into his lap.
I thought about how he’d quit law school with only a semester left. A person whose only concern was making lots of money didn’t do something like that—quit to become a barista—so what was his motivation for wanting this job now?
“Don’t worry about hiding it or whatever with me,” I told him. He looked back at me and I nearly lost my nerve as I spoke. But he needed to hear this. I needed to say it. “I didn’t hire you because you fit into some box. I hired you because you’re an outside-the-box type of a person. If I had an office full of Nancy’s, I’d still be running the original Java Beans out of my parents’ backyard shed.”
He smiled. For the first time, I made him smile. And the small gesture gripped at my insides.
“No offense to Nancy,” I added, feeling a little shy now. “She’s really good at her job. She makes phone calls and lunch runs better than any assistant I’ve ever had.”
He laughed out loud. I made him laugh. Then he picked up his bag and put it on his lap. What was with him and that damn bag? But the bag went forgotten as he gently said, “I’m so far outside the fucking box.”
“I noticed.”
“You might be a little outside-the-box yourself, Lana.”
I caught my breath. This man was going to destroy me. One kind word from him and the air suddenly felt way too hot.
I started talking work stuff, just to change the subject, telling Joe about the three different locations we’d be visiting today, and the pros and cons of each. He didn’t know it, but I was kind of testing him with this. I’d already made up my mind about which of the three would be best for a future Java Beans site. I wanted to see if Joe would come to the same conclusion. Once the location was decided, we’d be meeting with our contractor later today.
We arrived at the first spot.
Then the second.
Then ultimately the third.
Kitty got out of the car at each stop too, never saying much, but tagging along with Joe. Part of me wished she’d stay in the car, at least initially, but by the end of the third stop, I found myself wondering what her opinion of the three locations were. I mean, the girl was hella smart, edgy, and probably right smack dab in the middle of my company’s key demographic. She wasn’t edgy and tattooed because she’d been raised by a rough family, growing up on the streets, having some traumatic childhood, or something like that. No, I’d long ago determined that she and Joe came from money, big money, and that they’d probably both had a rebellious streak against their parents. Hell, maybe they were both still in the middle of their rebellious phase.
“What do you think, Joe?”
We stood in the empty construction site of a new development. This was the third location we’d seen today and the one that I wanted. New development. Growing area. Right next to a grocery store. Now that I’d seen it, even though the space was a little smaller than I had expected in person, I wanted it.
Joe smirked at me. “Is this a trick question? I know you like this place, Lana, so why ask my opinion at all?”
Kitty smacked on a piece of gum, her eyes darting between me and Joe, with a big fat smile on her face. She seemed to particularly like when Joe challenged me as if it were fun for her to watch. Hell, I kind of liked it when he challenged me, too. Though I’d never let him know that.
“It’s not a trick question. You’re going to have to find these locations and make these decisions on your own, me with the final say of course, but the more you can do without me, the better.”
He paced in a full circle. The building we stood in was half-finished, with no air conditioning, and I could see the little beads of sweat forming on Joe’s forehead. But he wasn’t sweating because of me.
“Number three is nice,” he said. “New construction. New area. The grocery store next door will bring in tons of people. But that particular grocery chain, I know for certain that they make their own coffee in house, probably for a fraction of your prices, and it’s pretty good. Not to mention the rent on this place, since it’s new and all, is way too damn high. So, final answer, Ms. Bitterman, is location number one.”
Kitty grinned liked Joe had just told me to shove number three up my ass. In a way, he kind of had.
I widened my eyes at him. He was so sure of himself. “Tell me why you like number one.”
“Okay.” He stopped pacing. “It’s in an older part of town but still a popular area. The rent is low—”
I shook my head. “Low rent tends to be for a reason. But keep going.”
“I like that it’s big. I like that you could make it a drive-thru location.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” I had to stop him right there. “There was never any mention of drive-thru option today.”
He took a step toward me. “No, but there should have been. I’m willing to bet a drive-thru location in that spot would outsell any one of your other stores ten to one.”
My heart raced a little harder. This was a step I hadn’t made with my business yet. It was something I wasn’t fully ready to consider, a leap I wasn’t sure we were ready for. All the stores followed a similar design and layout. A drive-thru would be like reinventing the wheel.
I swallowed hard.
Joe was making me incredibly nervous. He stepped even closer. My skin felt prickly and my heart started to run rampant.
“Number three, even with its high rent, is the safe option. Number one is riskier, but risks have the highest rewards.” His voice changed to its gentler tone. “Number one, Lana,” he pressed, “trust me.”
I looked over to Kitty because I couldn’t really take the intensity of his eyes on me a second longer. “What do you think, Kitty?”
“I think . . . that Joe is never wrong. Like, literally, he’s never been wrong in his life. The guy was doing multiplication as a kindergartener. So,” she shrugged, “I’d trust him.”
“But you’re biased as his sister.”
She huffed at me, “Whatever.” She went straight into defensive mode. “Don’t ask me if you don’t want my opinion, then. Don’t ask Joe’s if you don’t want his, either.”
“No, that’s where you’re wrong.” I stared at Joe as I answered her. “I want his opinion. It’s these types of opinions that help a business grow. But ultimately, the decisions will always be mine.” I sucked in a deep breath. I’d made up my mind. “Okay. Let’s do number one. Let’s do the drive-thru.” I felt a little giddy as I said the words. I was taking a leap of faith on him, and the only other person I’d ever really taken a leap of faith on had burned me. This was kind of a big deal for me. But I also liked knowing he . . . had my back. Those were the exact words he’d said to me yesterday. I have your back. It was kind of a random thing to say, especially coming from Joe, but I also couldn’t stop thinking about how he’d said it.
“Yes,” Kitty hissed as if my decision had been her own personal victory.
If Joe felt the same, he held a much better poker face. He looked as if either decision would have had the same exact effect on him, which was zero.
I took my phone out of my pocket. “My contractor is waiting on my call. I’ll get him to meet us at the first location.”
“Alright, let’s do this thing,” Kitty hollered, fist-pumping the air, and she raced off and out of the building.
Joe was slower to move, lingering behind with me. “If nothing else, thanks for distracting Kitty today. Thanks for including her and being nice to her. It might not seem like it, but she’s going through hell today.”
I wasn’t used to compliments, especially from men who looked like Joe. I didn’t know how to respond, so I shrugged off his words. “I’m not that altruistic,” I told him. I nodded off toward the door where Kitty had disappeared. “Kitty’s in our key demographic. Potential customer. I might be tough with my employees, but to everyone else, I try to be slightly less of a bitch.”
He chuckled. “You’re not a bitch, Lana.” At some point he’d taken the final step in my direction. He stood close enough to touch. And maybe it was the fact that we were in a stuffy box of a building, with no air circulating, on one of the hottest days of the year, but my cheeks and my entire body felt flushed. If he stared at me like that—like I wasn’t his boss—another second longer, I might just keel over onto the floor.
He reached out his hand as if he were about to touch my face, and I sucked in a deep breath, preparing for it. God, how wonderful it must feel to be touched by this man. But he immediately stopped himself and retracted. I wasn’t even sure if I’d just imaged it all. He cleared his throat, taking a step backward. “Didn’t you have a phone call to make?”
“Um . . ..” I blinked, focusing my stare on the phone in my hand. “Yes. I did. I’ll be just one minute.”
“I’ll meet you in the car, then.”
“Okay.”
He left me alone.
I’d like to say I was relieved nothing had just happened between us, but that wasn’t true. I felt a wave of disappointment.