Snowbound in Her Boss's Bed, page 10
Noticeably shaking herself free from the storm’s hypnosis, she gestured to her near-cleared plate. “Everything was delicious. Amazing. Like a restaurant,” she said, finishing the last of her plate before leaning back with a champagne glass in her hand. “Thank you,” she added.
“I’m glad you enjoyed. I’ll pass the word along.”
“You have enough staff to cook a meal like this, but I never see them around,” she noted, looking around the room that held only the two of them.
The decor of the formal dining room was dominated by natural wood and large beams, and also like the rest of the space, he’d lightened the heavy impression of both by installing massively enlarged windows and utilizing white accents.
He shrugged with a smile. “There’s a lot of space and I only hire those who are efficient.”
“You like a lot of space, don’t you?” she asked, offhandedly thrusting them back into the dangerous territory of personal divulgence.
Did she mean to ask such personal questions?
He doubted it. She was just making conversation.
Of course, making conversation was where things had started yesterday, as well.
“LA sprawls, and yet there is no room,” he said, choosing his words carefully so as not to fall into the trap of divulgence. “I’m drawn to the contrast here. A sprawling natural environment in which human spaces are compact. Where they know their place.”
“‘Know their place,’ huh? That’s not a loaded statement or anything.”
Catching her eyes, he allowed himself a moment to wonder at their whiskey glow before he answered her, “I should say, where humans recall that they are subordinate to the forces and powers of nature. No man, no matter how wealthy or famous or powerful, how loved or cherished, is greater than all this around us.” He gestured toward the storm outside and the hundreds of thousands of acres of mountainous forest it hid. “Or really ever in control,” he added, appreciating the irony of that embedded in their current situation.
The storm was an exercise in humility.
As well as a reminder that he appreciated as a man with the world constantly at his fingertips.
Lack of control, however. Was a lesson he had been introduced to long ago, with the losses of his adopted family to the sea barely a decade past the loss of his birth family to a flash-flooded road before them.
Death was always a lesson in control.
In Los Angeles, it was too easy to think that a big dream, engineering and money was all that it took to switch things around—to give people the power over nature and life—but it simply wasn’t true.
Nothing was ever really in anyone’s control.
But Miri was a California girl, through and through.
Had she had a chance to learn that lesson yet?
He watched her face closely for what she might give away without words.
Her response disclosed little.
A half smile gracing her face, she said, “That’s actually rather profound. I was expecting it to be more of a ‘king of the mountain’ thing.”
Smiling, he shook his head. “The woman who raised me shudders in her grave at even the idea of that kind of arrogance. Among other things, she was a Bay Area hippie in the sixties. Respect for nature was her jam. I keep having to remind you that I haven’t always been one of the richest men in the world.”
Lifting an eyebrow, she challenged him. “It’s just too impossible to believe that you used to be normal.”
Raising his own brow to meet hers, he said, “Just a regular Joe, in every way.”
“I doubt that. You have born and bred bougie written all over you.”
Enjoying the spark that flashed in her eyes, he said, “If by bougie, you’re suggesting I went to good schools, I won’t deny it.”
She snorted. “I’m suggesting private schools and a brand-new car when you turned sixteen. You probably grew up spoiled and don’t even realize it.”
He laughed but a shadow crept into the sound.
He had been spoiled, and even—to some extent—in the ways that she thought.
But mostly he had been spoiled in love and affection.
For which he was grateful.
It wasn’t a claim a lot of two-time orphans could make.
But it did make it that much harder to remember the good times.
Some of that shadow crept into his voice, giving it a somber cadence despite his continued smile. “I’m very aware of my blessings,” he said, “but my car wasn’t brand-new. It was a ten-year-old Subaru my mom only agreed to let me get because of its safety ratings.”
At that, Miri let out a bray of laughter, the outburst and volume of it breaking apart his tension at remembering.
“I can’t picture you in a Subaru at all!”
“It was a wagon, to make matters worse,” he added, enjoying her surprise. “Imagine my sex appeal, showing up to my a.m. coding course skinny and driving a wood-paneled station wagon.”
She shook her head holding up a hand, refusing his pitiful image. “Stop! It’s too painful.”
“Exactly. All-American teen hood, in a single image.”
Laughing still, she gestured around her with an open palm. “Congratulations on how far you’ve come.”
Her words echoed his from the night before, when he’d learned about the fiancé that she had narrowly escaped becoming a virtual child bride to, and he appreciated that she could give as good as she took.
She was smart and funny and determined—everything his father had told him to look for in a woman—and it was a strange thing to realize that.
He had thought of his parents—their advice and love—more over the past twenty-four hours with Miri than he had in years.
He wondered why that was.
Was it just because it was Hanukkah, or was it because of her?
He was usually better at keeping the memories, and the associated longing they brought up in him, in the back of his mind.
And yet while they remained bittersweet, something about the way she drew them to the surface was gentle.
Nodding, he agreed. “How far, indeed.”
A shift went through her at his words, her eyes narrowing, focusing in on him in a way that set warnings off.
“You miss them a lot, don’t you? Your parents,” she said.
It did not occur to him to deny it, though he kept his nod short.
Of course he missed them. It would be foolish to claim otherwise, and it was normal to miss lost loved ones, but he was by no means haunted by his loss.
The evidence was all around.
He had not ceased to function, or abandoned his goals, or given up on life.
He had dealt with the pain and picked up the pieces, wiser because he had survived.
He had found a way to be happy again, even through a loneliness that was as impenetrable as the storm.
Everybody was lonely.
He had built a more-than-good life.
“I do,” he acknowledged. “The ache has faded over the years, though. And though it doesn’t make up for their loss, I have had the benefit of not having to explain myself to anyone for the past twenty or so years. But we’ve digressed. As financially transformative as my story is, it’s also boring.”
Miri laughed. “Not to those who haven’t figured out the formula yet.”
“Are you the type to look? I can give it to you for free. It’s simple. Hole up wherever you happen to be living for inordinate amounts of time and practice something that can make you rich. Also, have a source of independent financial stability and no one to answer to.”
Now she snorted outright. “At least you’re honest with yourself,” she said, laughing.
“Where else does honesty begin, if not with the self?” he challenged, catching her eye.
Swallowing, a faint blush dusting the apples of her cheeks, she nodded. “So wise. Honesty begins with admitting who we are.”
Her voice had gone slightly light and airy, her skin brightening, and he knew she was thinking about last night—and not in agony over it happening but the other kind of agony.
The kind that wished there had been more.
Licking his lips, a thrill lifting his pulse though he maintained a steady hand of control on himself, he said, “And what we want.”
Blinking and clearing her throat abruptly, Miri broke the stare first, reaching for her mimosa as she did so.
“It’s a good thing we want the same thing,” she said, quickly adding, “A good gala, I mean, that is.” Stumbling over her words for the first time in his acquaintance, her voice pitchy in its forced lightness, after taking a swig.
CHAPTER SIX
“YOU WOULDN’T HAPPEN to have a roomful of clothing in every size that rich people always seem to have in the movies, would you?” Miri asked wistfully, aware of the toothpaste stain on her shirt, as they exited the dining room.
“Unfortunately, no. Not here, at least,” he said. “At my Palisades home I retain a personal stylist on staff who generally does maintain a wardrobe for guests to choose from, but I don’t entertain here.”
At his Palisades home... He had a house in the Pacific Palisades?
Pacific Palisades wasn’t the wealthiest neighborhood in LA, but it was the most beautiful, in Miri’s opinion.
Keeping her reaction to a small choking laughing fit, Miri shook her head.
“It’s all right. I’m sure it will pass sometime between now and tomorrow. I can bear another day in old clothes.”
As if her words had sparked a memory, he said, “I can’t offer designer attire, but I do have a few less traditional options.”
Perking up a bit, Miri said, “Yes?”
“There is a near-endless supply of robes in the spa. I discovered them there on my last use.”
Laughing again, at both the idea that he had not known he owned a stockpile of robes as well as the thought of wearing nothing but a fluffy white robe, and said, “No, thank you, though I appreciate the offer. Somehow it feels wrong to wear solely robes through a blizzard...”
Not to mention the fact that the idea of wearing nothing but a spa robe around him set off the kinds of sensations she had been trying to forget about since last night.
Laughter warmed his eyes, his smile remaining, as he said, “Absolutely understandable, and in that case, my second option: I think I have some of my old things from high school that might fit you. It may take some unearthing, but they have a better chance than anything from my current wardrobe. I’ve filled out since then,” he added, a flirty light in his eye that Miri couldn’t help but respond to.
“I consider myself generally more filled out than a teenage boy, as well,” she said saucily, only partially joking, but his smile only grew.
“You’d be surprised what a height advantage can do to tailoring,” he said. “You’re a tall woman, but I’ve still got plenty of inches on you.”
She loved being tall and full-figured—had been praised and lauded for both through her development into a woman—but it often meant she stood eye to eye with the men around her in more than a metaphorical way.
But not with Benjamin.
As he pointed out, he had her by more than six inches.
Focusing in on him now, her attention was drawn to the fact that his height and broad chest were traits she admired in a man.
Not that she spent much time admiring men.
Through a combination of scholastic busyness and her insistence on moving at a snail’s pace romantically, dating had happened only sporadically amid her collecting of degrees, moving out on her own and finding a job.
It had just been too hard to get to know someone while juggling all of that, and she refused to be intimate with someone she didn’t feel like she knew.
And now that she had a job, she had a gala to save.
She figured she would turn her attention to the awkwardness of modern dating once her career was secure and she had a few years with the foundation under her belt.
At that point her life might have space for the process of coming to trust someone.
But it really didn’t now.
And it particularly did not with Benjamin—no matter how much of an ideal height he might be.
He was a man with no time, and she was a woman who required a serious investment of it—once she had some of her own to spare, that was.
As a man, Benjamin was distinctly off-limits.
But wearing his clothes when she needed a change of them was not the same thing as forgetting that.
It was merely a reasonable and pragmatic thing to do under the circumstances.
Facing him with a smile that was probably too big, she said, “If you think they will work. I would certainly appreciate it.”
With a nod and a smile that seemed equally forced and overly friendly—as well as an odd mismatch to the heated darkening in his eyes—he gestured in a new direction than they were walking down the hall.
Miri refused to read anything into the look.
You don’t have to worry about there being anything more than what’s on the surface between the two of you, she assured herself.
They were grown-ups who knew the difference between a heated moment and full-blown attraction.
Today, they weren’t anywhere near crossing any lines.
The room was bright and there was literal and appropriate distance between them—social and professional.
They weren’t sitting together in front of a fire drinking wine again.
It was different now.
What had happened was behind them and they could put it out of their minds.
All they had to worry about was when this storm was going to end.
The conviction became harder to hold on to, though, when he led her up some wooden stairs and into an attic where he handed her a forest-green hooded sweatshirt with gold lettering that he had unearthed from the third box he opened.
“From high school spirit week, senior year,” he said, his mind clearly in a different place than her own with regard to the sweatshirt. “I swear my mom kept everything,” he murmured.
Miri didn’t point out that it looked like he had kept everything that his mother had.
Instead, she took the hoodie gingerly, running her fingers along the golden letters sewn onto the breast, proudly declaring the wearer attended California Polytechnic State University.
Only one other time had another man offered her his hoodie, though in fairness, she wasn’t sure it was accurate to call her ex-fiancé a man.
He’d barely been nineteen when they’d broken up.
Back then, she had worn his sweatshirt proudly around town, around the house—around everywhere.
It had quickly become one of her most cherished garments.
Kneading Benjamin’s sweatshirt between her fingers, she recalled the texture and familiar thickness of a university pullover, but it wasn’t her ex-fiancé’s image that came to mind.
Instead, it was Benjamin’s, from the night before.
Dragging her mind once again away from the past, Miri responded. “She must have been proud.”
Continuing to search through boxes in the climate-controlled attic storage space he had taken her to, he nodded without looking up from what he was doing.
“They were both very proud. Perhaps too proud, ultimately.”
The last bit sounded like an afterthought, and yet it carried a heaviness that made it seem ominous to her.
“Their pride was a lot of pressure?” she guessed, unable to stop the part of her that always wanted to take care of everything.
This time, he paused with the boxes, looking up at her as if truly startled out of the task at hand for the first time in their conversation. With a brief shake of his head, he said quietly, “No. Their pride was a wonderful mantle. Unfortunately, it had terrible consequences. They died when the yacht they’d chartered to celebrate my graduation capsized.”
Squeezing the sweatshirt to her chest, Miri grimaced. “That’s awful. I’m so sorry.”
His expression shuttered at her words, and he shrugged. “Bad luck. But it never would have happened if they’d been a little less proud.”
“I don’t think—” she started to argue, to deny that correlation equated to causation in this case, but seeing his face harden even as she spoke, she realized it was a useless exercise—and probably foolish.
Who was she to know better than him?
She didn’t know him.
They weren’t friends.
She just worked for him.
And kissed him.
But that didn’t make her anything to him or give her the right to push.
“That’s a hard way to lose a family.”
There was no pity in her words this time, just acknowledgment of the injustice of it.
To lose one’s parents in such a horrible accident, and on the eve of college—it wasn’t fair, for any young person.
His shoulders relaxed, the line of tension that had stiffened his spine curving back into a natural S.
He smiled at her and it felt like there was respect in that smile.
But had she done the right thing or simply the easy thing by not pushing back against such an obviously erroneous conclusion?
It doesn’t matter, she reminded herself.
It wasn’t her place to challenge his long-held notions.
He returned to hunting through the boxes for something for her to wear over her legs, and she pushed the question from her mind.
It wasn’t her business.
Triumphantly, he held up a pair of sweatpants in the same forest green as the sweatshirt she held.
Between the hoodie and the sweatpants, her attire was going to be a long way from professional, but putting on clothes that didn’t have dried toothpaste on them would still feel like a small miracle.
