Page 10 of Ruthless In A Suit

Tonight, she’ll finally get to meet the man who bought it for me.

My stomach lurches at the thought of what she might say when she meets Levi for the first time.

I decided not to tell her or my father anything about our weekend on the Cape until Levi actually put a ring on it, but when I came home Sunday morning with the vintage sparkler on my left hand, there was no hiding it anymore.

“What is that,” Brenda asked the very second I walked into the door, and as if I wasn’t clear on what she was talking about, she pointed right at the ring.

She and Dad were parked in the living room watching a Lifetime movie and eating pancakes on plates balanced on their laps. Sunday morning is the only time Brenda will allow eating in the living room.

On top of being persnickety about self-help books and diet cookbooks and celebrity tabloids, she’s also a bit of a neat freak. Though that’s one aspect of her that I don’t mind too much.

Before she came along, my dad was a bit of a slob.

“If you guys could turn the television off for a second, I have some news.” I tried my hardest not to sound nervous, but I feared the quiver in my voice was turned up to eleven. I took a deep breath, and then decided to just rip off the proverbial Band-Aid. “This is going to come as a surprise to you, but I’ve actually been seeing Levi Maxon, and –“

“Levi Maxon, your boss?” Brenda practically screeched, and when I nodded, I heard her actually tsk tsk. “How can you be dating? You’ve only known him for a week.”

“Two weeks,” I corrected, as if that made a world of difference. And to me, it absolutely did. The time I’d spent with Levi, though short, felt like an eternity. It felt like my life had finally begun. And no one I’d ever known in my life had ever seemed to understand me as well as Levi did after those two weeks.

“So you’ve been dating your boss for two weeks, and now you’re engaged?” She turned to my father. “Larry, I don’t like this one bit.”

Before he could open his mouth, I charged on.

“Yes, Levi asked me to marry him, and I said yes. We haven’t set a date, as you’re right, this is all very sudden, but I’m very sure this is what I want to do.”

“Well of course you are,” she scoffed, crossing her arms over her chest. “Way to land a rich guy. Who’d say no to that?”

“That’s not what this is about,” I replied, trying to keep the anger out of my voice. But of course I was furious. How dare she question the feelings I had for Levi. She didn’t know him.

She barely knew me.

“Something isn’t right here,” Brenda said, directing her comment again to my dad, who had yet to say anything at all.

“Are you pregnant?” he finally asked when he managed to marshal the power of speech again, and that was when I realized that from the moment he’d seen the ring, he hadn’t looked me in the eye.

“No!” I cried, bringing my hands to my heart as if both trying to swear it to him and also guard the ring from that kind of accusation. “Yes, it’s sudden, and yes, it’s a little crazy, but it’s what’s happening. And I’d appreciate it if you could all get on board. And if you don’t … well, that’s just too bad.”

There was a long silence, where Brenda continued to look completely skeptical while my dad attempted to let the news sink in. After a few moments, he sighed and nodded.

“Well, when are we going to meet this fiancé of yours?”

And now the night is here.

Levi is coming into enemy territory and I hope and pray he’s ready for what he encounters.

I scan the living room one last time for any traces of Brenda’s tabloids or my dad’s collection of half-finished crossword puzzles (nearly all the filled in answers incorrect).

I’ve been a bundle of nerves for days since we scheduled this dinner. I begged Brenda to please let me make a restaurant reservation, or at least let me order takeout. But she’d insisted on cooking one of her low-carb, low-sugar, low-taste concoctions that she’d discovered on a website somewhere that claimed to make you healthy and thin and miserable.

I wasn’t worried about letting Levi see the house.

Sure, it was shabby. Sure, he’d probably never even stepped foot in a place like this, much less grew up in one, but this is who I am. If he can’t take that, he can’t take me. And I’ve never been a person who lamented her station in life.

And I definitely don’t care about Levi’s money.

But Brenda is another story, and Dad around Brenda is the same. I worried she’d be rude, and I worried he’d be nervous. I worried they’d make a bad impression. I worried Levi would meet them and think less of me. This is the man who raised me, after all, and the woman who he’d chosen to spend the rest of his life with.

What did that say about me?