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“Everybody in?” she asked.
And when they nodded, and smiled, and Bea cheered, Allie had to push the clipboard into her stomach again and hang on tight to keep from floating away.
—
After Allie finished her announcements, everyone lingered at their tables, eating and talking. Winston found himself drifting away from the crowd to inspect the restaurant more closely.
Allie was right—it was much too small, obviously a space meant to be a sandwich counter, into which Ben had shoehorned a full-service restaurant serving three meals a day.
He admired the ambition, but there were better options for this space, particularly if the food Ben had prepared was a fair sample of his talents.
Winston edged around a table, in search of a better view of the kitchen, and bumped into an occupied chair. “I’m terribly sorry.”
“Remind me who you are again?”
Allie’s father. Bugger. He extended a hand, and Bill enclosed it in an intimidatingly powerful grip. They bobbed their arms up and down a few times, a ritual that Winston had always found faintly ridiculous.
“Winston Chamberlain. I’m a friend of your daughter’s.”
“Which daughter?”
“Oh, of course. Of Allie’s. She’s been staying with me for the week.”
“And who are those people, there?”
“That’s my brother, Neville, and his partner, Cath. The woman in the chair is my personal assistant, Chasity.”
“The one over there, with the colored hair?”
“That’s my daughter, Beatrice.”
“She’s a hoot.”
“Yes. She is, rather. Yours, too. Allie, I mean. She’s…” Bill’s eyes narrowed as Winston searched for a word to describe Allie that would capture her without offending her father. He gave up and settled for, “I’m sure you’re very proud of her.”
Bill settled back in his chair, his visual inspection of Winston still uncomfortably acute. “For what, exactly, do you think I should be proud of her?”
“Ah. Well. Her success in business, I suppose, and her intelligence, her wit, her great personal vivacity, her sense of style, her joie de vivre, her—”
“What was that last one?”
He had managed to annoy Allie’s father. “Sorry, it’s French. It means her enjoyment of life, her exuberance.”
“Mm-hm. So what did you say you do, Winston?”
And for the next ten minutes, Winston discovered that reaching middle age, experiencing divorce, raising a daughter—none of these things made it a titch less excruciating to present oneself to the father of the woman one had fallen in love with.
He barely escaped with his life.
It was Allie who rescued him, pulling him away from the table with breezy words to her father that he couldn’t recall afterward, so distinct was the sensation of her hand on his elbow.
“I can’t eat this food,” she said under her breath. “I love Ben, and I think he’s probably some kind of genius, but you want to go get a hot dog from that stand by your office? I’m starving. We can make Jean drive us.”
“We’d be consigning Neville and Cath to ride back on the train with Chasity and Bea.”
“I already talked to them. They say they’ll somehow get through it without your presence. Come on.”
She grabbed her bag off a table and led him through the door Jean was already holding open. Winston began to feel he’d been maneuvered into an elaborate sort of escape—a sensation he associated quite strongly with Allie, and particularly with the night they’d met at Pulvermacher’s.
