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“But?”
“But what? Nothing. I don’t know. She throws me off my game.” I buried my lips in Kennedy’s curls and breathed in her sweet scent. She rewarded me by laying her head on my chest and squeezing her arms around me. “I have to take a step back and just be polite. Reserved. Not flirtatious. You know, everything I’m not.”
“Give yourself a little more credit. You know how to be professional.”
“I do know how to do that.” I wouldn’t have gotten where I was if I didn’t.
“Eye on the prize, brother,” Sidney said, standing back up and smoothing down his pant legs. “You want to open your own restaurant, you can’t let some cute chef distract you.”
Sidney and Jasmine were really the only two people in my life who knew my ultimate goal was my own restaurant because well, my mother would have too many opinions, most of them not encouraging. Michael would be supportive, but I wasn’t sure he would believe me. My sister, Maeve, had a successful film career in L.A. and not a lot of time for her family. Most of my friends were in the industry and I wasn’t about to tell them because I didn’t want them mentioning it to the wrong person. So it felt a bit like a secret, and sometimes when it was discussed out loud, I wished it wasn’t. I wanted it now.
But I had to be patient, play the game. Make Isla happy, apparently. “What if she’s a really cute chef? Or more like a warrior woman chef?” I was joking, but maybe not totally.
“Oh, Sean,” Jasmine said.
It seemed to be one of her favorite phrases.
“You like her,” she added, eyeing me carefully.
“No, I don’t.” On that point, I was emphatic. I may have thought Isla was hot, but I didn’t like her. She was far too prickly to be likable. “Now go to dinner and have fun.”
For a second I was worried Jasmine was going to push it. She gave me a long look, but then she just shook her head and reached for her purse on the coffee table. She smiled at Sidney. “Let’s go.”
“Good luck,” he told me as he escorted her to the door.
I carried Kennedy and they both gave her a hug and a kiss and said goodbye and made her promise to be good. It was a routine that had to be honored, but it always wound Kennedy up in a negative way. She seemed to realize that if they thought it was a big deal to leave, she should think it was a big deal they had left. She fretted and whined and threw herself around in my arms, trying to grab at the doorknob after they had shut the door behind them. It was like trying to contain a hurricane.
“No!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. “Come back.”
“Kennedy, it’s okay, I’m right here. They’ll be back later.”
Her fist nailed me in the chest. It didn’t hurt but I realized she was determined to be miserable. She didn’t usually get this upset.
When the usual methods of tickling and tossing her up in the air failed to calm her down, I pulled out the big guns. My phone. I reached into my pocket and retrieved it, tightly gripping her with my left arm. “Do you want to see my phone?” I asked, holding it just out of reach of her.
She nodded and lunged for it.
“Then you have to calm down and be still. I don’t want you to drop it.”
She stopped wiggling. “Mine!” She held her hand out.
I wasn’t sure I should give in after that surly demand, but I wasn’t her father, so I figured I could get away with it. “Be careful with this,” I warned, and handed it over.
The little punk smiled and immediately held it up in front of me to unlock it with facial recognition. It was unnerving she knew how to do that. But it allowed me to carry her to the couch as she started swiping through my apps. I could guarantee she would find the app of kids’ games before I could even sit down.
But when I settled onto the couch with her on my lap, she said, “She’s pretty,” and showed me my phone.
Crap. She’d swiped right on some woman on a dating app. “Yep. Pretty.” I debated closing the app and risking a major meltdown, then decided I didn’t care if Kennedy swiped on every woman in Manhattan. It had been a long day and the pitch of her screams could actually shatter the eardrums of a dog. They hurt my ears like hell and I was too tense from Nico’s text to need more stress.
So she went to town on Tinder, swiping through profiles. Sometimes she paused to study a picture closer, but mostly she just flipped through them. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to who she paused on. Kennedy had switched directions and was going left now, which might save me from getting contacted by a dozen women I did not have time to meet at the moment. I wondered what the hell was going on inside her three-year-old head. What did she think she was looking at?
I was only casually paying attention.
But then I sat upright and grabbed the phone before she could swipe. Kennedy gave me a cry of irritation but I persisted and took the phone. “I know her,” I said.
It was Isla. I wouldn’t have pegged her as the dating app type, but that was stupid. Every single person in the world was on a dating app, whether they used it regularly or not. They were still out there, just in case. Just because.
“What’s her name?” Kennedy asked, sounding like she didn’t believe me.
