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Cal chuckled. “Will had a variety of cheeses he wanted me to try one night. We ate cheese until we nearly popped.”
Her brother Will was in imports and exports, and he’d come across the most amazing goods, everything from wine and caviar to Persian rugs and porcelain teacups. When Will introduced a product, it nearly always became a new fad.
“He didn’t ask me to taste-test,” she groused.
“That’s because you’ve buried yourself in work since you joined the foundation.”
“Tell me more,” she said. “Tell me something else I don’t know about you.” Suddenly, she wanted to know everything. “Start with where you went to college.”
His face changed, an infinitesimal adjustment of his features that slightly flattened his expression. “Back East.”
“Where back East?”
He looked as though he didn’t want to tell her. Finally, however, he said, “Harvard.”
“Wow.” She raised her eyebrows. “That’s very impressive. And not at all surprising. Why don’t you seem happier about it?”
“I wanted to be a lawyer, following in my dad’s footsteps.” He huffed out a breath, as if it was painful to remember the past. “But I changed my mind and went to Harvard Business School instead.” He finally looked into her eyes. “It was the right move. I like what I’m doing. A lot. I like working with the Mavericks. And I like buying and selling companies on my own too.”
“We’ve never really talked about that,” she said. “I mean, I know that’s what you do, but we’re always so busy with the foundation when we’re together that sometimes I forget you even have another focus.”
“I’ve been doing it a long time,” he told her. “And I have a great team who’ve been executing my vision so well, for so many years, that I’m pretty peripheral at this point.”
“I doubt that,” she said with a smile. “You could never be peripheral to anything or anyone.”
Especially to her, she realized. Somewhere along the way, she didn’t even know how, Cal had become the very center of her universe. It was kind of scary. And kind of wonderful too.
“That’s why you fly all over the world?” she asked. “Because you’re checking in on all the companies you’re managing?”
“I wouldn’t say managing. More like advising. When we were in London, I visited a textiles manufacturer. They’ll show a profit by the end of the year, and the owner can buy me out if he wants. It’s a win-win for both of us. I buy only what people want to sell. Sometimes they don’t have capital, so I invest, help turn them around. Other times, people are just tired and want out. So I take the company off their hands.”
He didn’t do hostile takeovers. He made sure a merger helped both sides, that they both received benefits. And he was modest about it all too.
He leaned in to kiss the tip of her nose. “Now it’s my turn to ask you some questions.” Though she got the sense he was deliberately pivoting away from himself—the way he always did, she suddenly realized—she couldn’t help but laugh when he said, “How many hearts have you broken in high school, college, and after?”
“I never broke any hearts,” she said with a shake of her head.
“I find that impossible to believe.”
“It’s true. I guess it’s just that I never met anyone who measured up to my brothers and my dad. Everyone I’ve dated—” She shrugged. “—paled in comparison.” She looked up at the ceiling fan. “The guys in high school and college all seemed like such boys. And when I graduated, I wanted to concentrate on my career. I wanted to get on with my life.” She thought about Gary, her last date before she’d flown down to see Cal. “Even now, the men I’ve dated all seem so immature.”
“Your brothers and father are very difficult to measure up to,” Cal agreed.
But you do.
As soon as the thought popped into her head, she knew it was true. Regardless of what had come between them before now—specifically his repeated post-sex disappearing acts—she had no doubt whatsoever that Cal was a good man.
The question was why had he disappeared on her?
Their sex was so powerful, so all-consuming that it was clear he was attracted to her. So it wasn’t that he’d been trying to let her down easy.
He was genuinely over the moon about the baby, so it wasn’t that he didn’t want children.
And once he’d known she was pregnant, he’d become intent on persuading her to marry him, so he wasn’t marriage averse.
But why had he held back initially? And why, even now, did she feel as though he was still keeping a part of himself hidden from her?
Was it because he knew she was still weighing all the pros and cons? Or could it have something to do with his reaction when she’d asked him about his past, even something as innocuous as where he’d gone to college?
