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Pierce gave a crack of laughter. He came around the table, kissed her hair and sat her down on one of the chairs. “I once dated a model who would have spent double that on a handbag and if I’d said ‘go to town,’ she’d have done just that and spent a hundred grand or more. Did you get enough stuff? If you forgot anything, don’t worry, that credit card isn’t going anywhere.”
“We’re sort of living on the edge, right? On the run. I figured I’d need low maintenance stuff and not too much of it. So what’s all this?”
The table was covered with food, steaming and smelling delicious. She was famished. The last meal had been almost twenty-four hours ago, and a lot had happened in the meantime. Harrison had an amazing collection of serving plates—colorful Fiestaware that she knew cost a fortune. The plates were heaped. The plates themselves were colorful, the food was colorful, and it was a delight for all the senses. And a real contrast to her usual meals, particularly over the past days as she puzzled out the video that had come in.
Her food was usually as bland-looking as her plates, all mismatched because it had been easier to rent a furnished apartment, and her landlord had furnished it with castoffs. Lunch was in the canteen and dinner meals were ramen or yogurt or oatmeal or tired-looking salads that came in a bag. Half the time, she wasn’t even aware of what she was eating.
This was nothing like that. This was life itself, color and variety served by the best-looking man she’d ever seen. She was on the run, but life was definitely looking up.
Her stomach, which had been closed, suddenly opened up.Yawnedopen, in fact. She was ravenously hungry and had an appetite for everything. Yes, she was on the run and war loomed. But that was all outside the door of this ridiculously expensive apartment. It was as if her life had been this dreary indie movie and all of a sudden it became a Bollywood extravaganza.
“Harrison is amazing.” Pierce elected to sit next to her and started loading a plate for her. “Let me know if you don’t like something.”
“So far, everything looks delicious. Amazing how?”
“Well, he’s super organized, for one. I’m organized, but mostly about my gear, definitely not my food. He has two freezers and a list of everything in them, the date he froze it, and if it came from a restaurant, which one. And they are organized by type of food. Meat, fish, pasta, and rice dishes, breads, vegetables, sweets. Totally OCD, but it makes it easy to put together a meal.”
“A feast, you mean,” Riley said, looking over the table and then at her plate. “So what do we have here? Chicken breasts and…”
Pierce pointed out the items. “Linguine al pesto, chicken breasts Marsala, sweet potato matchstick fries, a slice of eggplant parmesan, slice of zucchini frittata, rosemary rice balls and sourdough garlic bread. He has a lot of cuisines, but I chose mainly Italian because you liked Italian yesterday, and anyway you can’t go wrong with Italian food. Right?”
Riley nodded enthusiastically. She couldn’t speak because her mouth was full of pasta. Delicious. She pointed at Pierce’s plate and made a questioning sound.
“What’s this, you’re asking? Pumpkin risotto. To die for. Here.” He held out a forkful of fragrant yellow rice and brought it to her mouth. She swallowed her pasta and opened her mouth and he tipped it in perfectly. Oh, man. So delicate and tasty.
“You’re good at spooning food in people’s mouths.”
His rolled his eyes. “I should be, considering I have twenty-two nieces and nephews and I’ve fed every single one of them. Messy little beasts.” He grinned.
Riley’s jaw dropped. “Twenty-two nieces and nephews? How do you keep them all straight? And how many siblings do you have?”
“Easily enough, and only two, Moira and Brendan. But I have a lot of cousins, and I consider their children like the kids of siblings. Each little rug rat has his or her own personality on steroids, so it’s not hard to remember their names, believe me.” He narrowed his eyes at her. “You have no nieces or nephews?”
“No.” Riley averted her eyes. In the world she lived in, families were never a factor. Didn’t even exist, everyone was like a solitary molecule in space. She had no idea if any of her colleagues had siblings, or even parents. They could all have been hatched from eggs, as far as she knew. It was only when she went out into the world that she realized how strange her own world was.
“Parents?”
Oh God. Pierce was insisting. This is where she usually lied, changed the subject or broke it off. Went somewhere else. But there was nowhere for her to go. She was tied to Pierce, but beyond that, she didn’t want to lie to him or break off something great that had just begun.
Bite the bullet. The only thing she could do.
“Okay, um. Full disclosure. I come from a dysfunctional background, though I’m not dysfunctional myself. Or, at least I don’t think I am. My mom was a wild child, got into drugs and alcohol early and never really got out. I was brought up by my grandmother, who also left me a small inheritance. Enough for me to study without worrying too much, and I had scholarships. She died when I was eighteen. My mom died while I was on a study program in Paris. No one told me because they didn’t know she had a daughter. She’d been dead for six months before I found out.”
She watched him as she talked. The few people she’d told had cycled through the whole range of emotions—horror, pity, pain. Pierce kept his expression neutral, but his eyes were warm, as were his hands as he took her hands in his.
“I’m really sorry that happened to you. What about your father?”
She sighed. “That’s another sad tale. My mother got pregnant from a one- night stand. She was in one of her rare sober periods and lived with her mother, my grandmother, who kept a close eye on her. My grandmother finally told me his name, and so I contacted him. A lawyer who lived on the West Coast, near Los Angeles. I called him. He seemed friendly enough, and I flew out to meet him. I remember—” She closed her eyes and for the very first time smiled at the memory. “I remember being so very excited. Family. I was going to find my family. I researched him and he’d been a musician before going to law school in his late twenties. He was a fairly well-known lawyer. At the time it seemed the most stable, desirable job in the world, and just the idea made me feel … safe I guess.” She huffed a laugh. “I must have been the only person in the world who felt safe with a lawyer.”
He was watching her carefully, listening to her carefully, soaking up her story through every sense. Through touching her, too, his hands warm and strong.
“He met me at the airport, took me out to dinner at a nice place.” Riley stopped, remembering that evening so very clearly. The electric excitement, the feeling of having turned a page, of entering into the human family with a family of her own. The nice restaurant, her gratitude that her grandmother had insisted on table etiquette so she knew she wasn’t embarrassing herself. The light chitchat. Her father had steered way clear of talking about anything emotional. He didn’t blink when Riley told him her mother had passed away. “When we finished dinner, he drove me to my hotel. I was waiting for him to mention an appointment for the next day. Crazily, in my head, I was exploring my options for moving out West. I had a number of scholarship offers, including UC Berkley. I could have and definitely would have transferred to California to be near my only family member. He leaned over, kissed my forehead and said he couldn’t drive me to the airport the next day because he had an important business meeting and was leaving for a work trip to Seattle the day after.”
Riley probed the memory, like you probe a sore tooth. It had taken years before she could think about that evening without a sharp spasm of unbearable pain. She probed again but the intense pain was gone. It was like recalling a long-ago car accident.
“Let me guess,” Pierce said. “He wasn’t interested in continuing the relationship.”
“That’s putting it mildly. He was astonished that I thought he would care. When I said—I said I could wait for him to return, he just looked at me blankly and said,Why would you do that? He drove off and I haven’t seen or heard from him since.”
