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He held open the door for me and dropped his briefcase in the foyer. “Do you mind terribly if we order in tonight? I’m a bit tired.”
Now that we were standing together in familiar lighting, I noticed the dark hollows under his eyes, the slight pallor to his complexion. “Are you okay? You’re not coming down with that thing I had?”
“Oh, I’m fine. Just a little tired is all.” He smiled bravely, but I felt a cold chill of worry. Every time we got updates at work lately, it seemed like bad news disguised as good news. I realized he must have been under an enormous amount of stress over the past week.
I was determined to make the night as relaxing as possible for him. Maybe I’d bring up the meeting with Jake, but not tonight. Not when Neil looked so run down.
We ended up ordering pizza and cheap red wine and eating cross-legged on the bed in the media room.
“You said media room, I imagined like, a plasma screen and a rack of DVDs,” I said, looking up at the tray ceiling and recessed lighting. The bed we sat on was surrounded by movie-theatre-style seats, five behind us, two rows of two on either side.
“I had this done when Emma turned sixteen. She and her friends had sleepovers in here.” He gestured to the projector overhead. “Replaced that a few times since then, of course.”
“Oh, of course.” I snickered.
“Don’t make fun of me for having money,” he scolded. “You’d have more of it yourself, if you’d let me pay for the pizza.”
“No, I have to pay for some things.”
He took a swallow of wine. “I forgot to mention... Emma will be here tomorrow.”
“Oh.” Well, I’d thought I was feeling better from my stomach bug, now not so much. Maybe I was just getting an ulcer from stress. “Emma will be here...”
“Tomorrow,” he said slowly, the corner of his mouth twitching as he gauged my reaction. “But I’d like you to stay. You two had a disastrous first meeting, and I’d like you to be able to get along.”
I reached for the wine bottle and poured myself another glass. “Does she live here, or...”
“Part time. She travels a lot, for her job, organizing events and fundraisers all over. When she’s in town, I very graciously let her stay here, rent free, to prevent her from moving in with her horrible boyfriend.” He pushed the pizza box toward me and reclined on his side.
I shook my head. “That probably won’t work forever.”
“No, you’re right. But it has worked for the past year, so I’m ever hopeful.” He frowned up at the projection screen on the wall, where a happy blonde couple toured a restored farmhouse. “So, the entire premise of this program is that people go looking for houses to live in and reject the perfect ones outright because they’re too lazy to paint?”
“That’s about the gist of it.” I covered my mouth with my hand as I spoke, chewing up my last bite. I dropped the crust into the top of the box and grabbed one of the flimsy paper napkins to wipe my hands. “Well, Sir, I don’t know what you had in mind for the rest of the evening, but I think I broke your ‘don’t get tipsy’ rule.”
The glasses we’d been drinking from were bigger than the ones I had at home, and I was fairly certain I’d drunk most of the bottle on my own.
“Yes, I see that.” He reached up, taking my chin in his hand to tilt my face to one side, then the other. “You’re pink cheeked.”
“That’s not the wine. It’s anger at these morons.” I shrugged his hand off and gestured at the screen. “’We really liked the Cape Cod, and it was perfect for our needs, but it had waaaaaaaall paaaaaaper.’”
He laughed. “I can’t tell you how much I needed this tonight.”
“Bad TV?”
“You.” His smile slowly faded. “I find that when I’m with you, it’s impossible to worry about anything else.”
Oh, Neil. Maybe that was his problem. He was too happy to see the colossal mistakes he had made with Porteras. Or maybe he saw them, but like an oncoming train, couldn’t avoid them.
The problem wasn’t the changes he’d made. The problem was he’d made too many, too soon. I was starting to get a sense of what Rudy had referred to as Neil’s “forceful personality.” When he saw something he wanted, he went after it tenaciously. While that was admirable, it wasn’t always sensible.
We’d already had the “never ask me about my business” talk where this subject was concerned, and I so didn’t want to rehash that argument. Not when I was full of red wine and an alarming amount of pizza— which shouldn’t have been a turn on, but I challenge anyone to not be turned on sitting on a bed, even casually, with Neil Elwood.
