by Penny Reid
He accepted the spoon and arched an eyebrow as he peered into the tub. “I don’t know, are you sure it’s chocolatey enough?”
“Mmmm, you’re right,” she said, excavating a chunk of frozen fudge. “You’d think they could have found a way to squeeze a little more chocolate in here.”
“It’s like they’re not even trying,” he agreed around a mouthful of ice cream.
Between the two of them, they managed to polish off the whole container in the space of a few minutes.
“Feel better?” Melody leaned forward to set the empty tub on the coffee table.
“Actually, I kind of have a stomachache now,” he said, rubbing his belly.
“Me too,” she admitted, making a face. She pulled her legs up underneath her and rested her head against the back of the couch.
“So much for my miracle ice cream cure.” Jeremy yawned and stretched his arms out in front of him. “Shit, it’s late,” he said, catching a glimpse of his watch. He sat up and reached into his pocket for his phone. “I’ll call a car and get out of your hair.”
“And go where, exactly?”
“Back to my car,” he said, swiping his thumb across the screen. Which wasn’t an answer to her question.
“And then what? Back home to face your mother?”
The hand holding the phone stilled.
“That’s what I thought.” Melody took his phone out of his hand. “Stay here tonight. You can have the couch.”
Jeremy bowed his head, then turned to look at her with an expression that was heartbreakingly vulnerable. “You don’t have to do that.”
“I know,” she said. “I want to.”
“Thank you.” He exhaled a long breath. “I’m just—I’m so tired.”
She got to her feet. “Stay here. I’ll find you a pillow and a blanket.”
By the time she came back with the linens, Jeremy had fallen asleep, curled up on his side with one hand tucked under his chin. He looked younger with all the tension in his face eased away—more like the carefree college boy she’d met in Boston three years ago. Only with a much better haircut, thank god.
He didn’t even stir when she draped the blanket over him.
“Sweet dreams,” she whispered before turning out the lights.
When Melody woke in the morning, Jeremy was gone. In his place was a note scrawled on the back of a grocery receipt:
Called a cab. Thanks for the ice cream and company. Next time’s on me. —J
While she ate her breakfast of stale scones, Melody thought about the fact that Jeremy Sauer—billionaire bachelor and fixture of the Los Angeles social scene—didn’t actually have that many friends. Not real friends, anyway. Not the kind of friends who were good for more than just drinking and partying. The kind you could confess your fears and weaknesses to. Friends who actually came through for you when you needed them.
Apparently, that was something they had in common. Which was why she called him later that day to see how he was doing.
He sounded happy to hear from her. In fact, he sounded pretty happy in general, which was a dramatic improvement.
“Did you work things out with your mom?” she asked.
“In a manner of speaking. In my family, we don’t really talk things out so much as mutually agree to a détente.”
“That sounds cathartic.”
He made a grunting sound. “Catharsis isn’t in my mother’s playbook. Too messy and undignified. But she’s agreed to come clean to Hannah, so that’s something. She’s telling her tonight. Should make for a fun family dinner.”
Melody twisted the hem of her shirt around her finger. Even imagining it made her feel anxious for him. “How do you think Hannah will take it?”
“I don’t know, honestly. She likes Geoffrey a lot. And she was younger than me when we lost Dad. She doesn’t remember him as well as I do. Maybe she’ll be fine with it.” He sighed like he was trying to resign himself to it. “I probably overreacted. I always knew my parents’ marriage wasn’t exactly a storybook. And my father’s been gone for three years. It’s not fair to expect my mother to play the grieving widow forever.”
Melody pressed the phone to her ear. “I think you’re allowed to be upset that she hid it from you for so long.” Her shirt was twisted so tight, her finger was going numb. “Although, I guess I can understand why she’d be afraid to tell you.”
He let out an unsteady breath. “I feel like I’ve been handling a lot of things badly lately.”
“In your defense, you’ve had a lot to handle.” Melody doubted she’d be doing even half as well under the circumstances.
“I’m sorry I made you miss your book club last night. Thank you for coming to get me.”
“That’s what friends are for, right?” She tried to make the words sound breezy, like it was just an expression. Like it didn’t mean anything.
“Is that what we are? Friends?” The way he said it didn’t sound breezy at all. He sounded earnest. Like it meant something real.
Melody squeezed the phone. “I mean, at this point, I don’t think there’s any way of avoiding it.”
He laughed softly. “No, I guess not.”
A few days later, Jeremy came to Melody’s office. He just appeared in the doorway and stood there, silently waiting for her to acknowledge him.
She nearly jumped out of her skin when she finally noticed him.
“Jesus,” she muttered, pressing her hand to her chest. “I didn’t see you lurking there.”
“I’m not lurking. I’m standing here right in plain sight.” His shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows, and there were veins running down his forearms. Melody was pretty sure that meant he worked out a lot. He definitely looked like someone who worked out a lot.
She realized she was staring and lowered her eyes, feeling her face grow warm. “You could have said hi or something to get my attention.”
“I didn’t want to startle you.”
“That didn’t work out so well, did it?”
He shifted his weight to lean against the doorframe, grinning. “No. Next time I’ll say hi.”
Next time? She wasn’t even sure what this time was, and there was already going to be a next time?
“I had fifteen minutes to kill between meetings,” he said, answering her unspoken question. “So, I thought I’d stop by and say hi.”
“Hi.” So, this was just a friendly visit? Because they were friends now?
“Hi.” His tongue skated over his lower lip. “I’m not bothering you, am I? If you’re busy—”
“Nope, not bothering me, not busy. Not that I’m not working, because I am. Totally.” She waved at her computer. “Hard at work, that’s me. No slacking off here, Mr. Sauer, sir.”
He snorted. “I’m not your boss.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “You kind of are, though. Aren’t you?”
He shook his head. “I’m really not. I’m just another worker bee in the same hive as you.”
“The hive your mother owns a majority share of.”
“Yeah, but that’s my mother. That’s not me.” The smile slid off his face and his shoulders sagged. “Trust me, no one listens to what I say around here.”
“Rough day in the trenches?”
He shrugged. “No more than usual.” His eyes lit on the row of action figures lined up on the shelf behind her desk and he wandered over for a closer look. “You’ve got quite the collection here. It’s like a little army.” He poked her Ron Swanson bobblehead, setting it in motion.
Melody swiveled her chair around, watching him. “It’s possible I might have an addiction. Don’t tell upper management, though—oops, too late.”
The corner of his mouth curled into an almost-smile. “Your secret’s safe with me.” He picked up her Black Widow Funko Pop! figure. It was one of her favorites, the GameStop exclusive from Age of Ultron with Captain America’s shield. Jeremy frowned at it. “How do you decide which ones come to the office and which ones stay h
ome?”
“Oh, well, it’s a very complex system based on total randomness and whimsy.”
He set Black Widow down—in the wrong place. Melody shoved her hands under her legs, resisting the urge to fix her position. It was fine. She could do it after he left.
He turned around and cocked his head at her. “I should probably let you get back to work.”
She shrugged. “I can work with you here.”
“Okay.” His eyes flicked to her computer screen. “What are you doing?”
“You don’t want to know. It’s boring.”
The project she’d been assigned to was an update to some of their existing software for airplane climate control systems. It wasn’t sexy or exciting, like the cargo craft for the Space Station, but the commercial airplanes division generated 70 percent of the company’s revenue, so it was where most of their bread was buttered. And people needed heating and air conditioning when they were trapped like sardines in a flying tin can, so here she was, writing scripts to test the functionality of the software the developers were writing.
Jeremy dropped into the extra chair and leaned back, making himself at home. “I do boring all day long. I’m great at boring. Try me.”
“Okay,” she said. “Well, right now I’m running a test to make sure our software doesn’t break if a user decides to change the name of one of the sensors in the middle of a test. Like, if they name one of the air flow sensors ‘air_flow_1,’ but then on hour three of a six-hour test, they decide to change it to ‘air_flow_alpha,’ our software has to be able to handle that without barfing. Which is a technical term that means to stop working in an impressive and messy way.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “Sounds important.”
“It is. I’m a very important person. That’s why they’ve got me in the luxury office suite, as you can see.” She gestured around the room in her best impression of a spokesmodel.
He nodded. “Lots of privacy.”
“That’s true. I do like the privacy. I mean, not that I mind company, either,” she added, in case he thought she was trying to get rid of him. “I love company. It can get pretty lonely down here, so it’s nice to have a visitor every once in a while.” She felt herself flush and smiled to cover the extra color in her cheeks.
Jeremy smiled back, showing off all his dimples. “In that case, I’ll have to visit again.”
Chapter 15
He did visit again. And again. And again.
Now that they were officially friends, Jeremy started dropping by Melody’s office regularly to chat or hang out for a few minutes. Since her job still wasn’t presenting all that much in the way of a challenge, she was always glad to have a distraction. Especially today.
“Hey,” Jeremy said, leaning his head into Melody’s office.
She was on the phone, so she held up a finger. He started to back out, but she waved him inside. “Mom, I’ve gotta go, someone just came to my office… Okay… Okay. Love you. Bye.”
“You didn’t have to get off your call,” he said apologetically.
“Trust me, I was grateful for the excuse.”
Sometimes she wondered whether she’d be just as welcome if she tried to stop by his office up on the executive floor for an impromptu chat. Not that she was planning to find out and risk running into Geoffrey Horvath or Angelica Sauer—both of whom she’d successfully managed to avoid making eye contact with since the infamous peignoir incident. No thank you.
She didn’t even know where Jeremy’s office was, exactly, or what it looked like. She could have just asked him, but since she had no intention of ever going there, what was the point?
No, she was content to stay in her cave on the fifth floor, entertaining the occasional visit from Jeremy whenever he deigned to drop by. He’d complain about all the backstabbing that went on in the upper levels of management, and she’d complain about the devs who were always trying to insist the bugs she’d found were her fault and not theirs. It was so nice to have someone to share all her petty office annoyances with, she’d almost stopped being weirded out that he was the CEO’s son.
“I was thinking of walking over to the Coffee Bean,” he said, lounging against the doorway. “You in?”
“Oh my god, yes.” She grabbed her purse and stood up. “I need all the coffee today.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Everything okay?”
“Fine,” she said with a false, bright smile. “Just hankering for a caffeine fix.”
On the walk over, Jeremy talked about the Cyber Genome project the Advanced R&D group had been awarded by DARPA. Ordinarily, Melody would have been super interested in something like that, but she was preoccupied by the conversation with her mother, so she ended up nodding along without really listening.
“Okay,” he said when they were sitting down with their coffee, “you usually get way more excited about this nerdy science stuff. Talk to me, Melody.”
She blinked at him. “What?”
“Your head’s somewhere else today. What’s going on?”
“It’s nothing,” she said, reaching up to adjust her glasses. “It’s just—my mother’s coming to town next week.”
He leaned back in his chair, eyebrows raised. “From the face you’re making, I take it that’s a bad thing?”
“No, it’s not bad, exactly. It’s just…” She cast around for the right words and came up empty. “It’s my mother,” she said, like that explained everything.
Jeremy nodded knowingly.
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited for her to finally see my apartment and to show her around LA. Really, I am.” She didn’t want him thinking her mother was awful, because she wasn’t—she just had a special talent for driving Melody crazy.
“But…” he prompted.
“But she’s going to pester me about my love life—or complete lack thereof—the whole time she’s here, and it’s going to be exhausting.” She shook her head, grimacing. “And pretty insulting, frankly.”
“So, make something up. Tell her you’re seeing someone.”
Melody scrunched her nose. “You mean like a fake boyfriend?”
He shrugged. “If it’ll get her off your back.”
“It’s not that simple. She’s not going to just drop it if I say I’m seeing someone. That will only pique her interest more. She’ll have a million questions. And she’ll want to meet him.” She rubbed her temples. It was a terrible idea in so many ways, it made her head hurt just thinking about it.
“I could pretend to be your boyfriend,” he said, like it was no big deal.
“Yeah, right.” This wasn’t a Hallmark movie. She wasn’t going to hire a fake boyfriend to fool her mom.
“Why not?”
“Because it would be a lie. And a completely ridiculous lie at that.”
“It’s not that ridiculous. And if it would make your mother happy to think you’ve got a boyfriend, what’s the harm? It’s not like we have to get fake married and spend the rest of our fake lives together raising fake children. In a few weeks, you can tell her it didn’t work out. No harm done.”
“It’s still lying.” Melody wasn’t sure he had a firm grasp on the whole lying-is-wrong concept. “Although…” she smiled to herself, “the look on her face when I told her I was dating a billionaire would be priceless.”
“I’m game if you are.” He raised his eyebrows expectantly.
Melody tried to picture her mother, with her bedazzled denim jackets and press-on nails, meeting Jeremy Sauer, upper-crust Ivy League dropout and heir to a corporate empire. It was too embarrassing to contemplate.
“Yeah, no,” she said, shaking her head. “I appreciate the offer, but I’m just gonna stick with the truth.”
Her resolution to stick with the truth lasted all of twenty minutes after her mother stepped off the plane at LAX.
“You look pale,” her mom said while they were waiting for her checked luggage, fruitlessly watching the empty baggage carousel spin. “How do yo
u live in Los Angeles and not have a tan?”
Melody’s mother was very into tanning. Her skin had been irradiated to a deep, freckled brown that contrasted sharply with her hair, which was bleached a yellowish straw color.
“I work in a windowless office all day,” Melody said. “And I don’t tan anyway. I just burn, then end up exactly as pale as before.”
Her mom made a sour face. “That’s your father’s genes.”
Every undesirable genetic trait Melody possessed came from her father’s side—according to her mother.
“Oh! That reminds me. You know Sandy, at work?”
Melody did not know Sandy. Her mom had been working as a receptionist at a car dealership for the last year, and Melody had never met any of her coworkers there.
“Well, she met a chiropractor on Christian Mingle and they’re getting married in Hawaii at Christmas! How about that? I told you internet dating wasn’t just for losers.”
“I’m not particularly Christian,” Melody said, gritting her teeth. “And I don’t want to date a chiropractor. They practice junk science.”
Her mom waved her hand dismissively. “My point is, there’s lots of options out there for young women these days. You don’t want to waste your youth—believe me, baby, it doesn’t last forever.” She squinted at Melody with a faint look of distaste. “You’re such a pretty girl, you know. If only you made more of an effort with your appearance.”
Melody rubbed her temple. “You know that’s insulting, right?” They hadn’t even made it out of baggage claim and her sanity was already slipping.
“I’m just saying, it wouldn’t kill you to show a little more of your feminine side. You can’t expect to attract a man if you’re dressed like one.”
Melody could not believe she was being lectured on her fashion sense by a woman wearing a turquoise velour tracksuit and platform flip-flops.
“Unless you decide to go gay,” her mother continued. “Which is fine with me, if that’s what you want. My friend Maryellen went to a lesbian wedding last month, and she said it was very tasteful.”