He missed her.
But he did his best to brush away the hurt that still lingered. Rachel had been digging at him about Ava all week, somehow inferring that his blind date hadn’t gone well because he wasn’t over her. Nothing Jake had said could convince her otherwise.
And then, as if it wasn’t insulting enough to have his dating skills questioned by his baby sister, just this morning she’d hinted that perhaps he might be partly responsible for what had happened in Vancouver. That he’d overreacted or said things he shouldn’t have. When he’d asked why she would think that, she’d conveniently remembered that she had a class to teach and had left the house.
However, he’d flicked through the calls that had come into the house in the past few days and seen one from Hanna that he hadn’t answered and that no one had mentioned. Possibly, no one had been home to pick up and Hanna hadn’t left a message. But more likely, since Hanna hadn’t called again, she’d said something to Rachel and let her do the dirty work.
“I’ll give you a month’s severance,” his father said. “But I should tell you, if you push, I can go up to two.”
“No.” Jake shook his head, brought himself back to the present. “Why are you firing me exactly?”
“You aren’t happy.” His father shrugged and placed his big hands on the desk.
“I’m happy,” Jake said. Happy as he could be.
“You’re pretending. Don’t think we can’t see through it. Your mother has been on me about this, so you’re fired.”
“Yeah, I’m sure Mom’s going to be thrilled that you’re leaving me unemployed.”
His father’s smile widened. “Now, see, that’s where you’re wrong. I sent a copy of your show to that friend of mine. The one who works for the European airline.” Jake didn’t even have a chance to feel resentful or annoyed at the interference before his father went charging ahead. “He loved it and he wants to meet with you about it. He’s in town tonight.”
“Dad, I told you that’s in the past. I’m not throwing good money after bad.”
“You’re not throwing any money. If he likes it, he’ll pay. You can tell him I said that.”
Jake smiled in spite of himself. “I appreciate where this is coming from, but I’m okay. I like working here with you.” He told himself that he didn’t need to prove himself anymore. But still, hope was building. He could get the travel show off the ground this time. Run his own show, be his own boss.
“You could do the show from Toronto this time,” his father said. “Stay close to family.”
Jake thought about it. There would be some benefits. He wouldn’t have to Skype with his mother, popular European travel destinations would be a much shorter flight away and he’d be closer to Rachel.
On the flip side, he’d probably never see Ava again, he’d miss Hanna and Alex, and he’d be closer to Rachel.
“Your mother wants you to be happy,” his father said. “I had Liz book you a dinner reservation at Canoe for tonight. You can meet with my friend at the restaurant, pitch him your show. Liz will have the details. I thought something a little more casual was the way to go since he’s already interested. It’ll be less about convincing him and more showing him that you two can work well together. Now, he likes his reds, so order a good one.”
“Dad.”
“You can put it on my tab.”
Jake sat back, insulted. “I can pay my own tab.”
“Good.” His father cleared his throat. “There’s something else.”
“What? Mom thinks I’m too skinny and you’ve been tasked with getting me to eat more?”
His father laughed. “That does sound like your mother, but no. This came from Rachel.”
Jake started to rise. “I’m out of here.”
“Wait. It’s about the woman you were seeing in Vancouver. Ava.”
Jake’s stomach spasmed and his shoulders tightened. He didn’t want to talk about this or about the fact that he’d been looking forward to showing her off when they came to Toronto to film. “As I told Rachel, there’s nothing to discuss. That’s over.” She’d gotten what she wanted from him.
“Your sister seems to think otherwise and she’s convinced your mother.”
“Then I guess you’ll have to unconvince her.” He was not spending the next family dinner explaining the relationship to his mother.
His father simply watched him. “I’m not asking for the private details.” He cleared his throat and shifted in his seat. “If your mother wants those she can ask you herself, but I’d like to know if it was serious.”
Jake closed his eyes and wondered who he’d pissed off to deserve this. Was it not bad enough that he had lived it, now he had to talk about it? He exhaled slowly, and opened his eyes, doing his best to look indifferent. “We only dated a couple months.”
“I knew I wanted to marry your mother after our first date.” Chuck waited. “So? Was it serious?”
Jake’s stomach had moved past spasming and right into knot-making. “It doesn’t matter,” he finally said. “We broke up and we’ve gone our separate ways.”
“It matters.” His father’s mouth was grim. “What happened?”
Jake gazed at the file folder on his lap, the blue cover looking like the summer sky, all bright and shiny and full of hope. He wanted to rip it into a thousand pieces and light it on fire. “It was Claudia all over again.”
Because Rachel was wrong. The only thing he’d misunderstood was how Ava actually felt about him.
“What does that mean? That she took up with Harvey? Because I think his wife might have something to say about that.”
“No, not that way. I meant that she was looking for a way to get ahead in her career and saw me as an avenue.” He shrugged as though it was no big deal, simply one of the land mines that a man who had the ability to make or break a career had to navigate.
His father was silent for a moment, no doubt wondering how he could have raised a son so foolish as to fall for the same ploy twice.
“Well.” His father leaned back in the old captain’s chair his mother had found in an antique shop. She’d had it refurbished, covered in a deep red leather, but the base still squeaked when Chuck rocked in it, as he was doing now. “Rachel didn’t think she was like Claudia.”
“Rachel doesn’t know everything.”
“True. Don’t tell her that, though. Listen, son. I know that Claudia threw you for a loop.” His mouth tightened. “But that’s no reason to doubt yourself. You trusted her and she used that to her own advantage. Now, I know Rachel doesn’t know everything, but she does have good instincts.”
“She’s never even met Ava,” Jake burst out.
“I think you owe Ava and yourself a phone call. Or better yet, a visit.”
“I’m not going to see her,” Jake said, even as his heart jumped at the thought. Watching her bright eyes, feeling her silky hair, touching her soft skin.
“No? Then how do you propose that you convince her to host your travel show?”
“What?” Jake frowned. “She’s not the host.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that. The airline loved her. Loved her. I don’t have to tell you what that means.”
No, he didn’t. It meant if Jake was going to move forward and try to make a go of his travel show, he was going to have to do it with Ava as host.
* * *
“OKAY, I DON’T KNOW WHY you’re all mopey and hangdoggy.”
It had been
four days since he’d been officially canned. As Jake had expected, his mother had not been pleased to hear it. But to his surprise she’d come around in full support of the idea when his father had explained. And, of course, Rachel was no help. She was probably the one who’d put the idea in their father’s head in the first place.
“Hangdoggy?” Jake looked over at his sister, who’d said she wanted to help him pack but had done nothing other than lie on the bed and blather at him.
“Yes, like this.” She pulled her face into a mournful expression and sighed loudly. “Like Eeyore. This is your chance—you should be pumped.” She pumped a fist to show him how.
The meeting with the airline executive had gone exceedingly well. So well that Jake now had a letter of intent from the airline. They’d ordered twelve episodes, cities to be selected from the airline’s top fifteen travel destinations, delivered by the end of the year, and were offering an advance considerably larger than Jake had expected. He just had to convince Ava to host. If she refused, the deal was off.
“Come on. You’re going to head back there the conquering hero.” Jake figured Rachel must be teaching a class on heroic themes in art. “It’s your chance to win her back. To get everything.”
Jake ignored her and kept packing. Next, she was probably going to show him how he should pose when he saw Ava again.
It was nothing she hadn’t already said a thousand times already, starting the minute she’d heard he was heading back to Vancouver. Though Jake had given some thought to moving his base to Toronto, he’d decided to go back instead. Ava was in Vancouver and without her there was no show. The airline had been very clear about that.
“You’ll have the show, the relationship.” Rachel rose and raised her arm in victory. Yep, there it was. “And you can thank me in your wedding speech.”
A wedding? His sister was certifiably insane. He’d be lucky if Ava would even agree to see him, never mind marry him. And he wasn’t thinking past how he was going to convince her to join the show anyway.
“And don’t play the martyr,” Rachel advised. Yeah, definitely doing heroic elements in art right now. She dropped back on the bed. “You need to be strong. Women like a man who’s strong.”
“I’m not trying to win her back, Rache. Okay?”
“Yeah, you are.” She smiled at him, all smugness and challenge. “You just don’t know it yet.”
“Fine.” He dug his socks out of the dresser.
“I know that I haven’t met her, but Hanna said she’s great. And I trust Hanna.”
As he’d suspected, Hanna was the guilty party who had told Rachel all the details of what had occurred between him and Ava. Jake wondered why he’d ever introduced the two of them, since all they did was gang up on him. He jammed the socks into his suitcase.
“Speaking of Hanna, you didn’t tell her about my arrival, did you?” He planned to go straight from the airport to Ava’s apartment, before anyone else knew that he was back. He needed the element of surprise on his side. If he called to let her know he was coming, or told anyone else, she was very likely to avoid him. She was good at that.
“No, of course not.” But Rachel suddenly got very busy polishing her glasses.
“Rachel. It was the one thing I asked you not to do.” He ran a hand through his hair and wondered if strangling his well-meaning sister was a viable option.
She put her glasses back on and looked at him with the gray eyes they’d both inherited from their dad. “Hanna isn’t going to say anything to Ava. We discussed it and as it happens, we agree with you.”
Since she seemed to be expecting his thanks, as if he was supposed to be grateful that she was letting him decide his own life, Jake didn’t say anything. He’d thank her to keep out of his business.
“Jake.” She sat up and put a hand on his arm when he turned to get the rest of his clothing out of the dresser. “I want you to be happy. I think Ava made you happy.”
He shored up the part of him that wanted to soften and tell her everything, to get that woman’s perspective she so loved to share. “I’ll be fine, Rachel.”
“I want you to be better than fine.” She peered up at him, the lenses making her eyes seem bigger. “I know you think that whatever happened there was the be-all and end-all of your relationship with Ava, but I think you’re wrong. Hanna thinks so, too.”
“You talk about my love life?”
She looked surprised that he asked. “Of course we do. Anyway, she said she doesn’t think Ava’s so much angry as hurt.”
Jake didn’t see the difference. “Does it really matter?”
“Yes. You have to tell her how you feel.”
Since Jake didn’t like the sound of that, he shrugged her hand off and returned to grab his T-shirts.
“You know I’m right.”
“No, you’re not.” He folded the T-shirts very carefully and placed them in the suitcase.
“Yes, I am. I’m always right. Ask Rob. Ask my students.”
“Not about this.” Because while he might have told his sister that he was only going back for the show, he knew it was much more than that. From the moment Ava had agreed to help him that weekend at Rockdale, it had been about more.
He just wasn’t sure he was ready to tell her that.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?” It was the end of the week and Ava was exhausted. She almost hadn’t answered the knock at her door. Now she wished she hadn’t.
“I want to talk,” Jake said.
She did her best to stare him down, narrowing her eyes and not moving from the doorway of her apartment, barring him entrance. She crossed her arms over her chest for extra emphasis. But he looked good. So good. And he wasn’t even wearing the jeans.
“There’s nothing to talk about.” She sniffed.
“Ava.”
She steeled herself against the whisper of yearning that crept across her skin. She wasn’t going to be the kind of woman who let herself be so easily swayed. He’d cut her deeply, and she didn’t know there was anything he could say to repair it. “Look, Jake. I don’t know what you think you have to say, but I don’t want to hear it, okay?”
She just wanted him to go. Get out of her life and out of her sight and never, ever come back. She inhaled slowly, hoping to ease the sudden thumping of her heart.
“I’d like to come in,” he said.
She sniffed again. And she’d like a closet full of Blahniks to rival Carrie Bradshaw’s, but neither of those things were happening. “No. How did you get in the building anyway?”
He flashed her that crooked smile she loved. “I helped a sweet old lady cross the street. Turns out she lives on the fourth floor. When she found out I was coming to see you, she happily let me in.”
Ava scowled. “Well, she might have, but I’m not. I’d like you to leave.”
“I’ve been traveling all day.” He ran a hand through his hair, and even the movement was tired. She could see the circles under his eyes, but reminded herself that how he’d spent his day didn’t matter. He could have lain in bed with a pair of naked twins for all she cared. Her stomach twisted. Okay, maybe not naked twins, but still. “Can I please come in and sit down?”
“No.” She crossed her arms more tightly. “You’re lucky I don’t call security to bounce you out right now.” Which was an empty threat as the building didn’t have on-site security, but she was pretty sure he didn’t know that.
“So you wan
t to do this right here?”
“I don’t want to do this at all.”
“Harsh.”
It was, but she needed to be strong. “What do you want, Jake?” She leaned into the edge of the door for support.
“A chance to explain.”
He gave her those puppy-dog eyes that had so often been her downfall, but not anymore. “There’s nothing to explain,” she said. “I think we made things pretty clear the last time we saw each other.”
“Did we?” He cocked an eyebrow at her.
Ava felt her resolve waver, and reminded herself that she didn’t care if he had a bitchy ex-girlfriend who’d messed with his head. That wasn’t her problem. She’d done her time holed up in her apartment like a crazy cat lady and she was never doing it again.
She was back on the proverbial horse. Not yet ready to date, but going out a few nights a week with Jilly and Hanna and other friends and acquaintances. She’d even promised her mother dinner this weekend and she wasn’t about to cancel it again.
It was a miracle her mother had let her get away with it for this long.
“We did,” she told him. “But if you don’t remember, maybe you could go do your reminiscing somewhere else.”
“I just need a minute.” He took a step forward.
Ava held her ground even as her pulse shot up. “This isn’t a good time. I’m busy.”
His quick glance took in her comfy sweatpants and oversize T-shirt, and a glimmer of that smug grin reappeared. “Busy doing what?”
“Not that it’s any of your business, but I have company.” In the form of a movie and a bowl of popcorn as big as her head. She’d been too wiped to go out tonight, but now she wished she’d dragged her butt to whatever club Jilly had pinpointed as the place to be.
He kept smirking. She wanted to wipe it off his face with a smack, but that would mean she still cared. And she didn’t. Or at least she was working on it. “Oh. So I should come back later?”
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