Love in Bloom's

by Judith Arnold

  She pondered asking Susie to spy on him, then decided against it. If Julia implied anything negative about him, Susie would be so indignant she might not do the windows. Right now, Julia needed Susie as an ally even more than she needed to figure out how all those bagels wandered out of the store every week. “If you get any other ideas about someone with a business degree, call me.”

  “Don’t hold your breath,” Susie said cheerfully as she headed for the door.

  The phone rang. Susie twisted the doorknob, and Julia waved to her as she crossed to her father’s desk to answer. “Hello?”

  “Julia,” one of the receptionists said, “that reporter from Gotham Magazine wants to talk to you. Ron Joffe.”

  She gave Susie a frantic smile and another wave, waited until her sister had departed from the office and then lowered herself into her chair. Joffe. The reporter. The shark who had smelled blood in the waters around Bloom’s before Julia had even been aware of seepage. The jerk who had kissed her once and then disappeared from her life without any explanation.

  He was a business expert, wasn’t he?

  The worst one she could possibly turn to. She wasn’t going to ask him for any recommendations. She was simply going to be pleasant and upbeat and give him whatever he needed to write a puff piece on Bloom’s for his magazine.

  And she’d never let him kiss her again.

  “Okay,” she said. “Put him on.”

  13

  He saw her waiting for him outside the restaurant, dressed in a pale-gray top and a matching skirt that revealed a satisfying amount of leg. It wasn’t a micromini, but from where he stood on the corner of Eighth Avenue, he could see her calves, her knees and a hint of thigh.

  Her legs were actually on the thin side, but it didn’t matter. His body temperature notched up a few degrees from the mere sight of her. Not because of her knees, not because of the rest of her—which was also on the thin side—but because if you touched two live wires together, you could fry your circuitry, cause an explosion, ignite a fire, black out an entire region. When it came to Julia Bloom, Ron became not just a live wire but an exposed one, stripped of insulation. He saw her and automatically started shooting sparks.

  He kept walking toward her, reminding himself of the reason he’d asked her to meet him at his favorite Italian place on Restaurant Row instead of at her office. The last time he’d been in her office, he’d closed the door, and he still considered it something of a miracle that nothing more than a single kiss had occurred between them. If he wound up behind a closed door with her again, there would be more than a kiss. A lot more. Short circuits, blackouts, a minor apocalypse.

  The sky stretched pink above the towering buildings. He’d arranged to meet her at seven, figuring that by then most of the theater crowd would be finishing up their meals and heading out to catch their shows. The restaurant would empty, and he and Julia would be able to linger over dessert—although she didn’t look as if she ate dessert very often. He’d talk her into something—a pastry, a cordial, whatever it took to prolong the evening. Just because this was a working dinner didn’t mean they couldn’t make it last.

  She spotted him and smiled—and immediately stopped smiling, as if she didn’t want him to think she was happy to see him. That fleeting smile stuck in his mind like a gnat on flypaper. She was happy to see him, and knowing that caused his body temperature to hike another degree.

  He might just as well have been fourteen years old again, a lowly freshman at Stuyvesant High School catching his first glimpse of Heather Fenster, a statuesque junior with plump lips and a shimmying stride whom he and just about every other boy in the school had lusted after. Julia Bloom looked nothing like Heather Fenster; she wasn’t statuesque and her lips didn’t shape a sultry pout. Her modest proportions in no way reminded Ron of Heather Fenster’s abundant bosom. But his reaction to her was just as physical, just as adolescent and just as instantaneous.

  “Hi,” she said once he was close enough for them to speak. Her voice was ordinary, neither husky nor kittenish, but it made his skin tingle.

  He held open the door for her and let her precede him into the restaurant. Inside, the din of street noise was replaced by the cushioning sound of muted voices and silverware clinking elegantly against china. He gave his name to the host, who led them past the bar to a cozy table for two.

  “I hope you don’t mind meeting me here,” Ron said, her silence compelling him to fill the space between them with words. “I thought it would be easier for us to talk if we got away from all the interruptions at work.” And you’re safer around me if we’re someplace public, surrounded by witnesses, he almost added.

  “This is fine.” She shook out her napkin and spread it across her lap.

  A waiter approached their table, bearing bread and water. Julia surprised Ron by ordering portobello mushrooms and polenta, a large salad and a glass of Chianti. Given her slender build, he would have guessed her to be one of those women who ordered only salads—dressing on the side—and then picked at them, leaving half the serving untouched.

  The thought of Julia eating heartily turned him on even more than seeing her had. Women didn’t seem to realize how incredibly sexy they could be when they were eating.

  He ordered something Milanese—swordfish or scallops, whatever—and a salad, and suggested they split a bottle of Chianti. The waiter departed, and Ron tried to study Julia without staring. Maybe it was her eyes, as dark as espresso, or the way the corners of her mouth tilted up even when she wasn’t smiling. Damn it, there had to be some reason for his hormonal reaction to her.

  “Gotham Magazine hasn’t published your article on Bloom’s,” she said.

  He wasn’t sure whether to be grateful or pissed off that she wanted to talk business. He thought about it while the waiter went through the whole wine rigmarole, displaying the label for Ron as if he cared what it said, then popping the cork, sniffing it, snapping his corkscrew shut and pocketing it, and splashing some wine into a glass. Ron sipped it, nodded like an expert and gestured for the waiter to fill Julia’s glass. A little wine might loosen her up, make her more willing to discuss things that weren’t business—or to discuss business in such a way that he could tie his story up in a neat ribbon and drop it on Kim’s desk.

  “I’m still working on it,” he told her.

  She sipped her wine, her gaze remaining on him above the rim of her glass. “It’s not going to be a puff piece, is it.”

  “You were expecting a puff piece?”

  “I wouldn’t have agreed to be interviewed if I’d thought it was going to be anything else.”

  He reminded himself that she was a lawyer. Her pale skin, her elegant posture and his raging hormones had nothing to do with the fact that she was one sharp lady, intellectually well exercised and protective of the store she’d been selected to run. As a lawyer, she probably knew as well as he did how to pose questions and elicit information. He mustn’t let his attraction to her cause him to let down his guard.

  He considered suggesting they drink more wine before they started debating what his article would or wouldn’t be, but then remembered that this was supposed to be a working dinner. She had a right to introduce the subject of the article, and if he possessed half an ounce of sense—which seemed to be a pretty close estimate of his supply at the moment—he’d follow her lead.

  “Bloom’s is in trouble,” he said.

  Her already round eyes grew rounder, and her cheeks picked up some color, although that might have been a reflection of the red wine in the glass she held just below her chin. “What makes you think that?”

  “I have a source.”

  “What source? Bloom’s is a privately held company. My family and a few trusted employees are the only people who know just how well the store is doing. And I know those employees would never say anything bad about the store behind my back. Especially since it’s not true,” she added—a bit desperately, he thought.

  “My source says
Bloom’s is bleeding.”

  The flash of color in her cheeks had nothing to do with the wine. He’d scored a direct hit with that particular choice of words—words Kim had shared with him, words she must have gotten from someone in the Blooms’ inner circle.

  Julia lowered her glass, sat back in her seat and regarded him as if he’d just descended from the hatch of a flying saucer at the center of a crop circle. “I’d be very curious to know who told you that,” she said.

  “I’m sure you would.” He helped himself to a thick slice of bread, smeared butter on it and took a bite. He liked watching her squirm, on a whole lot of levels.

  “Let me guess,” she murmured. “When you were fifteen, you read All the President’s Men and decided you were going to be an investigative reporter. Somehow you wound up writing fluff for Gotham Magazine, but the old muckraker inside you refuses to give up the dream.”

  He laughed. “Actually, no. I decided I was going to be a reporter because my eleventh-grade English teacher made me join the school newspaper staff as a punishment for mouthing off in class, and it turned out to be a lot of fun. And I don’t write fluff for Gotham Magazine. I’m the magazine’s business and economics reporter. I’ve got an MBA and I write the weekly City Business column. Occasionally I do business-related feature stories on topics the readers might enjoy. Everyone in New York knows and loves Bloom’s. When I got a tip that the store might be struggling, it was right up my alley.”

  “You have an MBA,” she repeated.

  He hadn’t mentioned that to impress her. Well, yeah, he had—given her fancy schooling and her law degree, he thought he ought to reinforce for her that he wasn’t just some hack with half-baked fantasies about uncovering the next presidential scandal.

  “So I know a thing or two about business,” he assured her. “Is Bloom’s in trouble?”

  “No.”

  He weighed the sound of that single syllable, trying to decide how convincing she sounded. Not very. If he were a boxer, he’d go for her midsection with a flurry of jabs and have her down on the canvas before the bell rang. But the waiter was delivering their salads, and by the time he’d finished grinding fresh pepper all over the weedy-looking greens, she no longer appeared quite so vulnerable.

  Ron decided to back off a little. “Have you unlocked your grandfather’s desk yet?” he asked.

  She smiled—another flash that staggered him more effectively than a boxer’s right hook. “Why are you so curious about that desk?”

  “It comes with being a journalist,” he explained. “You see something locked, you want to unlock it.”

  She shook her head. “I asked Deirdre about it. Deirdre Morrissey,” she clarified, and he nodded to indicate that he knew whom she was talking about. “She said she has no idea where the key is anymore, but she’s sure the desk is empty.”

  “You didn’t run our theory by her—about your grandfather’s spirit being locked inside?”

  Julia chuckled and shook her head. “If I told her that, she’d think I was nuts.”

  “So, you’re finding your place at the store? They don’t really think you’re nuts, do they?”

  “Who, Deirdre and the others?” She shrugged and munched on her salad. He liked watching her jaw when she chewed. Her chin moved in an almost circular path as she ground the leaves and stems down into swallowable form. “I do things a little differently from the way they used to be done. I guess everybody’s still adjusting—including me. If that’s the so-called trouble you’ve heard about Bloom’s—”

  “No, I definitely heard the place was bleeding.”

  All traces of humor vanished from her face. “It’s not,” she said coolly.

  Maybe he should come at her from a different angle. “Do you miss your law firm?” he asked.

  “Not as much as I’d expected.” She ate some more salad, apparently enjoying it. He’d ordered a salad because he figured it was healthy, but she actually seemed to be savoring it. “Most of the cases I was involved with were divorce cases. It was pretty depressing.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  His parents had split when he was ten. Neither of them had had the bucks to hire a law firm like the white-shoe outfit Julia had been working for—he had her firm’s name in his notes back at the office, and he remembered thinking it was just the sort of place a Wellesley grad who wanted to make a lot of money might end up hanging her shingle. When his parents had decided to call it quits, his father had used his sister Ruth’s husband, Louie, who was a real estate lawyer in Jersey, and his mother had gone with a neighbor, Ellen Weintraub, whom she’d met at a tenants’ meeting a year earlier. Ron and his brother had never been clear on what function the attorneys served in the divorce. All they’d known was that their parents had spent a lot of time screaming at each other and referring to each other in the third person when they were in the same room. And then they’d gotten divorced and seemed twice as miserable apart as they’d been together.

  He’d rather run a deli than be a divorce lawyer any day.

  “And the hours were awful,” Julia was saying. “I was an associate there. We worked very long days.”

  “Were you in line for a partnership?”

  “I think so. I’d been there only two-and-a-half years, but no one ever told me I wasn’t on the partnership track.”

  “So you gave up a lot to go to Bloom’s.”

  She shrugged, then took a piece of bread and dabbed it into the puddle of herbed oil and vinegar on her salad plate. “What’s a lot? I’m still a lawyer.”

  “But you aren’t practicing.”

  “Who knows? If you publish a bunch of lies about Bloom’s, I might put my law degree to use suing you for libel.” She gave him a sly smile.

  “I would never publish lies about Bloom’s,” he assured her, smiling back. To be sharing a smile over a threatened libel action may have been odd for them, but he felt as if they were connecting on some other level.

  Neither spoke as they finished their salads. The waiter brought their entrées, topped off their wineglasses and vanished. Julia immediately dug into her food.

  “You like to eat,” Ron observed. He’d meant it as a compliment, but her scathing glare told him she wasn’t flattered. “I think that’s great,” he hastened to add.

  “What’s great? That I’m a pig?”

  “You’re not a pig. Did I say you were a pig? Did you hear me say anything remotely like that?”

  She lowered her fork and stared hard at him. “You said I liked to eat.”

  “Which, in my book, is a good thing.”

  She seemed to wrestle with her response, then surrendered to the tantalizing meal on her plate and tasted a forkful of polenta. Her sigh of delight proved his point. “This is delicious.”

  “That was all I meant,” he insisted. “You appreciate good food.” He tried his seafood and nodded. This restaurant had never let him down. “It must have been great growing up with all that Bloom’s food around.”

  She grinned. “We hardly ever ate Bloom’s food when I was growing up.”

  “You’re kidding. All that amazing food at your fingertips, and you didn’t eat it?”

  “No.” She sliced a wedge of mushroom, tasted it and sighed again. He could get a permanent hard-on just listening to her sigh like that.

  Shifting in his chair, he focused on the conversation. “Why not?”

  “The family operated under the theory that Bloom’s merchandise was for customers, not for us. It was to be sold. It was profit centers, not family indulgences. Every now and then—as a big treat—my father would bring home a babka or maybe some knishes from the store. This was only on special occasions, someone’s birthday or something. And maybe once a year we’d have a big Sunday brunch with Bloom’s bagels and lox. But for the most part, my mother shopped at the grocery store down the street. She said the prices were cheaper.”

  “She’s crazy,” he blurted out, then smiled apologetically. “I know that grocery store. I live o
n West Seventy-Sixth.”

  “Really? I live on—”

  She cut herself off. She looked the way she’d looked outside the restaurant, right after she’d stopped smiling when she saw him, as if she was happy and didn’t want him to know. “Where do you live?”

  “West Seventy-Fourth.”

  “So we’re neighbors.”

  “It would seem.” She attacked her food with singular determination.

  He successfully suppressed his own smile. But while he worked on his dinner he kept his gaze on her, trying to read her expression. Some tension in there, a hint of panic but a sort of fizziness, too, like bubbles in a bottle of soda someone had shaken. Just one twist of the screw cap, and they’d come squirting out.

  He decided not to dwell on how terrific it was that they were neighbors. “Number one,” he said, “that grocery store isn’t cheap. And number two, Bloom’s is less expensive than it could be. Besides, you’d have gotten the food wholesale.”

  “But then the store wouldn’t have made its profit.” She tilted her head slightly, and her sleek black hair brushed against her shoulder. “I hope you won’t put any of this in your article. I know my family is a little eccentric, but it would be cruel for you to make us look ridiculous in your magazine.”

  “I have no interest in making you look ridiculous.” Colorful and interesting would be more accurate.

  “I’ve been encouraging employees to use our merchandise. I couldn’t believe that people working for us would stop in at the McDonald’s to buy a cup of coffee to bring to work with them. It’s absurd. They should be using and enjoying the products they’re selling to others.”

  “And they didn’t do this before you came along?”

  “Apparently not. They probably think I’m some kind of crazy radical, turning the place upside down.”

  He mentally stored her words. He’d try not to embarrass her family, but a lot of this stuff belonged in his article. She hadn’t said any of it was off the record, so he could use it if he wanted. “Are you turning Bloom’s upside down?”