“Great. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.” Jack pumped his fist in the air and whirled his chair around. “See you then. Bye, Jamie.”
He hung up before she had a chance to change her mind. Steve lounged against the doorframe, his coffee mug in his hand.
“You’re insane.”
“Probably. But I also think I’m in love and that’s worth going a little crazy over.”
Steve lifted an eyebrow. “You’d better take a peace offering.”
Jack stood up. “Good plan. Flowers? No, not for Jamie. What do I give a woman like Jamie?” Jewelry wasn’t right either. “How do I show her I’m sorry, I’m sincere, I respect her?”
“The way you’ve described her, she sounds like a bleeding heart. So you could give money to her favorite charity.”
Just when he thought Steve served no purpose other than to annoy him, his cousin pulled something brilliant out of his ass. “That’s a great idea. I’ll give money to her agency. What do you think? Five grand? Ten grand?”
“Whoa. Not her agency. We’ve been through this. It’s time to call the feds on Beechwood, not donate to them.”
“No, it has to be her agency. It’s a show of faith. Then maybe she’ll let me root out the guy who’s day trading.”
“Bad idea.”
Jack moved around him, patting his pocket for his wallet and keys. “No, it’s not.”
“It’s called complicity—accessory to a crime. You have knowledge of illegal activity and you’re not reporting it.”
“It’s not that black-and-white.” Jack gave Steve a wave and went out to beg and plead if necessary.
To coax and cajole.
To kiss and lick until Jamie saw that they were meant to be together.
That was the problem with having too much time on his hands. With no job, no apartment, and lazy summer days stretching out long and hot, he couldn’t help but find himself in front of Jamie’s office again.
Lunchtime. She liked to bring her lunch outside and eat in the little garden next to the social services building. There were vegetables growing in uneven rows, and Jamie always spread her lunch out on the picnic table and flipped through a magazine while she ate.
She was pretty, sweet and innocent. She smiled for everyone, including him when she’d met his eye on the sidewalk, which had made him feel good.
He should leave her alone.
But he couldn’t help himself. The need to see her was overwhelming, the only bright spot in long, restless days.
He leaned on the bus stop pole and watched Jamie unwrap her sandwich.
Sooner or later he was going to have to do something. Either leave her alone or tell her the truth.
Jack’s cell phone rang as he was brushing his teeth in the private rest room he shared with Steve outside their offices. Spitting out the toothpaste quickly, he pulled his phone out of his pocket. He didn’t recognize the number.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Jonathon, how are you?”
Wiping his mouth with a paper towel, Jack tried to place the woman’s voice, but he was way too preoccupied with quickly securing fresh breath and getting over to Jamie’s office.
“I’m fine. How are you?” He used a cautious, polite tone.
The woman laughed, and he suddenly realized who it was. “It’s Meredith, Jonathon. How quickly they forget.”
Rolling his eyes, he put his toothbrush and paste back in his travel case and left the rest room. Just who he wanted to talk to. The woman who’d loved his money way more than she’d ever loved him.
“Is there something I can do for you, Meredith?”
“Yes. Come back to the firm. Your old job is available again and we want you back.”
That gave him pause outside his office. “Really? Tim left?”
“Yes. Forcibly, I might add. He was no Jonathon Davidson. Look, we’ve got a mess on our hands here and we need you to clean it up. You were the best analyst the company ever had.”
Well, that was true. Jack felt a little smug as he tossed his travel case back into his desk drawer. “I have other commitments now, Meredith.” Not that it wasn’t incredibly satisfying that they wanted him back. It was. And then some. And it was intriguing, the little familiar jump of excitement he felt at going back to Wall Street, needed. He knew he could fix whatever the situation was, knew that he would enjoy the challenge of untangling the numbers.
“Look, I know we have our differences…but I’m mature enough to put the past behind us for the good of the company. Even if you dumped me under humiliating circumstances.”
That was a joke. It was such a skewed version of reality that Jack actually laughed. “Meredith, I broke up with you after you bragged that my best attribute was my money. The only one who was humiliated was me.”
“What are you talking about? I never said anything of the kind.”
God, he didn’t want to do this right this very second. Jack could picture Meredith, cool and blond, impeccably dressed, intelligent as hell, her wit as sharp as her fingernails. There had been a time when he’d been very attracted to her appearance of perfection.
But it was only that—an appearance. Their entire relationship had been false, a coup for Meredith, an embarrassing lesson for him. He didn’t want to wind up one of those fifty-year-old men with no hair and a thick paunch dangling a gorgeous twenty-five-year-old on his arm, denying to himself that money was his sole attraction.
“I loved you, Jonathon.”
Oh, God. No, this wasn’t where he wanted to go. “Meredith. I don’t know what to say, except that I’m sorry things ended the way they did.” Sorry that both of them had been hurt. Sorry that the doubts Meredith had given him had made him stumble in this new relationship with Jamie.
“Come back to the firm. We need you.”
Jack hesitated in the doorway of his office. Six months earlier he would have thought he couldn’t go back, could never go back to the way he was before, an obsessive workaholic. But that life, the job, called him again, the hook firmly in his back, ready to reel him back in.
“Let me think about it, Meredith. I’ll be in touch.”
Chapter 11
Jamie wondered why in the name of cruel irony had she packed tuna for lunch that day. Now Jack was walking across the street toward the building, and she must smell like the New York Aquarium. She could probably turn every cat in the neighborhood on, but Jack was going to recoil if he got within three feet of her.