Chapter 35
thirty-five
I wake up with pictures of Graham blurring through my brain. Graham wearing his pink suit, almost unfairly handsome. Graham’s serious frown while he worked with one hand and massaged my feet with the other. Graham’s sexy body in those short silk boxers.
Ludicrous . Always so infuriating and unexpected and audacious and colorful and just?—
Graham.
Perfectly natural , I coach myself while applying my makeup. He’s hot. He wears nice clothes. He has a great smile. Any woman would feel this way about a man like him.
But the lie chafes. Because my heart knows that its flutters aren’t just about his appearance or his money or even his sharp tongue.
No.
It has something more to do with how he always cups the back of my head when he holds me. Or maybe his insistence on slow dancing before we hooked up for the first time. The handkerchief? Or last night’s foot massage? Maybe his French toast?
Ay Dios mío . My blood runs cold. Do I like it when he’s… loving?
To avoid panicking, I put on the first black dress I can find and distract myself by braiding my hair into an intricate bun.
Marco pulls up to the curb to wait for me. When I slide into the passenger seat, his brown eyes snag mine. One look says it all.
I’m in for it.
Marco is a former cop. Answering his questions all the way to Manhattan without arousing his suspicions might be impossible. My queasy stomach lurches.
As he puts the white sedan in gear, he grunts, “So, tell me.”
Pouting, I cross my arms over my chest and fall back into the leather seat. “Tell you what?”
I have to be careful not to give too much away. Marco is quick and intuitive—a human lie detector. Loyal to his work, too. I assume as soon as he knows about Graham and me, Mr. Stryker will know also. Then again, he did delete that elevator video for me…
Marco’s suspicious face grows more intense. “Jules. Abuelita called me last night at nearly midnight, asking if I knew where you were.”
I really need my own apartment.
“It was nothing. I had a…” Can’t say work thing, because he’ll ask why it wasn’t on the Stryker & Sons schedule… “date that ran long.”
His brows bounce up. “Like a date-date? You?”
“Yes,” I snap, fidgeting with my hem. “I’m a twenty-five-year-old woman! I can go out with a man if I want to!”
I remember Abuelita’s scolding when I came home in Graham’s sweats, adding, “And if I want to borrow some sweats so I don’t have to spend the forty-minute ride home in my work clothes, then I will!”
Marco slips on a pair of aviator sunglasses, blocking my window into his thoughts. “Huh. Okay. So you were in the city, not Queens. Forty minutes away from Abuelita’s puts you in… Midtown? No, it was nighttime. No traffic. So lower. Lower East Side, if you were driving. The subway would have taken way longer at that hour. But you would never call a cab or an Uber for yourself when you could take the train, so he must have called you a ride. Lower East Side, hired car?—”
He stops right in the middle of his sentence and snaps his head to the right. Even with his sunglasses on, he looks furious. I don’t even want to know what his eyes are doing.
“Jules,” he growls. “ No .”
He knows. I know he knows. The snarl on his face tells me as much.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I mumble to my lap.
“Graham. Everett.” Marco scowls ferociously. “He lives in The Ludlow. He has a car service. And I know you two worked together after that elevator incident. Jules—tell me I’m wrong.”
What’s the point? He’s figured it out. All from one lousy sentence.
“Don’t tell anyone,” I reply. “It’s just a temporary work thing. He’s starting a new company, and I’m doing some contract work for him.”
Marco clutches the steering wheel with white-knuckle force. “ Contract work? That requires you to take off your clothes ?” His thick jaw ticks as he stares out the windshield. “Damn it, Juliet. I thought we talked about this. Now I have to tell Stryker.”
Panic leaps into my throat. “No, you don’t,” I insist. “It’s nothing. Just a—” Can’t say one-night stand. Can’t say friendship . “Fling.”
That word doesn’t fit at all. Flings are supposed to be light and carefree. Things between me and Graham are more complicated.
I broke the rules for him.
My own, my company’s. And I don’t even know why. Until I’m in a room with him. And then it all miraculously makes sense again.
“There’s no reason for you to mention it to Mr. Stryker,” I go on. “It’s not like we’re in a relationship.”
Marco guffaws. “Great. Perfect. So you’re sleeping with Graham Everett and working for him on the side, but I shouldn’t concern myself because you’re just screwing and not dating at all? You’re right. I feel so much better now.”
Well, when he puts it like that…
“No wonder Abuelita freaked out,” he mutters, frowning at me. “And she’ll tell your mother. And my mother. Carajo . You’re smarter than this. What happened?”
I can’t tell if he wants to know why I stupidly wore Graham’s clothes home or why I’m even with Graham in the first place. I don’t have an answer apart from another silly, fluttery flip in my chest.
“He’s”— Different . Fun. Brilliant. Good…? To me, anyway— “not what I expected.”
Marco casts me another sideway glance, still shielded by his Ray-Bans. “What does that mean?”
I want to groan. Because I don’t know . I don’t want it to mean anything, but I know it does. “I’m still figuring that out.”
Considering my face, Marco purses his lips to the side. “How many times?”
My face heats while my brain starts to tally. “I’m not telling you that.”
My cousin nods once as if he expected my reply. “So more than once. And do you guys talk ? Or eat meals together?”
“Yes.”
Marco’s lips twitch. “And you actually get work done amid all the other stuff?”
I nod, hoping my face won’t register my own surprise. I assumed we wouldn’t get anything done once our clothes came off last night, but Graham proved me wrong once again. He’s a hard worker, dedicated to tasks once he sets his mind to them. And he reads faster than anyone I’ve ever met.
With a deep sigh, Marco loosens his grip on the wheel. “Does he make you laugh?”
I recall his insane velvet slippers. His witty banter. “Yeah…”
He blows a breath out of his nose. “And he respects you? Your thoughts? Your wishes and… preferences ?”
Heat blazes over my face. “Yes,” I grit, mortified. “What’s with all the questions? I’m telling you, he and I are not a big deal.”
The lines between stern cop and protective older cousin blur all over his face. “I’m trying to determine if he’s decent, prima . If there’s going to be a man in your life, I want to be sure he makes you happy.”
“He isn’t ‘ in my life ,’” I sneer, every bit the brat. “He’s just?—”
“The man you’re falling for,” Marco states. Like a fact.
When I open my mouth to argue, he glares over the top of his shades. “Don’t bullshit me. I used to interrogate people for a living. And I know you. You like this guy.”
Carajo . He’s right.
Choking fear stabs my gullet. Pissed at myself, I cross my arms tightly over my chest and turn to peer out the window. Queens streaks past as I blink frustrated tears out of my eyes.
“Juliet.” The quiet stillness of Marco’s voice makes me look back at him. I find his sunglasses gone, his brown eyes on mine. “It’s okay to like him.”
Only it isn’t okay.
Because falling for a man always leads to trouble. It did for my mother and our grandmother. Marco is just about the only trustworthy guy I know—and even he can’t hold down a relationship.
“Where could it go?” I blurt, asking myself as much as I ask him. “It’s not like people actually stay together, happy.”
His voice drops to a whisper. “My parents did.”
That’s true. His Colombian mother and Syrian father met at an immigration office. They didn’t speak the same language or know any of the same people. They didn’t even know where the other came from, but they spent the whole morning staring at each other across the waiting room.
Six months later, they got married. They stayed that way until his father died three years ago.
I swipe at my watering eyes, irritated. “Yeah, but they were, like?—”
A fairytale .
“They were just people,” Marco tells me, interrupting my reverie. “Two people who found each other.”
I sniff back all my feelings. “They were so different.”
Marco’s smile looks sad. “People always assume that. I guess because they were from such different places and spoke different languages. But really, they always made perfect sense to me. Their hearts were the same.”
The depth of his simple statement strikes me. All my anxious musings and stomach flutters and doubt come to a screeching halt.
Their hearts were the same .
The thought closes my throat.
Panic must be written all over my face because Marco shoves his hand through his hair. “Look, I’m sure it’s nothing if you say it’s nothing. I’m probably wrong about everything. As you know, my knowledge in this area is purely theoretical.”
Marco’s lone-wolf attitude is a notorious thorn in Abuelita’s side. She constantly tries to fix him up and marry him off. It usually amuses me, but at the moment, I can’t even feel my own face.
He clears his throat and murmurs, “I won’t tell Stryker, Jules. I can’t do that to you. But keep it out of the office. And just… think about all of this, okay? Because if you and Graham get together, then our boss is going to find out eventually.”