Chapter 40
forty
I feel like a jackass, but I practice what to say all the way to Jackson Heights.
“ Hola, Senora. Yo soy Graham Everett. Juliet es mi amiga. Está ella en la casa ?”
Looking like a stooped, creased version of her granddaughter, the elder Rivera stands on the other side of her apartment’s open door, flicking her eyes over my three-piece suit. She fixes me with a scathing scowl.
Hell . I should have changed after work. But by the time I decided to ambush Jules, I figured I better go before I lost my nerve.
Not now , she said last night. And I listened, damn it. Through three orgasms, multiple rounds of defiling Dominic Carter’s desk, and all the way downstairs, where I put her in my hired car and hailed a cab.
But today, she’s been much too quiet, only messaging to tell me she felt exhausted and needed to head home after work to catch up on sleep.
If she thinks I’m just going to disappear without helping her through whatever her father pulled yesterday—or accept fucking on a desk as some sort of resolution—she’s about to learn a lesson.
Graham Everett doesn’t surrender.
Although, with Abuelita glaring at me? I’m about as close as I’ve ever been.
I look down at my own clothes, examining the fine black fabric and red pinstripes through her eyes. I chose this suit because it matched the cursed red handkerchief folded in my breast pocket, along with my crimson velvet vest and an onyx shirt and tie.
And, well.
Fuck.
I look like the rich, arrogant supervillain from a comic book.
Instead of insulting me, the elder Ms. Rivera purses her lined lips and asks, “You suit—it is silk?”
If she feels self-conscious about her broken English, it doesn’t deter her ferocious frown. I raise an eyebrow at her. “ Sí, senora .”
But she doesn’t smile back. She pinches at my shoulder and makes a tsk sound. Her silver brows fold together as she waves me in. “You come. I fix.”
It seems like she knows exactly how to throw me off my game. Like her granddaughter . “Um…” I stifle a chuckle and force myself to nod. “ Sí, senora .”
Yes, ma’am seems like a safe response to most things. I say it again when she wrestles me out of my jacket and once more when she points to a seat at her kitchen table.
As she busies herself with my suit, I take a moment to soak in my surroundings, hoping to find more clues to understanding the woman I can’t seem to stay away from.
Juliet’s jokes over the weekend about her entire apartment fitting into my living room weren’t exactly an exaggeration. The place starts in a pressed stretch of hallway, cluttered by a coat rack. It ends in a small rectangular room with a low ceiling.
A partial brick wall stands opposite the entrance, cabinets filling the space. On the other side of the partition, I spy a living area just big enough for a loveseat and a small TV.
I sit at the scarred wooden table pushed into the wall across from the kitchen. My fingers glide over its edge, imagining what it would be like to grow up with a family table. Did they sit here and tell stories? Was it always just the two of them?
Less than five minutes after taking my jacket, Abuelita returns, holding out the garment with an impatient flourish. Before I slip it on, she grimaces and pinches my shoulders again.
“This. Un problema ,” she fusses. “You no eat. Tall man. Necesita comida .” She passes the jacket to me. “Put in. I fix.”
Blinking, I do my best to interpret her words. Put on ? I slide my jacket back on, and she gives a firm nod.
The fit feels better already. She’s altered it in five minutes, against my will— talented and bossy, just like her granddaughter .
“ Gracias ,” I tell her, meaning it.
A second later, cabinets start to open and close with rapid-fire determination. Before I know what’s happening, she has food out. Tons of it. Beans and beef and eggs and an array of produce, all laid in haphazard piles.
She spares me a look over her shoulder. “You fuerte ,” she tells me. “Here.”
In French, forte means “strong,” so when she waves a meat mallet in her hand, I figure she has some sort of manly kitchen duty for me. I shuck my jacket for a second time and start to roll up my shirtsleeves.
When I take three steps and reach the place beside her, she whips an apron off a hook and tosses it at me. “Silk stain. No está bien .”
Not good .
See? I can do this.
I smile while I don the apron. Silk does stain like a bitch.
“ Plátanos ,” she says, shoving a stack to me. They look like small, oddly shaped bananas. Plantains, I realize.
“You cut. Mash. I fry.”
Simple enough. I get to work, peeling and cutting the plantains into chunks before squashing each piece with the mallet. I’ve done half the pile before I realize I never got an answer about whether Juliet is even home.
I chance a glance at her grandmother—who works twice as fast as me, turning a heap of fresh herbs into precisely minced mountains in minutes—and ponder my next question carefully, choosing words I think I can get right.
“ Cómo está Juliet ?”
That’s all I really care about, anyway. I don’t need to know where she is every minute, but I need to know how she is.
Abuelita slows her knife and gives a small, discouraged shake of her head. “She sleeps,” the woman murmurs quietly.
Shit. Juliet isn’t one to crawl into bed and hide. She must be in serious pain.
Her grandmother notices when my face registers shock. She sighs. “She work toda su vida . And now”—she slashes her knife through the air in front of her—“ Nada .”
It takes me a second to comprehend. My chest clenches. Her mother . Whatever her father said must have something to do with her lifelong plan to bring her mom to America.
I hit the next plantain with unnecessary force and utter a word I ordinarily would not say in front of a distinguished lady. Abuelita’s soft, wrinkled hand flies up, grasping my chin and turning my head.
I brace for a dressing down. But she simply tilts my face one way and then another, her dark eyes narrow and sharp as they trace my features.
“ Un pinchao ,” she grumbles. “ Pero tu amas a Julieta .”
There’s my nickname again. I still don’t have a precise definition, but it doesn’t matter anymore. It’s Juliet’s word for me; I’ll always like it.
I’ve grown to accept that I may never understand the meaning. But I can’t understand anything else Abuelita said, either.
Seeing my confusion, her expression melts into compassion. She pats my cheek softly. The maternal gesture touches a place inside me that I never even knew existed.
“ Julieta ,” she murmurs, “you love.”
She still has my face in her hand. It’s not like I can lie.
And I don’t really want to. Just like Jules, something about her grandmother inspires me to be an honest man.
“ Sí, senora .”
If I expect some sort of welcoming embrace, I’m doomed to disappointment. She drops her weathered hand and keeps frowning.
For a long moment, she stares. Then she taps her chest. “Abuelita. You call me.”
I bite back a victorious smile. “ Sí , Abuelita .”
Twenty minutes later, we have the food prepped and on the stove. Abuelita snatches my apron and sends me back to the table. I watch her make coffee and listen as she tells stories about Juliet as a girl.
She speaks a dizzying mix of Spanish and English, but I follow better than I expected, possibly because her inflections make her easy to read.
Sometime halfway through coffee, with seven different pans sizzling on the stove, Juliet appears.
Everything inside of me sighs, simply relieved to see her. I grin when I recognize my black T-shirt hanging off her petite shoulders.
With her hair clipped up against the back of her head, spilling over the side of a claw, and a super tight pair of yoga pants, she looks as disheveled and gorgeous as she did the morning she woke up in my bed. When she steps into the light, though, I note the swelling around her eyes and the red lining their lids.
My smile vanishes. I jump to my feet instinctually, forgetting we aren’t alone until I’m half a foot away from her. Her eyes flash to her grandmother, then glare at me.
“It’s okay,” I reassure quietly. “I haven’t totally screwed anything up yet. She even let me mash plátanos .”
Juliet’s brows lift. “She let you help?”
My bijou looks cold. I wonder if I could touch her without incurring Abuelita’s wrath. “Yes. She asked me to.”
“She literally never— never —lets anyone help her,” Juliet mumbles. “Marco tried once, and she swatted him with her metal spatula.”
I know my sexy lawyeress. When she says “never,” she means it. Another swell of fondness rises in me as I smile at her grandmother’s profile. “It’s not my fault that the Rivera women seem to take a particular shine to me.”
Her mouth wobbles, torn between amusement and disapproval. “What are you doing here, Graham?”
She doesn’t use her endearment for me, and I notice. My fingers twitch while I repress the urge to reach out to her. “You need me,” I reply, looking into her gold eyes. “So I came to you.”
Juliet lifts her pointed chin, even though it trembles. She looks ready to fight through her pain, but the second our gazes connect, she stills.
Her eyes widen. Her skin blanches. For a moment, her guard slips. And she looks so lost; pain stabs my heart.
Before I can stop myself, I take her hands in mine and bring them to my lips, drawing her closer. “Whatever it is,” I vow against her knuckles. “I’m going to help.”
Fire snaps in her eyes. I give her a severe look, halting an argument before it can begin. “I came all the way to Queens. During rush hour. In my silk suit. Do I seem like a man who will leave without getting what he came for?”
She presses her lips and her thighs together at the same time, then nervously flicks her gaze to her grandmother again. It doesn’t seem likely that the elder understands my double entendre, but I take the hint.
With one last crooked grin, I tug Juliet over to the table and pull out a chair. She drops into it with an indignant huff, never taking her wary eyes off my face.
Even with a little old lady in the room and ready-to-bolt rigidity stretched taut through Juliet’s posture, sexual tension still crackles between our seats. I can’t keep myself from reaching for her hand again. “I have no idea what we’re making, but it smells amazing.”
Apprehension seeps into her features as she runs her eyes over mine. “ Bandeja paisa .”
Abuelita bursts into the conversation, waving her spoon and firing off a stream of Spanish so fluid I realize she majorly dumbed it down for me before Juliet came in.
My bijou listens. The corner of her lush lips pulls up in a reluctant smirk. Then she gives me a wry once-over.
“She says you’re too lean for your beautiful suit, and you need to eat more. Apparently, she told you ‘in plain English’ that she would fix it.”
“The suit?” I clarify.
Her lips twitch again. “No. You .”
I try for another teasing smile. “Many have tried, and many have failed. But if anyone could do the impossible…” My eyes slide over to her grandmother, cooking up a storm. “My money’s on you two.”
Juliet tilts her head, hair swishing to the side. “Seriously,” she whispers. “Why are you here?”
I’ve already told her the truth, so I try to explain. “The week is over. And as soon as I walked out of the office, there was only one person I really wanted to see.”
Because I love you, woman .
She honestly can’t believe me. She tries, but even as her eyes widen hopefully and her lips fall slack, those thin black brows pucker more. “That’s it?”
“ Sí, senorita .”
A giggle bubbles out of her. “Your accent is awful .”
Abuelita’s laughter surprises us both. Our heads swivel in unison, turning to witness the stern old lady erupt in hearty chuckles.
Juliet’s beaming smile melts the last of my stubborn pride. I’ll be the butt of any joke if I get to see that smile. And, in that moment, with the marvelous Rivera women mocking me, I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.