Page 21 of Shopping for a CEO's Fiancee
I bark out the address and turn on my laptop.
Funny how the markets haven’t changed much in ten minutes.
I blink a few times, and Gerald says, “We’re here, sir.”
“Short blocks,” I mutter.
By the time I turn off my laptop, find my phone, check texts and answer a few, Terry’s next to the SUV, shaking his head, a half smile on his mouth.
I get out of the car and ignore him.
“Busy markets?”
“If I hadn’t checked, I’d have missed a critical message.” He doesn’t need to know it was from Gina about my massage appointment tomorrow.
“You’re an important man.” He always had that shock-jock voice. Terry could have made a killing in radio.
That makes me halt. “Is that what this is about? You’re jealous Dad picked me for CEO?”
“My God, Andrew, you figured it out. Exactly. I’m jealous. Now get in here and order for me. Take charge. Be the controlling sonofabitch Dad wants you to be. Order the hell out of the hummus. Dominate that kebab.” He says this with a mock intensity that would come across as scathing sarcasm from Declan, but seems jovial in Terry. Like having Santa Claus sing CeeLo’s song “F*** You.”
It’s unnerving, but I’m too pissed to let it rattle me.
We’re seated at a low table with soft cushions on benches. The place smells like incense and an earthy spice I can’t name. Terry looks at me with a smirk, but it’s a friendly, playful expression. I’m good at reading people, but hell if I can understand my own brother’s nonverbal cues. He looks like a blend of Mom and Dad and acts like no one in the family.
Scratch that.
He’s more like Mom than anyone else.
“What’s good here?” I ask.
“You’re the one in charge.”
The server approaches and before she can say a word, I order. “We’ll take your best two-person platter.”
“Meat or vegetarian?”
“Meat. And wine. Whatever your best bottle of red wine is.”
She nods and retreats. A man approaches, fills our water glasses, and disappears.
“So?” I ask.
“So what?”
“Why’d you leave Anterdec? I didn’t pay much attention back then, but you were in your junior year of college. Dad’s protégé. Eldest son and primogeniture and all that. Inherit the family business. Titan and son.”
His eyes drain of emotion. A wave of regret pours over me, but I hold fast. For some reason I can’t quite understand, I need to know this.
Need to know it now. On the surface, it has nothing to do with my feelings for Amanda.
Deep below, though, it is everything.
If I were having this conversation with Dec or Dad, I’d get exchange after exchange of deflection. We’d spar and tussle, verbally jabbing each other, and the only information I’d get would need to be gleaned afterwards, reading between the lines.
Terry meets my eyes and says, “It was all about Declan.”
Didn’t see that coming. On multiple levels. I wait for him to explain, and as he opens his mouth—
“Andrew!” a female squeals. “My goodness, what a coincidence running into you here!”
I turn to find my face in a woman’s cleavage, her scent a fine perfume that takes me back to high school.
She pulls away and I fumble, looking up, standing quickly.
“Jessica?”
Definitely didn’t see that coming, either.
Terry’s eyebrows are the opposite of his voice: nice and high. The server delivers our wine, setting the bottle on the table.
Jessica’s hip bounces against mine with a misplaced intimate nudge. She’s animated and alive, eyes sparkling as they cut over to Terry.
“Terry! The reclusive brother! I haven’t seen you in years,” she gushes, offering her hand for a handshake. He takes it, her slim-fingered appendage swallowed by Terry’s. He gives her a man’s-man handshake and I see the muscle in her jaw twitch with the unexpected force.
“Jessica! Fancy meeting you here,” he says. “Given my hermit-like state, this must be divine intervention.”
She quirks one eyebrow, extracting her hand, and using it to shove a wall of straight, blonde hair behind one ear. “You always did have a voice that could melt frozen butter,” she teases him.
“Join us,” Terry offers.
“And panties,” she says under her breath, out of Terry’s earshot.
I groan internally, but move aside as Jessica plops her ass on the cushioned bench next to me. The server instantly appears with another table setting and a wine glass.
“What are you drinking?” she asks, her face going shrewd.
“Merlot,” Terry answers.
She gives him a hard look, then openly crawls over him with her eyes. “My goodness, Terry, you’re covered in paint!” Her giggles pierce the calm environment, bridging the line between mocking and mirthful. The fact that I can’t tell the difference sets my teeth on edge. “I’d imagine being out of the limelight means letting yourself go. Must be nice.”
She waits patiently. Too patiently, hands in her lap, making eye contact with Terry, then me.
I reach for the wine bottle and pour obediently.
Her smile is my reward. I guess.
What is she up to?
“That wedding was something else, wasn’t it?” she says with a throaty, condescending laugh. “As if poor Declan weren’t dragged through enough with the gaudiness of all that Scottish crap, Shannon made him escape in the helicopter. Hello—decorum! I give the marriage two years. I hope James insisted on a pre-nup.”
Terry and I share a look. He guzzles his entire glass of wine in one long gulp.
The fastest way to make two people bond is to give them a common enemy.
He reaches for his phone and starts tapping, then puts it away, watching us intently. The man doesn’t actually use his phone. Why now?
“And then the bridesmaid fell in the water and you saved her!” she adds with glee, clapping her perfectly-manicured hands. She is golden tan, a color never found in nature. Her skin is impossibly smooth. Something seems slightly computer-generated about her. Jessica triggers the Uncanny Valley reaction in me.
“What a ridiculous spectacle,” she continues.
I bristle at the word ridiculous and tune her out as I drink my glass and Terry refills it.
“The only good to come from that wedding is the confirmation that you’re not a vampire, Andrew.”
I am in mid-swallow, and as I finish, the wine feels like an endoscopy tube doing down.
“Between the cat as a flower girl, the half-naked bridesmaid who was clearly doing it for attention, the crazy mother of the bride thinking the President of the United States had come to her pathetic daughter’s wedding, and what you had to do to rescue that frumpy oaf.”
Did she just call Amanda a frumpy oaf?
“I am so sorry your brother has dragged down the family name by marrying into that mess.” A blindly charming smile aimed directly at Terry gives her nothing but my brother doing his best imitation of an Easter Island statue. She tries to use it on me.
“Oh, no,” I answer, turning in the booth, putting space between us as I stretch one arm across the back, behind me, the other holding my very full glass of red wine. “If anyone dragged down the family name, it was me. Going back to high school.”
Terry and I exchange a look. He smiles.
Turkish food always makes McCormick men so clumsy.
As the entire contents of my glass pour into her lap like the Hoover Dam in a disaster movie, I try to savor every second. I didn’t tell Amanda the entire story about my dating Jessica Coffin when we were flying home from Vegas. Truth is important in relationships, yes.
And as Jessica leaps up, Terry tries—oh, how he tries—to grab the half-full wine bottle before it tips toward her and pours even more wine all over her lap.
But he fails.
We’re a bucketful of family fail right now, aren’t we?
“I am so sorry!” he says, jumping up, grabbing the bottle and fumbling, tipping the neck up so the wine burbles up in a parabolic stream, hitting between her breasts.
“OH MY GOD!” she screams, batting at the stains, Terry’s hands, making the mess turn into a wine Vesuvius.
The server rushes over with a towel and a look of horror. “Miss! Miss! Can I help?”
“Of course you can help, you stupid idiot! Get the manager!”
A flash from a far corner of the restaurant registers and I turn toward it.
Twenty-somethings taking pic after pic after pic.
Like Jessica at Dec and Shannon’s Boston wedding.
Terry’s eyes cut over to the flash, too, and he gives me a look, winking.
“You are having some sort of breakdown, Andrew! I’ve never known you to be clumsy!” Jessica rants.
“People change. I am so sorry.” My tone makes it clear I’m not.
“My dress is ruined!”
I look at her, softening my eyes, working on a convincingly sexy body crawl that she picks up on instantly, minus the fakery.
“It was a year out of style anyhow,” I say, her reaction a hiss. “I probably did you a favor.” Wink.
The server is mopping up the destroyed tabletop. A pool of wine on the cushion means I can’t sit. Jessica’s gawking at me, gape-mouthed, her hand curling and uncurling in the universal gesture of outraged women.
I’m about to get slapped.
I give her a one-shouldered shrug and turn away, making a call.
