All Grown Up

Chapter 2

Ford

My assistant had a mighty fine ass.

“How the f**k do you get any work done around here?” Logan’s head turned to follow Esmée as she walked out of my office. Her hips swayed from side to side, and my friend’s head synchronized perfectly.

I couldn’t blame him. The damn thing was a work of art. Full and curvy—currently wrapped in tight red fabric that molded to her body—a perfect upside-down heart. When Logan’s head craned to the right and nearly touched his shoulder, I knew he was mentally flipping that heart right-side up.

Esmée reached the door and looked back over her shoulder with a flirtatious smile. “Is there anything else I can do for you, Mr. Donovan? Mr. Beck?”

“We’re good. Thanks, Esmée.”

Of course, Logan being Logan, he couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

“Do I have to work here to hear you say Mr. Beck with that accent every morning?”

Esmée was a recent transplant from Paris to New York. Her heavy French accent escalated her sexiness from an easy ten to an overflowing eleven-plus. I should have known better than to ask her to bring us coffee with Logan anywhere in the vicinity.

“Ignore my friend. He doesn’t get out in public much. Would you mind shutting the door behind you?”

When the door closed, I wadded up a paper from my desk and whizzed it at him. “Stop ogling my staff, douchebag. You’re going to get me sued for workplace harassment.”

“Don’t tell me you haven’t made a play for that.”

“I don’t dip my pen in the company ink.”

“Since when? Last time I stopped by your office, you were banging that redhead from accounting with the sexy-as-s**t shoes. And if I’m not mistaken, her cousin, too—at the same time, you lucky fuck.”

“That was a long time ago. I’ve matured since then.”

Logan tipped his chair back and smirked. “I forgot. That’s right. The receptionist—Ms. Mature. What was her name again? Misty? Marsha? Magdalene?”

“Maggie. And don’t remind me. That cost me a small fortune.”

“I would have paid a small fortune for what that woman gave you.”

“Except you don’t have a small fortune, asswipe.”

A few years ago I was going through a rough patch and not thinking with the right head. My receptionist videoed herself while giving me a blow job under my desk. I had no idea the whole thing was a setup. She’d positioned cameras from two different angles and told me to act like a pissed-off boss giving his secretary a job to do. I’d never been into role play before, but it turned out to be pretty damn hot.

Until she showed me a copy of the video and threatened to sue me for s****l harassment in the workplace. My attorney made me settle before it went to court. That was a business lesson in growing up they hadn’t taught me in college.

“So what’s our plan for next week?” Logan asked.

“My place at six. The C train is a block north on Eighty-first.”

Every year my college buddies got together for a weekend pub-crawl. We started early and hit a different bar within walking distance of each stop on a train line. One hour per bar. Ten stops on the train, ten different bars. Most years, guys started dropping by the fifth stop. But Logan and I always made it to the end. I paced myself, alternating waters between my drinks. Logan, well, he didn’t do the conservative approach. But the fucker could put away more drinks than anyone I’d ever met.

“What do you say we go warm up? Hit O’Malley’s?”

I looked at the time on my phone. “It’s ten thirty in the morning.”

Logan shrugged. “So?”

“I have actual work to do. In fact, you need to get the hell out of here. I have a meeting in ten minutes.”

“I still can’t believe you get to call sitting in this place and having that Persian kitten fetch you coffee, work.”

“A person from Paris is Parisian, not Persian, dumbass. And not everything is as simple as it looks.”

He shrugged and stood. “Whatever. Drinks tonight?”

“Can’t. Picking up Bella.”

“Annabella. How is your little sister?”

“Not so little anymore. Spent a semester abroad in Madrid. She’s flying home tonight. I told her I’d pick her up at the airport.”

“She’s in college already?”

“Going to start her second year. Nineteen.”

“Damn. She was always a cute little thing. Bet she’s a hot number now that she’s legal.”

“Don’t even think about it, asshole.”

Logan chuckled and held out his hand for a shake. We clasped. “Next week, then, pretty boy?”

The intercom buzzed, and Esmée’s voice came through. “Ford, you have Mrs. Peabody on the line.”

Logan’s forehead wrinkled. “Peabody? You still talk to that nutjob?”

“She’s not a nutjob… She’s just eccentric.”

“Eccentric is just the polite way of saying nutjob.” Logan shook his head. “I worry about you sometimes. I think you might be as nuts as her.”

“Get out, jackass. And don’t harass my receptionist on the way out.”

It made no sense to leave the office and go all the way uptown to my place, only to head back downtown to shoot over to the airport at ten. I had enough s**t to do here to keep me busy for days anyway. By the time seven o’clock rolled around, the floor was pretty empty—just me and the night cleaning crew. I’d ordered in some Thai food and decided to go sit in the seating area in front of the windows, rather than behind my desk with my back facing the city.

I sank into the leather couch, slipped off my shoes, and propped my feet up on the glass table in front of me. Still a few hours to kill, so I started to sort through my email while eating with chopsticks out of a cardboard container. My inbox was a damn disaster. At any given moment, there were always three-hundred unread and follow-up items to manage. I sorted them oldest first and opened one I’d been avoiding for nearly a week. The director of marketing wanted me to consider a half-million-dollar investment in an advertising campaign with Match.com.

I normally didn’t question his judgment—he’d been with my dad for twenty-five years. But I wasn’t so sure a dating website was the right place to market high-end Manhattan shared workspace. And that was a damn big chunk of change. Part of the problem was, I had no experience with how the online dating scene worked or the buying habits of its users.

After reading the PowerPoint proposal, I clicked on the link on the last slide, deciding to give the site a test drive. It took me about ten minutes to set up an account. When it prompted me to begin a search, I felt like I was shopping at the supermarket for the ingredients to make my favorite meal—interests, background, height, body type. I started to get into it and added s**t like my favorite slogans and my happy place so the site could match me with women with similar ideals.

My search returned more than a thousand profiles. I clicked on a few, and within minutes, one face began to blur into the next. Every woman I saw at the popular bar of the month must have also had a profile on this damn site.

I clicked around a little more and noticed some ads starting to appear. Within minutes, they knew enough about me to target exactly the type of product I’d buy. I’d listed one of my hobbies as hiking and checked the box for income over two-hundred-and-fifty grand a year. An ad popped up on the left of my screen showing a Patagonia brand, top of the line, all-weather backpack for four-hundred bucks. This site knew their users—probably gathered more intimate details than anywhere else.

After I finished buying the blue Mountain Elite bag, I clicked back to my email and told the director of marketing to move forward. Sold.

With no desire to continue my email cleanup and hours before I had to leave to pick up Bella, I narrowed my Match.com search criteria and updated my profile. The age category took me about ten minutes of staring at the screen.

Eighteen to twenty-four?

Twenty-five to thirty-one?

Thirty-two to thirty-eight?

At the ripe old age of twenty-five, I was done dating the eighteen-to-twenty-four crowd. Been there, done that. I had no patience for games. I wanted a woman who knew who she was, rather than one who tried to be the woman she thought I wanted. Unclick. Later, eighteen to twenty-four.

Leaving the box on the twenty-five to thirty-one age group checked, my pointer then hovered over the next box. Why was I excluding an awesome thirty-two-year-old? That’s more experience. And likely less bullshit. Click.

After all my modifications, I now had only a dozen or so women who were my supposed ideal match. One through five seemed interesting, definitely worth a second look. Then I clicked on number six—a woman from New Jersey. Her profile writeup actually had me laughing out loud.

Intrigued, I clicked over to her pictures. There were only a few, but one in particular caught my attention. It was a photo taken from the side as she cannonballed into a pool. Her dark hair flew high above her, and the portion of her face I could see was scrunched up in a smile. And while I couldn’t get a good look at her body, since it was all folded up, I could see she had the curves to rock the bikini she wore. Even better, she looked like the type of woman who cared more about having fun than her hair and makeup getting ruined in the pool. And lately, the latter was the type of woman I seemed to attract when I went out.

By the time my phone buzzed, reminding me it was time to leave to pick up Bella, I’d wasted almost two hours on a dating site I never thought I’d visit. I started to shut down my laptop, but the last open window had the photo of the woman cannonballing. It made me smile again before I clicked it closed.

My finger hovered over the power button to turn off my Mac, but then I thought better of it and went back to the dating site one more time.

I scanned through my matches, looking for one in particular. Finding Val44, I took one more peek.

What the hell? Why not?

Plenty of people used sites like this.

I clicked the button beneath her profile to let her know I was interested.

“This place is so boring.”

I dragged the last of my sister’s bags into my apartment and grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge. It was pretty damn humid for almost the end of May.

“Manhattan? Is boring? That’s one I haven’t heard.”

Bella rolled her eyes. “I don’t mean Manhattan. I mean your apartment. What fun can I have staying with my brother?”

“Where else would you stay? Besides, you’re here for the summer, not forever.” Thank God for small things. Bella had been fourteen when our parents died five years ago. I’d never thought about not taking her in and becoming her guardian, even though I was only twenty at the time. But I’ll admit I was relieved when she’d decided to go away for college. Raising a fourteen-year-old was sure as hell easier than a nineteen-year-old.

“The summer house. I’ll go out to Montauk for the summer.”

“I can’t commute from there every day.”

“So? Who asked you to commute? I meant I would spend the summer out there, and you would spend the summer here.”

“Not happening.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’d be all alone, and there’s no security out there.”

“It’s Montauk. No one even locks their doors. We spent every summer out there growing up. Montauk is safer than Manhattan.”

“How do I know you aren’t going to have wild parties?”

“So what if I do?”

“You’re nineteen, not twenty-one.”

She arched a brow. “And you never had a drink or threw a party until you were twenty-one?”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

“It just is.”

“God, Ford. When did you turn into Dad?”

Even if I had security installed at the beach house out east, I wasn’t sure it was a good place for Bella to be. Neither of us had been there since we lost Mom and Dad, and if there was anyplace in the world that was filled with memories of them, it was Montauk—Mom hosing down our feet in the outdoor shower, having breakfast with Dad on the back deck. Dad leaning in the doorway quietly, watching Mom dance to music in the kitchen. The way he smiled when he looked at her—that thought picked at a wound that had only just begun to heal.

When our accountant had suggested we rent out the place, I didn’t even entertain the idea. I’d rather take the loss on maintaining the property than let strangers into the house.

Bella would never be able to handle the stir of all those memories. Honestly, I wasn’t sure I could either. I should probably just put the place up for sale.

“Come on, Ford. You know, I don’t actually need your permission to go. I can grab the Jitney while you’re at work.”

Of course she was right. Bella was over eighteen and could go anywhere she wanted now. The only thing I held over her was the purse strings. I was her financial trustee until she was twenty-one.

“Maybe we can spend a weekend out there or something?” I said.

“You mean the two of us? Gee, how romantic. Sounds like a blast.”

I sighed. This was going to be one long-ass summer.