Suddenly Dating (A Lake Haven Novel Book 2) Page 11

  “I prefer red, and I just happen to have this great bottle of wine that my friend Mallory gave me. It’s organic. Want some?”

  “Ah . . .”

  “Oh,” she said, before he could answer, “I forgot to mention that I made you dinner. I mean, if you want it. But I wanted to show my gratitude for rescuing me last night, and you always seem so hungry.”

  He stared at her—or rather her legs, which were now directly in front of him. He was amazed by this stroke of luck. The offer of food, real food, and not some processed shit, had drawn him to the kitchen without him even realizing it.

  “I’m going to make a mushroom sauce, but the sauté pan is up here. Who puts a sauté pan up here?”

  Well, he had. He couldn’t find another place for it.

  Lola reached, and when she did, she hopped a little to reach it, but in doing so, her foot missed the chair. “Careful!” Harry said, and put his hands up to catch her. One accidentally landed on her derriere, which, he couldn’t help but notice, was neither too firm nor too soft. It was perfect, pliable yet firm. The ideal ratio of fat to muscle in his non-expert opinion. He wanted to examine it, push his fingers into it.

  “God, thank you,” she said, glancing down at him. “I could have broken my neck.” She withdrew her arm from the cabinet clutching the sauté pan, and Harry withdrew his hand from her ass.

  She jumped down from the chair and pushed it a little haphazardly beneath the kitchen desk. With his foot, Harry nudged it completely under. That was the point he noticed she was wearing an apron with the body of Superwoman painted onto it, giving her the illusion of having that figure.

  “It’s steak,” she said.

  He glanced up from her cartoon figure. “Huh?”

  “Dinner. I’m going to grill steaks. It’s grass-fed beef, which is supposed to be better for you. Oh God, you eat beef, don’t you? If you don’t, I made a salad. Oh, and baked potatoes. You look like a guy who would like baked potatoes. Oh, and guess what else? I made you a pie. See?” She slid past him, dropped the pan onto the stove, then reached across the kitchen island to pick up the pie and show him. The dough was latticed across the top of the pie. “Apple.”

  “Yes,” he said, without thinking. His stomach was already rumbling.

  “Yes . . . it’s apple?”

  “No. I mean, yes, I want whatever you’re offering,” he said, and added gratefully, “I’ll eat anything right now. Because you’re right, Lola, I’m hungry. Unfortunately, my options are pretty bleak out there.”

  Lola beamed. “Great! So yes to the wine?”

  “Yes to the wine. I’m just going to clean up,” he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of his room.

  “Okeydoke,” she said, and put down the pie. She turned back to the kitchen, and for once, Harry was not annoyed that there were dishes and condiments scattered about and something oozing out of a pot on the stove. Nope, he wasn’t annoyed, because she had made him a fucking pie.

  He took a quick shower, dressed in some jeans, and managed a quick shave. When he returned to the main living area, he heard voices and realized they were coming from Lola’s phone, set to speaker as she worked at the stove.

  A young woman was complaining. “He doesn’t have the right to tell me what to think or who to hang out with,” she said.

  “Uh-huh.” Lola dropped the lid to the pan on the counter with a clang. “Ty, don’t tell her what to think.”

  “I haven’t told her what to think,” a man’s voice said irritably. “I just said she might be a little more careful about who she hangs out with! The woman was a Moonie, Lola.”

  “I can’t stand this!” the girl screeched. “How can you be so narrow-minded, Ty? You hate everyone! You have contempt for anyone different from you!”

  “That is not true, Kennedy! The only people I have contempt for are siblings who don’t agree with me!”

  “Okay, all right,” Lola said, her back to Harry. “What do you want me to do about it, Ty? I’m up to my elbows in a mushroom sauce.”

  “I would kill for some of that,” the man said wistfully. “Anyway, you need to come home and talk to her, Lola. No one is looking out for Kennedy, and God knows what she’s doing on campus without someone checking up on her.”

  “I am not a child!” the young woman shrieked.

  “I’m not coming home, Ty. You’re going to have to deal with it if you’re worried about it,” Lola said, stirring something in the pan.

  “Me! I already have three children, remember?”

  “I am right here!” Kennedy said angrily. “I can hear everything you’re saying, Ty!”

  “Okay, how’s this?” Lola said calmly as she whirled back around to the counter. She saw Harry and winced, mouthed an I’m sorry, then said, “Kennedy, please call your brother once a week and make sure he knows where you are. Ty, lighten up. Kennedy is twenty-three and, therefore, an adult. You can’t dictate her life to her.”

  “Thanks, Lola, helpful as always,” Ty said curtly. “Look, I have to go, I don’t have time for this. I’ll talk to you both later. Kennedy, I’m coming over tomorrow!”

  “Whatever,” Kennedy said. “Is he gone?”

  “He’s gone,” Lola confirmed.

  The young woman said, “Sometimes I hate him.”

  “Don’t say that. He’s your brother.”

  “I don’t hate him, hate him. He just makes me so mad. Hey, Lola—do you have any money? I found this sweater at Topshop that I love. But I don’t get paid until the end of the month.”

  “How much?”

  “Fifty bucks.”

  Lola groaned. “Okay, fine, I’ll PayPal you. But that’s it, Kennedy. I’m not working right now, I can’t keep you in sweaters.”

  “I know. Thank you!” the young woman chirped. “You’re the best big sister ever.”

  “And remember, you’re going to go see Mom this weekend.”

  “I will!”

  “And I’m going to call you tomorrow to talk about this Moonie business.”

  “She’s not a Moonie,” Kennedy said. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  Lola said good-bye, and with a tap of her elbow, ended the call. She smiled sheepishly at Harry. “Sorry about that. Siblings,” she said with a shake of her head. She removed the sauté pan from the stovetop, then picked up a rolling pin and began to roll a glob of dough directly onto the kitchen counter.

  Harry decided not to say anything because he also noticed two glasses of wine on the bar. “One of these for me?”

  “Yes! Please take one. I’m going to join you just as soon as I roll out this extra dough. I’m going to make some extra piecrusts and wedge them into the freezer around your mountain of frozen dinners.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m pretty sure I got the freezer when we divided things up.” He winked at her.

  “Ooh, making a joke about it now,” she said brightly. “We must be getting somewhere.”

  “I think we are,” Harry agreed. “It’s been a couple of weeks and no one has been murdered. I’ve cleaned your kitchen and rescued you, and you’ve bit my ear. I’d say we’re off and running with this roommate thing.” He picked up the wine and slid onto a barstool.

  “I apologize for the ear thing. That was a failure of personal impulse control. I promise,” she said, pressing her hand to her heart, apparently having forgotten it was covered in dough, “that I won’t do that again.”

  “It’s okay.” It had surprised the hell out of him, but it hadn’t been unpleasant. Quite the opposite, really.

  Lola continued working on the dough as Harry sipped the wine.

  “So . . . those people were your brother and sister, huh?” he asked, curious about Superwoman now.

  “Yep. That was exactly half of the herd. I have two more.” She stopped rolling a moment. “You ought to hear all five of us go at it.”

  He’d rather not. “That’s a lot of kids in one house,” he said absently.

  “Especially in a tw
o bedroom, one bath walk-up. It’s a wonder any of us made it to adulthood.” She laughed at herself, wiped her hands on Superwoman’s bare middle, and picked up her wine, but Harry was mentally taken aback—she’d grown up with four siblings in a two-bedroom walk-up? He and Hazel had had their own bedrooms, a nanny, and so many extracurricular activities that they’d rarely seen each other when they’d been kids.

  “Hey,” she said, as if a thought just occurred to her. “Let’s have a drink on the terrace while the sun sets. It’s so gorgeous, every night. I can see why Sara and Zach bought this house. They bought it, right? Or did they build it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll ask Sara next time I talk to her. If I talk to her. I got an email from her. Apparently she met a new boy toy at the Thai resort and now she’s pretty hard to get hold of,” Lola said as she walked out, leaving the dough flattened to the counter top, the rolling pin still on it. “Oops, I probably wasn’t supposed to mention that. Promise you won’t say anything. But why would you? Zach would wonder how you would know anything about Sara, am I right?”

  She stepped outside and began to chatter about the view instead of Sara’s love life.

  Harry followed her out. Lola set fire to the charcoal and they took up residence in two Adirondack chairs and shared a footstool as they waited for the coals to get hot. Neither one spoke for a few moments as they gazed out at the deepening shadows. Harry was thinking about food. Just the smell of the charcoal in the grill was making him ravenous. But he wouldn’t ask when he’d be fed like some impatient clod.

  He tried to take his mind off his stomach. He squinted at the lake and a pair of paddleboarders coming back to shore and asked, “Where are you from, Lola?”

  “Brooklyn. What about you?”

  “Manhattan.” He eyed his glass before sipping.

  “Upper East Side,” she said matter-of-factly.

  She said it as if she knew him, and he glanced curiously at her. “How did you know?”

  “Easy. You have that look.”

  “That look?”

  “You know, a little preppy, a little rich.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” he scoffed. “I don’t look preppy or rich. I wear hard hats and steel-toed work boots. I don’t even have a look.”

  “Maybe it was the Cornell T-shirt,” she said. “I saw it in the laundry. No one in my neighborhood is trying to start a bridge company or wears a Cornell T-shirt. That’s really curious to me, by the way.”

  “That I went to Cornell?” he asked, laughing a little self-consciously.

  “No, the wanting to start a bridge construction company. Why not the rest of the road? Why single the bridge out for special treatment?”

  He grinned. “Because I like bridges. I like designing them and figuring out how to build them. After working several years in a big civil engineering firm, I discovered that I’m pretty darn good at bridges. So I decided to go for it.”

  “Cheers!” she said, holding out her wine glass to him.

  Harry touched his to hers. “And what about you, Superwoman? When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?”

  “Oh, I . . .” She waved her hand and looked out over the lake. “Always. But I never thought I could. That always seemed like one of those jobs you either fall into, or you’re born to do, you know? It’s not like you can get a creative writing degree and just hang your shingle, right? Not if you want to eat, anyway. My family was really poor, so I went to community college and became a paralegal before I decided to commit to writing.” She smiled sheepishly. “That’s what my sister Kennedy calls it—committing to a vision. You would not have guessed from that phone call, but she’s actually studying psychology. Which she is very good at applying to all of us, but never to herself.”

  “Small world,” Harry said. “My sister is a resident psychiatrist at Mount Sinai.”

  “No way!” Lola said with delight.

  “So you were a paralegal with dreams of becoming a writer.”

  “Not exactly. I always wanted to write, and I wanted to study creative writing. But Casey and Ty and Ben were all bound for college on scholarships, and there wasn’t enough money to cover all the expenses. And Kennedy would need money for school . . . so I bowed out.”

  She had given up pursuing writing so her siblings could go to college? “Could you have borrowed the money?”

  “Oh yeah,” she said. “I almost did. But do you know how much it costs to get a degree these days? I would have been paying it back for the rest of my life.”

  “What about your parents?”

  “My parents?” She glanced away. “My dad died when I was young, and my mother is . . . she’s not well. Oh, geez, I have to get the steaks on.” She popped up and hurried back inside before he could ask her more about it.

  It was an interesting difference in life, he thought idly. There had never been any question that he would go to college, and to a good one. The point of friction between him and his parents had been his field of study and the fact that he’d not wanted to pursue graduate degrees like his sister.

  Lola returned a few minutes later with two thick slabs of steak on a plate and put them on the grill. They chatted about the weather until the steaks were ready, and then went inside. Lola pulled out a salad from the fridge, potatoes from the oven. She took off her apron, pulled her hair down from a hair tie and shook it out with her fingers. “Please sit,” she said as she found the wine bottle and placed it on the table.

  The meal was delicious—the steaks were grilled to perfection and the mushroom sauce reminded Harry of the meals he’d had in five-star restaurants with his family. Lola was animated during the meal, asking how one went about starting a bridge construction company. He told her bits and pieces, how he’d had some setbacks—skimming over how far in the hole he actually was—and that the need for heavy equipment and operating costs had led him to sell his apartment. He told her about the toll road and how he hoped he could get the bridges on that project.

  “And then what?” she asked.

  “Then, bid on the next job. And the next.” He had polished off his steak and was feeling completely renewed. “Like you, right? You finish your book, then start another one, right?”

  “That’s the plan. If I finish it. And then I have to sell it. It’s not easy to get a book published these days. It’s going to be a challenge convincing a publisher they ought to buy it.”

  Harry chuckled. “I can imagine.”

  “Excuse me?” she asked, looking up. “Why do you say that it like that?”

  He looked up with surprise. “I, ah . . . well, the pages I read were . . . different.”

  Lola laughed. “You clearly don’t appreciate American Psycho meets Gone Girl meets Bridget Jones’s Diary.”

  “Huh?”

  “See, that is one reason I want to meet Birta Hoffman so badly—how do you explain something as complex as a book? And I want to know how she works, how she plans a book, what her routine is. I want to know everything about her.”

  Harry had no idea who she was talking about. “Who is Birta Hoffman?”

  Lola gasped so suddenly that she almost sent half a potato flying across the dining room table. She gaped at him, wide-eyed, and Harry felt a little foolish for not knowing the name. As if this Birta Whoever was someone everyone would know, like the President of the United States.

  “She just happens to be last year’s winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, that’s all. And she was a finalist for the Pulitzer once.”

  That meant nothing to Harry; he looked at her blankly.

  Lola gasped again at his apparent stupidity. “She is one of the most important writers of our time and I’ve been dying to meet her for years. I love her work, I would love to know how she constructs her novels. Is she a plotter? A pantser? Now do you see?”

  What he could see was a very attractive woman whose eyes sparkled when she talked gibberish. “Umm . . . no,” he admitted, shoving a hand through his hair.


  “Ohmigod, what is happening to our society?” she murmured, and tossed back in her seat, staring off toward the window as if she’d just realized life was hopeless.

  “Wow. Surely I’m not the only uncultured male walking around.”

  “God, definitely not,” she said, sitting up again.

  Harry was too amused to be offended. “So what about this Bertha, genius of fiction—”

  “Birta. Birta Hoffman is the genius of fiction. And what about her is that I just found out she lives on Lake Haven!”

  “Is she rooming with Amy Schumer?” He laughed at his own joke.

  “Hey!” she said, pointing at him. “You can’t blame me for hoping to meet Amy Schumer.” She grinned and poured more wine into her glass. “But my friend Mallory actually knows Birta.” She sipped her wine. “I have this fantasy that she and I will meet, and we’ll be friends, and then one day I will casually mention my book, and she’ll be all like, ‘oh, I must have a look, Lola,’” she said, mimicking some sort of accent that Harry didn’t recognize. “And of course I’ll let her, and she will love it, and she will want to send it to her agent—he’s like one of the best agents in all of New York, by the way—and the next thing you know, they are offering me a million bucks for the book. Does that sound weird?”

  “One hundred percent,” Harry assured her. “They actually pay a million dollars for a book?”

  “What? No!” She laughed as if that was as ridiculous as believing Amy Schumer would attend a party in a village the size of a postage stamp.

  This woman confounded Harry, as women often did. But more than that, Harry thought, he was actually having a good time. A surprisingly good time. Lola was a bright light, a fun dinner companion. Maybe it was the second glass of wine—or was it a third? Maybe it was the smell of apple pie. Or maybe it was that the last several times he’d had dinner with a woman, it had been Melissa, and the tensions between them had seemed to permeate even the taste of the food.

  Whatever it was, he was beginning to think that as far as roommates went, he’d lucked into a good one. She liked to cook. She had a healthy appetite, silky hair, and pretty eyes. They talked about New York and their favorite spots, about the new resort area at the other end of the lake. They talked about favorite bands and films. She said she liked the Mets.