“You’re running to Denver because you don’t want to have dinner with us?” Ben asked, feigning hurt and with clearly no concept of what had just happened. “Little extreme, my friend.”
Jack was already standing and grabbing his suit jacket. “We both know this dinner invitation isn’t about me.”
Ben’s wife had been trying to set Jack up with her friends for forever, while Jack did his very best to dodge her fix-up attempts. Though he’d never hopped states before. But the timing of this trip just worked out.
With dating, he was definitely more of a casual guy, reserving his serious streak for work. Even if it drove his best friend’s wife to throw lots of dinner parties he didn’t ask for. Jack and Ben met during what Ben’s wife Sarah called their oat-sowing days.
That descriptor might take it a tad too far, given that Ben had no oats to sow. He had Sarah. Even early on, she was his everything. Still, he’d rooted Jack on while Jack sowed his. They’d had a fuckuva lot of fun during those days.
Well, mostly Jack had the fun.
But he was good with that.
Jack’s feelings about Sarah’s friends had never shifted. They were decidedly…bland. The feelings, not the women. The women were fine. To be honest, the previous dinners and coffees and lunches and beach dates and gerbil-house-sitting-accidental-double-bookings that Sarah set up for him were all with very nice women. But they were all women looking for a future he was not interested in providing.
“Sarah has a friend coming…maybe,” Ben said, all noncommittal. Jack called bullshit. Ben’s eyes roamed to the left the barest of inches when he said,maybe.
Which meant he was lying.
“Will thisfriendbe bringing her husband?” Jack shoved everything he’d need for a virtual office into his travel satchel. Why he was continuing to bait Ben, he didn’t really know. He wouldn’t be in town anyway.
“Husband?” Ben scoffed. “Come on, man, you know Sarah better than that. Would she invite you over if the woman who may or may not attend was hitched?”
Ben was six feet six, built, and bald, with dark brown skin. He was the smartest man Jack had ever met. The brains behind the company. He’d seen the need for influencer management long before anyone else. And also, he had the brilliant idea to put Jack in charge of selecting talent and making them shine.
“I’m good finding my own hookups.” Jack pursed his lips. He just would be too busy to even consider it. He paused, mentally calculating how many days he’d need to fix this situation with April.
Ben sauntered farther into the office. “Ah, but my wife wants you to have more than a tryst. She wants you to have what I have.”
“Your wife should focus on tellingyouwhat to do, not me.” Jack said it, but they both knew he didn’t mean it. Jack adored Sarah and, like Ben, would do anything to make her happy.
Except take up with one of her friends.
Ben married his high school sweetheart, and they currently lived their happily ever after in a house near Pasadena with two kids and a gerbil. He left every day by five and didn’t work weekends. That’s why he had Jack. Because Jack did not mind working weekends.
Jack was good with what he had in his life. His track record was spotless. He’d never failed in business—and that was enough. He didn’t need a love story like Ben’s.
If he were to want to meet a woman for anything remotely longer than a weekend—and he didn’t think he’d ever be in that mindset—he’d like a woman like April. The way her voice always sounded like she cared. The way she didn’t get too worked up about anything. Usually radiated calm confidence.
“Your wife is a troublemaker,” Jack muttered, grabbing the files of a nearly washed-up celebrity chef account he’d brought in recently. The chef would not be washed up when Jack was through with him.
A tickle of an idea about the chef and April and using them both to benefit each other formed. A kid cookbook. Chef Ethan had a kid, didn’t he? Yeah, he was pretty sure Ethan had a kid.
He’d focus on that later. Later, when he was in-flight with time to spare.
Not when he was on a mad dash out of the office with Ben’s wife trying to set him up the whole way.
He sighed. Eventually, Sarah would get the message that he wasn’t interested in any of her long-term entanglements. Wasn’t interested in anything that shifted his focus away from what mattered: this gig of his.
His first love.
His only love.
“Nosy is her way. Seeing you married with four kids is her dream.” Ben dropped to a chair across from Jack’s desk.
“Youdon’t even have four kids,” Jack muttered with a shiver. Four kids was a lot of kids.
“Yet.” Ben grinned a cat’s-got-his-cream grin that made Jack want to gag.
