A Gentleman in the Street (18 page)

He gave her a thoughtful look. “I’m not averse to constructive criticism.” He closed the laptop and set it on the table, picking up his abandoned sandwich and swallowing a huge bite. He nodded at the box in her hands and spoke when he finished chewing. “Sorry. I almost forgot why I came here.”

Her fingers clenched around the wood. That was right. This was why he had come here. Their stupid agreement.

With a bit more force than necessary, she pushed the box across the table. “It’s all yours.”

Akira held the beer he had brought between two fingers. Dressed in jeans and a white button
-
down, her shiny black hair piled on top of her head, she was about as casual as he had ever seen her.

He would have to do some research on women’s clothes. Lidia would have garments of the highest quality, though she had been in hiding for the last decade. His fingers itched to grab his laptop and write the thought down, but he had already played the eccentric author once tonight.

Jacob would, of course, have to finish the James Talent book he was contracted for, but then he’d have the unpleasant conversation with his agent about putting the man on hiatus. Akira was right. A spin-off was smart and would take advantage of the momentum he had built.

It would also let him do something fun and new for a change, let him flex his creative wings. He hadn’t realized until he had verbalized his discontent, but the reason this book was so difficult was probably in large part because he was utterly bored. Being in one man’s head for this long was exhausting.

With Lidia, everything was wide open. New backstory, new intrigue, new mysteries, new stakes.

A new love interest. Many new love interests.

He almost gasped aloud and cast a longing glance at his messenger bag before he mentally shook his head. Not now.

Jacob cleared his throat and wiped his fingers on a napkin before picking up the box. “I wish I had had a few of these puzzles around when my brothers were younger,” Jacob murmured, turning it in his hands. “Anything to keep them out of trouble.”

“Ah.” Akira shifted in her chair, drawing her legs up. Her feet were bare and small, each dainty toenail painted a deep, vibrant
,
glossy red. He wanted to nibble on them.

He had never particularly paid much attention to a woman’s feet before. But then, he had never seen Akira’s feet before.

“How are the Bobbsey Twins?”

His mouth kicked up, thinking of how his brothers would react to being called that by a beautiful woman not much older than them. “They’re…” He glanced up, mouth drying when he caught her gaze locked on his lips.

Was it his smile? She probably wasn’t used to it. His default setting was solemn, and he had never gone out of his way to grin at her. Testing, he let his face relax, let the grin come. Her eyebrows snapped together, and she looked down at her hands linked together in her lap.

Interesting. His heart beat a tiny bit faster. “They’re, uh, great. They opened a landscaping business last year. It works for them. Connor’s the brains. Ben’s the brawn. And the heart, really.”

“I remember them being thick as thieves.”

“They’re very close.”

“I’m glad their business is doing well.” She hesitated. “Let me know if I can help.”

Most people would kill to get assistance for a fledgling business from Akira Mori, even if that business was as mundane as a landscaping company
.

He bit back the instant surge of pride, the automatic denial of help. This wasn’t Mei sneaking him a blank check out of whatever lingering emotions she felt for his father. This was a simple, gracious offer.

“Thanks,” he said humbly. “If you hear of anyone looking, I’m sure they’d appreciate a referral. You haven’t seen it, but they did my backyard.”

She wrapped her hand around her knee. “The rose.”

“Yeah.” He had spotted it sitting in a bud vase in her office yesterday, but he hadn’t said anything. Careful. They were both being so careful.

“I’ll keep them in mind.”

He nodded, beginning his nightly manipulation of the panels of the box. He had done more research on these puzzles since that first night. He’d made progress and logged each successful move in his brain, but since it took two hundred and twenty-six moves to open the thing, it was slow going. He wasn’t even a fifth of the way to solving it.

“Kati’s going to college in the fall, right?”

His chest swelled, still so proud he could burst. “Stanford
,
” he announced.

She nodded and drank her beer. “I wanted to go there.”

“Did you?” He cocked his head. “You went to…”

“Harvard.”

“Right.”

She shrugged. “It wasn’t my scene, but I got my diploma.”

“Did your—?” He hesitated, wary of breaking their tentative peace.

“Did I what?”

He cleared his throat. “Did your parents want you to go there?”

A hard gleam entered her eyes. “No. They didn’t think I could get in. Well, they didn’t think I could get in anywhere.” She shrugged. “But I was a legacy at Harvard, thanks to my dad, and we still had hotels with my name on them at the time, so they rolled out the red carpet.”

“Ah.”

“Still, I always thought Stanford looked like a great place to go. And your sister doesn’t have motivation to get as far away from you as possible.”

“I don’t know,” he said ruefully, remembering Kati’s frosty goodbye to him that morning when she left for school. “Right now, she’s probably wishing she’d applied abroad.”

“Oh.” Akira brushed a crumb off her shoulder. She had always been slender, but the more time Jacob spent in her company, the more certain he was she had lost weight in the months since her mother had passed.

Not that he cared what she weighed, but his growing suspicion over why the change had occurred did concern him. Grief, though she might deny it. Maybe not grief over the woman her mother had been, but grief over never getting to see the woman the rest of the world saw
.
Of never gaining closure on their rocky relationship
.

She would shut down if he brought it up, and given his own complicated part in her relationship with Mei, he wasn’t eager to delve into that Pandora’s box. He was also smart enough to know weight wasn’t a subject women enjoyed discussing at length. So he would keep his trap shut and merely continue feeding her.

“Trouble with Kati-cat?”

He ignored her use of his nickname for his sister. Kati would kill him if she knew a third party had overheard it. Especially Akira. “There’s always something with teenage girls, isn’t there?”

Her shoulders lifted. “She’s not the type to get in trouble, though, right?”

His eyes narrowed at her subtle emphasis on the word
type
. “She’s a good girl,” he agreed slowly. “Has great grades, is focused on college.”

Akira took a drink from the beer. He had never seen her drink beer at parties, only wine or liquor, but the lager didn’t seem to faze her. “Oh, Jacob.” Her expression was mildly pitying.

“What?”

“I’m going to clue you in on something you really should be aware of.” She leaned closer. “There’s no such thing as good girls and bad girls, or the right crowd or the wrong crowd. Life isn’t that simple.”

“I know,” he protested.

“Do you? Or have you put her up on her own mini pedestal? Maybe that’s why any problems you have with her throw you for a loop.”

“So, what, I’m just supposed to expect the worst from her?”

“No. Expect her to be a human.” She pointed her finger at him, stern. “When I was at your cabin and you were calling her? I bet you a thousand dollars Kati was with her boyfriend that weekend.”

That was an easy bet to take. He tried to keep his smugness to a minimum. “She doesn’t have a boyfriend.”

“Maybe she hasn’t introduced him to you yet. Because, and I further bet, you and your brothers have successfully scowled and run off any guy she does bring home.”

Lies. He was the soul of hospitality to all of Kati’s friends. Even the bastard, pimply-faced boys who hovered around, panting after her. “Trust me. She doesn’t have a boyfriend.”

Akira cocked her head. “She talks to him on the phone a lot. Maybe he’s dropped by to study with her. They go silent when you walk in on them.”

A tall, skinny kid popped into his head. Quiet, a bit shy, who blushed any time Kati spoke. Their heads had been awfully close together when he’d walked in on them studying at the kitchen table a few weeks ago… “Darren,” he growled.

Akira mimed a shooting motion. “Darren’s your man. Or rather, Kati’s man. Boy. Whatever.”

He thought of the hesitancy in Kati’s voice when he had called her from the cabin, the way she had quickly switched the subject to Akira. “She’s going to get a lot more than her phone taken away if she lied to me and then spent the weekend with some boy,” he grumbled.

“Bah.” Akira waved her hand. “Give the kid a break. It could have been a lot worse. I won’t tell you what I was doing with my weekends at that age.”

“She’s a young girl…”

“And in a few short months, she won’t be under your supervision at all.” The words shot through him, burrowing into his heart, but she was relentless. “Soon, she could be shooting crack and having orgies on the weekends, and there won’t be a damn thing you can do about it. Let her learn while you’re still around.”

He subsided, unhappy. “I’m going to ask her.”

“Fine. But don’t be a dick about it.”

“I know you might find this hard to believe, but I am capable of not being a dick,” he said wryly.

She pressed her hand against her chest, an action which brought his gaze directly to that expanse of smooth flesh. “Did you…did you just use the D word?”

“I can do a lot more than use it.” The words came out unbidden, the sexual entendre surprising them both. It was just that this conversation was coming so easily, so naturally, both of them merely speaking with one another without thinking about their history or consequences or—

Jacob stiffened. He didn’t need to rationalize a lapse in decorum, damn it. He was a fully grown man. Let her see he wasn’t a type either.

Her lips curved wickedly, and she stretched her legs, drawing his instant attention. God, he loved those legs, displayed to perfection tonight in her clinging skinny jeans. They were long and muscular, her thighs and calves strong.

Strong enough to wrap around a man’s waist as he drove into her, trapping her body against a wall in a room lit by a dim bare bulb…

He swallowed, mentally slapping himself from wandering into dangerous storage room territory. Where were they? Oh yes. She was about to make some sort of lewd comment or snarky reply. For the first time ever, he was eager to hear it.

Her gaze lowered, hiding her eyes from him. “What did Kati do to get her phone taken away?”

No sexy remark? Oh. Okay.

He controlled his disappointment and digested her question, hesitating to answer truthfully, that she had been the source of disagreement between him and Kati. Did he want to lose this easy camaraderie, the novelty of sitting in Akira Mori’s presence without pride or anger interfering with their conversation?

This was too new. Too fresh. So he merely looked down at the box and started to manipulate the panels. “She was unkind to someone I care about.”

A throat cleared from the vicinity of the entrance to the kitchen. Jacob broke off in the middle of whistling “Bad Romance”—the song was too damn catchy—and glanced up from where he was loading the dishwasher. “Oh. Hey.”

Kati linked her hands behind her. Dressed in black tights, black shorts, and a tight pink top, her backpack slung over one shoulder, she was ready for school. “Hey.”

He straightened. It had been quiet around the house, both of them communicating with each other only when necessary, with stilted, abrupt language.

He hated the strained awkwardness between them, but he wasn’t about to give in on such an important principle.

However, this was the first overture Kati had made, and he was prepared to accept it like the gracious adult he was. Jacob nodded at her hair. “You changed your style.”

Self-consciously, she fingered the ends of her neon-purple hair. The dye jobs she did at home—when he cleaned later, he was certain to find splashes of purple on the bathroom counter. She must have gone to a salon yesterday, though, because she’d chopped the strands in a shorter, asymmetrical cut.

“You don’t like it?”

“No, no,” he hurried out.
Anything’s better than the puke green
.
“It’s striking. Very cool.”

“Thanks.” She continued to watch him, hands shoved into the pockets of her shorts.

He glanced at the watch on his wrist. “You’re going to be late for school.”

“I’m okay.” She wandered into the kitchen. “It’s a late-start day.”

“Ah.” Usually he had Kati’s schedule memorized. But it hadn’t seemed quite that important in the past couple of weeks.

The kid was capable of knowing when she needed to be somewhere, he told himself, tamping down the spurt of guilt over not paying attention to her the way he always did. “Right.”

“I can do the dishes, if you want, when I come home from school,” she offered.

He flicked his wet hands. “No problem. I got it.”

Kati nodded. “Oh. Okay.”

When she lingered, he finally took pity on her. “Something on your mind?”

“Haven’t seen you much lately.”

“You’ve had all those play rehearsals.” He turned back to the sink. Kati was directing the spring play at school, a rather convenient distraction. It had meant there was no one at home to question why he, the borderline hermit, had spent five nights away from his cave, staying out progressively later. He’d managed to beat Kati home most nights, though a couple of times it had been close, with him flopping on the couch and turning on the TV in time to hear the jingle of her keys.

The previous evening, though, he hadn’t been able to manage that trick. He couldn’t be blamed. Akira had looked up from her gyro and asked him whether he’d made any progress in plotting his new book. The next thing he knew, they were hotly debating the kind of weapon his heroine would favor. That had led to a discussion on gun control…and somehow, the existence of aliens.