Love Handles (Oakland Hills #1)
by Gretchen Galway
Chapter 1
The funeral was more fun than this, Bev thought, waiting in the lobby of her late grandfather’s fitnesswear company. The young receptionist was on the phone and had been deliberately ignoring her since she came in. Maybe she can tell I got my suit at Ross Dress For Less.
Bev glanced around the dim lobby, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, surprised Fite Fitness looked more like the waiting room for a used car dealership than an upscale fashion manufacturer. It even smelled stale, like yesterday’s lunch.
“That piece of shit car,” the receptionist said. She wore a lopsided cordless headset over her skinny blond braids but was speaking into a cell phone she had slipped under the earpiece. “I hate San Francisco. I just replaced those brakes like last year, and the prick’s like, ‘Oh it’s your fault for braking too much.’ Like I should just crash into everybody. Stupid hills.”
She doesn’t look old enough to drive, Bev thought, feeling ancient at thirty. She checked her watch again. Only a few hours until her flight home to LAX. “Excuse me,” she said, smiling broadly. “I’m Beverly Lewis.”
The receptionist held up one hand, index finger erect, and kept talking.
“I have an appointment with Richard,” Bev continued. “The CFO. It’s kind of—”
The girl spun her chair around so that Bev was staring at the tangle of braids on the back of her head.
“—important.” Her mother had warned her the fashion business was filled with self-absorbed, emotional people, but Bev was an expert—she worked with demanding four-year-olds every day. She just had to think strategy.
Next to the desk, racks of clothes were lined up like the under-staffed dressing room of a department store. Curious, Bev stepped to the other side, slid the hangers apart, and ran her hands over the smooth Lycra and polyester. Track suits. T-shirts, yoga pants, running shorts. Cropped tanks with built-in bras.
Poor man must have been senile, leaving his company to me. She was a preschool teacher with no muscle tone—which her grandfather would have known, if he’d ever met her. Shaking her head, Bev pulled out her cell phone and scrolled down to the number she’d got from the lawyer.
The desk phone trilled. The receptionist let out a loud sigh, set down her cell, and realigned her headset. “Fite Fitness, this is Carrie.”
“Hi Carrie, this is Beverly Lewis, right next to you. I’m here to see Richard, the CFO.”
Carrie jerked her head around and stared at Bev holding her phone.
Bev smiled, trying not to laugh at the look on her face. “Ed Roche was my grandfather,” she said into the phone, since Carrie seemed to process better through it. “Could you please tell Richard I’m here?”
The woman’s eyes widened. She nodded and swung back to the phone to dial. She mumbled something, dialed, mumbled again, then hung up.
“Thanks,” Bev said, this time without the phone.
“He didn’t pick up, but I left a message. You should have told me who you were.”
“Sorry. Richard didn’t answer?”
“I’m sure he’ll come out and get you. It’s kind of hard to find his office.” Carrie pinched her lips together again, this time with an apologetic look. “I’d get you something to drink, but we don’t have anything like that anymore.”
“That’s okay, I’ve got my water bottle.” Bev pulled it out of her shoulder bag, waved at Carrie, and walked over to a lint-colored chair that may have been white when it was manufactured in the 1980’s. She thought about the word Carrie had used—anymore—and wondered if business was as bad as it looked.
Not her problem. Her aunt Ellen could figure out what to do with it; Bev’s life was hundreds of miles away.
She sat down next to a dusty ficus, noticing the brown leaves littering the floor beneath it. She lifted her hand and caressed a crispy leaf with her thumb. “Poor thing. When’s the last time you had a drink?”
She got up onto her knees and leaned over the back of the chair, pouring her Calistoga into the pot. Clouds of dust motes rose up around her head, glimmering in the shafts of light coming in from the street. She sneezed.
“Did you lose something?”
The man’s low voice made her flip around in surprise, hand over her mouth, fighting back another sneeze. Right behind her stood a muscular blond man in a tank top and shorts. She tilted her head up to gaze into his face, suddenly wishing she’d spent a little more on her outfit for the day. With a face that would impress even her Hollywood executive relatives, the man was well over six feet tall, broad at the shoulder, narrow in the middle, and glistening all over—her classic nightmare.
She realized she’d seen him at the funeral, though not dressed like this.
“Thank you.” She maneuvered herself off her knees and onto her feet, trying to look graceful. He must have just had a lovely view of her big butt. Her face burning, she extended a hand. “I’m Beverly Lewis. Are you Richard?”
His cheerfully sun-kissed hair didn’t suit the gloom of the rest of him. His workout clothes were slick and black, his mouth was a hard line, and his penetrating dark eyes made her feel as though he could see through her retinas into the soft, jiggly underbelly of her soul. Not to mention the rest of her.