Party of Two (The Wedding Date #5)(9)

“I haven’t . . . exactly . . . called him yet. I’m still deciding if I’m going to do that.”

Ellie frowned at her. Olivia almost laughed—when Ellie, the woman with a perpetual smile on her face, tried to frown, she looked like a little kid playing with facial expressions.

“When you say, ‘I’m still deciding if I’m going to do that,’ do you mean you’re deciding if you’re going to call him versus text him, or do you mean you’re still deciding if you’re going to get in touch with him at all?”

Olivia cut herself another piece of cake.

“The latter. I don’t have time for men right now, Ellie! Especially not . . . complicated men.”

Ellie dropped her napkin onto the desk.

“Oh, come on. Call the man! Or text him, whatever. This is a really good cake!”

Olivia laughed at that. It was just like Ellie to have her priorities straight.

“It is a really good cake, but what if he sends cakes like this to every woman he has the slightest interest in? I don’t want to be just one of Max Powell’s conquests.”

Ellie picked her cake up again.

“That’s an excellent point, and all the more reason to find out. Call him, see if he’s trying to woo just some random woman he met at a bar, or if he’s trying to woo you, specifically.”

Ellie stood up and went to the door.

“But before you do any of that, respond to that email Daphne sent us, would you? She likes you better than me.”

Olivia minimized her many tabs open to stories about senator Max Powell and clicked over to her email. Daphne had sent this forty-five minutes ago; she couldn’t believe she’d wasted all that time researching a man instead of responding to a potential client.

See, she didn’t have time for men. She was here in L.A. to concentrate on work, not to get “wooed” by anyone. Ellie knew that, what was she even talking about?

But she couldn’t just leave senator Max Powell hanging after he’d sent her a cake. He’d been perfectly friendly and not at all creepy; she would be rude to just ignore this gift. Plus, who knows, she might run into him again, and she didn’t want to seem like the asshole here.

She picked up her phone to text him.

Hi Senator—Thanks for the cake, it’s delicious. My schedule is pretty booked for the next few weeks, but

No, come on, that sounded laughable. He was a senator; his schedule was likely four times as packed as hers was.

Hi Senator—Thanks for the cake! But I’m not sure if

No, the exclamation point sent the wrong signal.

Hi Senator—The cake was very thoughtful, thank you. However

Should she call him Senator? Or Max? He’d signed the card Max, so it seemed overly formal to the point of rudeness to call him Senator after that.

Hi Max—Thanks for the cake, we all loved it. But I don’t know if

“Max” sounded too informal. He was a senator, after all, and she’d only really talked to him that one time. Better to not call him anything.

Hi, this is Olivia Monroe. Thanks for the cake, it was delicious. I hope all is well with you.

Well, that seemed perfectly appropriate and very cold. She didn’t feel that cold toward him.

She sighed. Fine. She’d call him.

Luckily, since it was just after six p.m., he was probably still in a meeting, or at a dinner, or with his staff or something—it would probably go to voice mail. If there was one thing that being a lawyer had taught her, it was how to leave a polite but firm voice mail. That was much easier than a text message.

She tapped out his number on her cell phone and waited for it to ring. She definitely wouldn’t have to talk to him; no senator would have his ringer on. And he definitely wouldn’t answer a number he didn’t know.

“Hello?”

Shit.

“Hello, Max?” Maybe it was a wrong number. It was probably a wrong number—she always did that when she actually had to type a number into her phone.

“Olivia?” His voice was warm, and slightly amused.

Nope. Not a wrong number.

“Um, yeah. Hi. How’d you know it was me?”

He laughed.

“Well, I only give this number out to a handful of people, and everyone else who has it is in my contacts. And you told me you were from Northern California, which made sense with your phone number—you never wanted a New York number?”

He only gave this number out to a handful of people?

“Oh, I thought about getting a New York number on and off, but I’m so glad I never got rid of my Oakland number,” she said. “After a while, it was a point of pride for me. Plus, I think there was some part of me that always knew I was going to come home, even in my most insufferable ‘New York is the greatest city in the world!’ phase. Thank goodness I had the sense to take the California bar right out of law school, or else this whole process would have been a lot harder.”

She didn’t know why she was babbling on about her phone number and taking the bar. Why was she even on the phone with a senator in the first place? Not just on the phone, but on his private number. What the hell was going on?

“I had that ‘New York is the greatest city in the world’ phase, too, in my midtwenties,” he said. “The phase ended, but I still love that city. I’m always grateful when I get to go there, though these days my trips there aren’t as . . . exciting, let’s say, as they used to be.”