Stuck-Up Suit(16)
“This is beautiful. But odd,” I said.
Graham took off his jacket and settled into his side of the table with one arm casually slung over the top of the booth. “Fitting.”
“Are you saying I’m odd?”
“Are we going to fight about it if I say yes?”
“Probably.”
“Then, yes.”
My brow furrowed. “You want to fight with me?”
Graham tugged at his tie, loosening it. “I find it turns me on.”
I laughed. “I think you need counseling.”
“After the last few days, I believe you may be right.”
The waitress returned with our drinks. She set a highball glass down in front of him and a wine glass in front of me.
Graham had ordered Hendrick’s and tonic. “That’s an old man’s drink, gin and tonic,” I said as I sipped my wine.
He swirled the ice around in his glass, then brought it to his lips and looked at me over the rim before drinking. ”Remember what arguing with me does. You might want to look under the table.”
My eyes widened. “You aren’t.”
He smirked and cocked an eyebrow. “Go ahead. Put your head under. I know you’re dying to take a peek anyway.”
After we both finished our drinks, and some of my nerves had started to calm, we finally had our first real conversation. One that wasn’t about sex or tongue rings.
“So how many hours do you work a day in that big fancy office of yours?”
“I usually go in by eight and try to leave by eight.”
“Twelve hours a day? That’s sixty hours a week.”
“Not counting weekends.”
“You work weekends, too?”
“Saturdays.”
“So your only day off is Sunday?”
“I actually sometimes work in the evening on Sunday, too.”
“That’s nuts. When do you find time to enjoy yourself?”
“I enjoy my work.”
I scoffed. “Didn’t sound that way when I stopped in the other day. Everyone there seems afraid of you, and you refused to open the door.”
“I was busy.” He folded his arms over his chest.
I did the same. “So was I. I took two trains to personally deliver that phone, you know. And you didn’t have the decency to even come out and say thank you.”
“I didn’t know what was behind the door waiting for me, or I would have come out.”
“A person. A person was behind the door. One who went out of her way for you. If I were a sixty-year-old married woman with blue hair, you should have come out to thank me.”
He sighed. “I’m a busy man, Soraya.”
“Yet here you are on a weeknight at only 7PM. Shouldn’t you be working until eight if you’re so busy?”
“I make exceptions when warranted.”
“How big of you.”
He arched an eyebrow. “You want to look under the table, don’t you?”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “Tell me something else about you. Aside from you’re a workaholic with a superiority complex who drinks fancy drinks. All of that, I could have guessed from my observations on the train.”
“What would you like to know?”
“Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
“No. I’m an only child.”
I mumbled under my breath. Gee, I never would have guessed that one.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
“How about you?”
“One sister. But I’m not speaking to her at the moment.”
“And why is that?”
“Bad blind date.”
“She fixed you up?”
“Yep.”
“With the guy who took you to the funeral? What was his name, Dallas?”
“Aspen. No, she didn’t fix me up with Aspen. I picked that disaster all on my own. She fixed me up with a guy she used to work with. Mitch.”
“And it didn’t go well, I take it?”
I fixed him with a stare. “I nicknamed him High Pitch Mitch with the Itch.”
He got a chuckle out of that. “Doesn’t sound so good.”
“It wasn’t.”
He squinted at me. “And will I have a nickname tomorrow?”
“Would you like one?”
“Not if it’s anything like High Pitch Mitch with the Itch.”
“Well, what did you have in mind?”
The wheels spun in his head for about thirty seconds. “Morgan with the Big Organ?”
I rolled my eyes.
“You can fact check under the table at any time.” He winked.
I continued to try to get to know him, even though all roads led to between his legs. “Any pets?”
“I have a dog.”
Remembering the little dog from my snooping in his cell phone, I said, “What kind of a dog? You seem like the type to have a big scary one. Like a Great Dane or a Neapolitan mastiff. Something representative of what you keep goading me into looking at under the table. You know, big dog, big d—”
“The size of a dog is not a phallic symbol,” he interrupted.
So, it was his cute little dog in the pictures.