Page 64 of Boss of the Year

“Right. Yes. That sounds…” I trailed off, pushing a palm heart around on my plate.

Then, I made a decision. Since I’d returned from France, I’d been struggling to be playact a version of myself I thought people wanted me to be rather than the person I was. But Daniel wasn’there, and there was no reason to impress Lucas Lyons with anything other than my cooking. Right?

I set my fork down on my plate. “The truth is, I’m not really much of an explorer.”

Lucas’s fork paused halfway to his mouth. “No? I thought you enjoyed Paris.”

Heat crept up my neck. Why, ohwhy,had I said anything at all?

But the look on his face indicated he wasn’t going to let it go, so I continued.

“I mean, I’d probably just get lost. Or kidnapped or something. I don’t speak Portuguese, and I’ve never been anywhere like this before.” The words tumbled out once they started. “Even in Paris, it took me months before I worked up the courage to leave St. Germain. I had this friend, Louis—he’s a musician and a student at one of the conservatories. And he basically had to take me around the city one block at a time.”

Lucas tipped his head. Almost like he was charmed, not repelled by my confessions. “How did you meet him?”

“At a concert.” I smiled at the memory. “After a few months, I found myself getting a little homesick, so I decided to attend a Mass, which would be the same anywhere, no matter the language. I found this tiny church called Saint-Éphrem-le-Syriaque, not far from my apartment, and decided to go, but when I arrived, I discovered that the Saturday Mass was not being held because they were having a piano concert instead. It was so small and sweet and quiet compared to the rest of the city, I decided to give them the five euros and stay. Louis was the performer. He approached me after and asked if I liked what I’d heard. I said I did, and he sort of adopted me after that.”

It was a more intimate version of the same story I’d offered Daniel. But instead of the boredom and dissatisfaction in Daniel’s response, Lucas only looked intrigued.

“But not a romance?” he asked.

Of course, he knew exactly how little experience I’d had with all of that, even in Paris.

I shook my head. “Louis leans toward men. But I think he—well, Iknow—he understands what it feels like to be on the fringes of things. We just became friends, and he showed me around. To big things like the Louvre and Montmartre, and small things like the Paris flea market or walking the Canal Saint-Martin. I never would have seen any of it without him holding my hand. Kind of pathetic, I know. Like I was a child or something.”

On that note, I shut my mouth. Louis’s and my friendship was one of the best things about my time in Paris, and I didn’t want to tarnish those memories by thinking about my own cowardice.

Lucas’s gaze never left my face. But there was no judgment there, no condescension. Just thoughtfulness.

“You don’t like the unfamiliar,” he said as he went back to eating.

“It’s not…it’s not that,” I stammered. “Well, maybe it is, but it’s notjustthat.”

“What else, then?”

How could I put this into words? “My whole life, the world has always seemed too big. Overwhelming with danger lurking everywhere.”

“Well, you did grow up in the Bronx.”

I snorted. “Only people who didn’t grow up in the Bronx think about it like that. It’s more because my parents died when I was two—I told you about that—and if you ask my older siblings, things were pretty bad when they were alive too. Then we moved in with my grandparents, who raised us in this cramped little house filled with love and sweetness, but it couldn’t keep all the danger away. Bad things still happened…out there.”

Lucas frowned over a palm heart. “Bad things like what?”

I shrugged. How could I make this make sense?

“I watched. When my older brother went to war and ended up with PTSD. When my nonno died, and it tore my grandmother apart. When my older sister got knocked up at twenty-two and thought the dad had left her for another woman. Another sister is a widow with four kids because the mafia killed her husband. And Joni—that’s my younger sister, the one who’s dating Nathan Hunt—she’d been chewed up and spit out by some of the worst people in New York before she met Nathan.”

Lucas seemed to consider all of this for a long time. “That’s…a lot for one family to go through on top of losing your parents.”

I nodded. “It was. It is. So I always just sort of kept to myself. It seemed safer, somehow, to do that.”

“But you went to Paris. Nothing happened to you there.”

“I had Louis there. And in New York, there was always my siblings for my grandparents to help me make changes.”

Some things never evolved, I realized. As a child, I had seen so little of the city I’d grown up in because I was often too scared to leave the boundaries of Belmont without my grandmother or another sibling. I even had special permission to stay home on field trips while the rest of my classmates would visit the Met or Central Park. I’d thought things had changed in Paris, but truthfully, I’d just traded one trusted chaperone for another. And now, here I was, a grown woman afraid to walk around another of the world’s great cities on her own.

I really was pathetic.