Page 90 of Boss of the Year

Quietly. Respectfully.

When I looked up, his eyes were kind.

I nodded miserably. “It should have happened by now, right? Sometimes I think something is wrong with me.”

Lucas’s scowl returned. “Well, that’s insane. There’s nothing wrong with waiting for the right person. The world might be a better place if more people did that”

“Maybe. But what if I’m waiting for someone who doesn’t exist?”

Daniel’s face danced in my memory before dissipating into the image I’d seen earlier: the one with the red-tipped nose, the perpetual party boy.

And then there was the memory, the one from a year earlier, when I’d been forced to listen to him—I couldn’t call it “making love”—to that woman in his room.

No. I wasn’t waiting for that person either.

For the first time, I wondered who Daniel was inside. If the boy I’d been in love with had ever existed at all.

“He exists.”

The certainty in Lucas’s voice made me startle, wondering if I’d spoken aloud. When I realized he was answering my previous statement, I relaxed.

“You’re beautiful, Marie,” he went on. “Kind. Smart. Absurdly sweet. And not just since Paris—you always were.”

I snorted. It sounded like such a line. “You’re just saying that because you’re my employer. No one noticed me until I got back from Paris.”

He leaned forward in the water, and even though there was a solid ten feet between us, the distance seemed to shrink to mere inches.

“It was June.” His voice was soft with memory. “The roses in the garden were beginning to bloom, and I was taking a walk after a nasty argument with my father about investing in crypto. You had just started working full-time in the kitchen, and you were carrying a basket of something from the garden. I think it was kale, but you also had a container of early strawberries. You’d been eating some too—I could see the stain on your lips.”

My breath caught. “That’s…you remember all that?”

He smiled, more to himself than to me. “You knew you weren’t supposed to eat them, so you kept rubbing your lipstogether, like you were trying to hide the stain when you saw me coming. As you passed, you looked at me through those wire-rimmed glasses you used to wear. The sun was shining off your hair, tied behind your neck, and it looked like polished onyx. You smiled at me before saying, ‘Hello, Mr. Lyons.’ And in that moment, I thought I’d never seen anything so lovely in my life.”

My skin prickled, not with embarrassment, but with something quieter. Stranger. It was the ache of being remembered when you’ve spent your whole life assuming you wouldn’t be.

“I can’t believe you remember that,” I said again. “I can’t believe you rememberme.”

“As if I could ever forget.” Then, with a light splash toward some phantom thought: “I also remembered to check with Ondine about your age. I knew you were still too young for me, but I wanted to make sure I wasn’t committing some heinous crime by noticing you.”

He seemed embarrassed by the fact of our age difference.

I wasn’t.

“I don’t think I’m too young for you,” I said.

For that, I received a wry expression designed just for me when I was challenging him in a way he secretly loved.

An expression I was secretly starting to love myself.

“Marie. I am more than fifteen years older than you.”

I shrugged. “So? It’s just a number.”

His eyes glimmered. “I’m forty-one years old. You won’t be twenty-six until October.”

“And?”

He cast his eyes up to the stars and muttered something that sounded like, “Dear God, help me” before he looked back at me. “Last year, a doctor put his fingers up my ass to check my prostate and will continue to do so every two years until the day I die. I have a herniated disc that gets aggravated if I don’t do anhour of core work per day. I take my coffee black after ten a.m., haven’t changed my haircut in twenty years, and only like the bagels from one place in Manhattan. I’mold, Marie. And you are very muchnot.”