“I couldn’t do that,” Kady said, aghast. “You have no idea what’s at stake here. People are depending on me. Their whole lives are waiting for me, and I have to—”
“They’ve waited over a hundred years, so what does one more day matter?” He paused. “Miss Long, don’t you ever have fun?”
At the very thought of such a thing, it seemed that a thousand scenes went through Kady’s head at once: coming home from school to help Jane’s mother with the housework, cooking for people all weekend, then school during the day and more courses during the night, while catering parties to help pay her way through school. Then there was Onions and Gregory. His idea of “fun” was to have Kady cook dinner for twenty-five people who he said might someday help further his future political career. Then there was Legend, and sometimes what she remembered most from those days was feeling frantic that she’d never get back home. After that was the worry about a job, and now—
She stopped thinking when she heard Tarik laugh, and squinting, she looked up at him.
“Going over your life in your head?” he asked, and when Kady’s eyes widened at his words, he smiled. “Miss Long, if it seems that I can read your mind, it’s because I think I can. My father believed that childhood was a preparation for the stress of being an adult, and because I was someday going to be in charge of millions, he made sure that I spent my life in school. And after that I had all the responsibility of the Jordan Company dropped onto my lap. I think my life has been about as much fun as yours has. What do you say we take the day off?”
“What are you trying to get from me?” she asked suspiciously.
“All your worldly goods,” he said with a smile, and Kady had to laugh.
“You could hold everything I own in one hand,” she said. “I’m thirty years old and I own nothing, have nothing. At the moment I don’t even have a job.”
He made a sound of disbelief. “Are you going to try to make me believe that a chef of your reputation doesn’t have hundreds of offers of employment?”
“A few,” Kady said modestly, looking down at her coffee cup. He had hand-ground the beans and hadn’t allowed her to touch a thing as he’d made buckwheat pancakes.
“Come on,” he said, holding out his hand to her. “Let’s both take the day off.”
As Kady looked up at him, a chill went down her spine, as it was the gesture she had seen a thousand times in her dreams. Right now shade darkened the lower half of his face, but a shaft of sunlight came through the leaves and highlighted his eyes.
“Come, habibbi,” he whispered, and she knew it was an endearment from another language. “This time you can reach me.”
Kady’s heart and her common sense warred with each other, but she remembered all the times in her dreams that she had tried to take his hand and had been unable to reach it. Now she extended her hand, tentatively at first; then as she neared his fingertips, she smiled up at him and slipped her hand into his.
Tarik gave a great laugh, then on impulse picked Kady up and twirled her about, and for a moment they both laughed together, Kady’s hair swirling about them as he turned her round and round.
It was Kady who came to her senses first and began to push away from him. “Mr. Jordan,” she said, “I think we should—”
Still smiling, he set her down, but he kept his hands on her shoulders. “I think that for today we can dispense with thinking,” he said, smiling warmly at her.
Kady wanted to retain her animosity toward this man, but he was making it difficult. Remember that he is a cold fish, she told herself. Remember that he is about to marry someone else. Remember that he is rich and famous and you are a means for him to get his money back, and that’s all.
“I think I should go to Legend,” she said. “I have to do things there, and I have business to attend to. And, besides, I do need a job and potential employers won’t wait forever.” She was backing away from him.
“Damn the employers! I’ll buy you a restaurant, and you can—”
“Is that what you think I’m after? That I want you to buy something for me? Do you—”
“I want to spend the day with a pretty girl,” he said softly. “I want a day away from business and family tragedies and all the other worries, I’d like to show you a place I found when I was a kid. I’ve never shown it to another living soul, but I’d like to show it to you.”
“Why?” she asked suspiciously.
“Because I’ve never met anyone like you, that’s why,” he said with a look of exasperation. “And maybe I’d like to give you a better impression of me. I’m not what or who you seem to think I am, and I’d like you to know that before we . . . before we part.” Again he held out his hand to her. “Will you go with me?”
Kady started to protest, started to say no, but then she thought, What the heck? Why not? Could anything stranger or worse happen to her than what already had? “Okay,” she said with a grin, then took his hand in hers. “But on one condition.”
“Which is?”
“We don’t talk of money and you don’t try to make me tell you what happened in Legend. I would like a day off from the past.”
“Done! We’ll just talk about ourselves.”
“Great. And later I’ll sell the story of the rich, elusive C. T. Jordan to the tabloids and make enough to open my restaurant.”
He didn’t hesitate as he lifted her hand and kissed the back of it. “Any woman who would return a fortune as you did isn’t going to do something so low-down rotten and slimy as that.”