A Princess for Christmas - Jenny Holiday Page 0,14
how he wasn’t wearing a ring and how deftly he navigated the city streets that were, to her, an endless maze of urbanization. That was part of why she had called him instead of Torkel.
She wanted him to spirit her to the hotel, to make her white lie to Mr. Benz—He’s driving me back to the hotel after the boat docks—be true. Mr. Benz had no doubt assumed she meant Philip Gregory, but she hadn’t technically lied.
Because he was here. Mr. Leonardo Ricci was here.
He shrugged, slammed the back door, and moved to open the front one.
She slid in as gracefully as she, not her mother’s daughter in this regard—Lucrecia had been right about that—could, given the volume of her dress. It took some wrestling with the thing for her to get settled in.
He pulled away from the curb. “Where to?”
“The Plaza.” She braced for more of his disdain but none came.
He simply said, “Rough night?”
“You could say that.”
He nodded, seeming to accept her vague answer as evidence that she didn’t want to talk about it.
This was also why she had called him. She had known, somehow, that he would be silent. Let her be silent. He would not pepper her with questions or crush her with his unarticulated disappointment. No, that would come later.
He was wearing a red-and-gray flannel shirt, and the sleeves were rolled up to his elbows. Even though the car was an automatic, he rested his right hand on the shifter. He had a very nice forearm. It was muscular and lightly dusted with hair the same rich dark-brown shade as on his head. And it was very . . . veiny. Which was an odd thing to find appealing, but she did.
Soon she began recognizing landmarks that suggested they were almost back at the hotel. “Would you mind stopping so I can get something to eat? I . . . wasn’t able to eat at the party.” On account of all the crying in the bathroom. “There’s a sandwich shop that’s open all night on the next block. The concierge recommended their pastrami on rye, and I have never tried pastrami on rye.”
“Can’t stop there,” Leo said gruffly.
“Why not?”
“I don’t do Fifth and Fifty-Eighth.”
“You don’t do Fifth and Fifty-Eighth?” She laughed incredulously. What a curious man.
“I can drop you off a block up, and you can walk back down.”
He was in earnest. “Isn’t that rather hard in your line of work? To boycott a major intersection?”
Leo’s face remained utterly unchanged as he said, “My parents died in a car accident on that intersection two Christmases ago.”
He might as well have slapped her. Tears—they were still so close to the surface after the evening she’d had—gathered in her throat. She opened her mouth, and closed it.
But why not just tell him? She had told him a great deal already today, including that her mother had died, just not when or how. “My mother died three Christmases ago. On December twenty-second. Breast cancer.”
That got his attention. He looked at her sharply. “That’s why your father’s sad.”
She nodded. “Though it doesn’t look like sadness from the outside. I’m not sure why I called it that before.”
“What does it look like?”
“Anger.” Paralysis.
He nodded like her answer made sense to him. “Is he going to be angry at you about what happened tonight?”
“Probably. Or disappointed, which is actually worse.”
“You want to talk about it?”
She started to say no, she didn’t want to talk about it. But to her shock, that wasn’t exactly true. So she found herself telling him about the meeting gone bad. About how much Eldovia needed the Gregory account.
He listened and asked nonsnarky questions. “So this Philip Gregory guy owns a big watch store chain?”
“He owns twenty shops nationwide, which perhaps doesn’t sound big, but the luxury watch industry isn’t like others. It’s so expensive to produce these watches that we rely on orders from retailers to fund production runs.”
“So you download the risk onto the little guy.”
His grin showed he was jesting, but he wasn’t wrong. “You could say that, except Philip Gregory is not a little guy. When we had his account, it was seventeen percent of our GDP. We’ll lose a thousand jobs without it. And that’s out of a population of two hundred and twelve thousand.”
Leo whistled.
“Indeed. He didn’t want to meet to discuss his decision, so I was supposed to . . . ambush him, if you will. He was not pleased about it. Not only did I not get to talk