Sandcastle Beach (Matchmaker Bay #3) - Jenny Holiday Page 0,131

was getting annoyed. What business was it of hers who he chose to date? He didn’t want kids. So he made it a priority to avoid women who were likely to want them. Women who hadn’t yet aged out of being able to have them. There was nothing wrong with that. That wasn’t inflexibility. That was honesty.

But whatever. He wasn’t getting into it with Stacey. Arguing with a lawyer was never a good idea.

“Or…” She drew out the word in overly dramatic fashion. “You could, you know, actually examine this whole rabid stance against having kids and stop letting it rule your life.”

“No.” He wasn’t going to bicker fruitlessly with her, but he couldn’t let that stand.

“You’re not your father.”

“What the hell, Stacey?”

“Or Cam’s father.”

He looked at her sharply. He’d been thinking, back in his office, that Stacey knew why he pushed himself so hard, why he maintained such discipline over his affairs. But knowing about that was different from talking about it. She’d gone too far.

And she knew it. “I’m sorry.” She laid a hand on his arm. “I’m not trying to be mean. I just sometimes think you’re too wrapped up in a certain vision of yourself. One that is…less fulfilling than it could be.”

The phrase abandon beige popped into his head.

“And honestly?” Stacey went on. “I know you won’t believe me, but I think you would be a great dad. I wish you would just give yourself a chance.”

Elise wondered if Jay had a thing for older women or if it was just a coincidence that his two ex-girlfriends—or ex-crushes, or whatever—she had happened to meet were both closer to fifty than forty.

And both stunningly beautiful.

And self-assured.

There had been no aspiring with either of those women.

They probably had proper offices that didn’t also double as their living rooms.

Their tiny living rooms.

But whatever. She smoothed her shirt—she’d gone with a classic white blouse and a pair of jeans, given that the meeting was at her place and she didn’t want to look like she was trying super hard, even though she was, in fact, trying super, super hard—and reminded herself that it wasn’t a crime to be in the early phase of her career. Everybody started somewhere. Not that long ago, Jay and his partner had taken a risk by starting their own company, and she was doing the same thing.

She surveyed the space. The flowers on the coffee table would just get in the way of their work, so she moved them. Then she restacked the magazines and games she stored on the bottom level of the coffee table. She wanted everything to be perfect.

Even though she was expecting Jay, she jumped a little when the doorbell announced his presence. She lived on the third floor of a Victorian that had been converted to apartments, so she had to hoof it down to the front door to let him in.

“Hi,” he said, and oh. It was Friday at two o’clock, and they must have casual Fridays in his office, because he was dressed in jeans and a blue polo shirt. Nothing special, yet the blue made his impossible eyes even more impossible—they looked like they were going to twinkle right out of his skull. And standing on her porch backlit by the sun, he looked like a Disney prince. He was so—

Okay, enough. No stroking clients, Elise.

“Come on up.” When she ushered him into her apartment, she said, “You didn’t look at my portfolio the other day, so you don’t know that I’m a new business owner. That’s why I work out of my place—I’m trying to keep the overhead low initially.”

She was cueing up a rehearsed speech for when he asked what she had done before she struck out on her own, but he just said, “That’s smart.”

Then, looking around, he said, “This place is amazing.”

She smiled. It was pretty amazing. She’d worked hard to make it so. Elise would admit to being a bit of a perfectionist. Her friends were always needling her about it like it was a bad thing, but she didn’t see anything wrong with having a vision and sticking to it. That was how you ended up with results like this. Ironically, though, this was not how she would have designed a public-facing office. Her apartment was all exuberance and color, whereas in a place where she’d meet with clients, she would probably have leaned more classic.

But she was stupidly gratified by his praise. It felt like he’d seen a glimpse