With Love, from Cold World(33)

Maybe it was that memory, but for some reason, she wasn’t upset to have him crash the meeting—even despite the many, many times she’d told him he wasn’t invited. Instead, she almost felt . . . relieved?

It was this new, harebrained idea from Daniel. Maybe Asa would be able to help him see sense.

But Daniel’s face closed off, and it was clear he had no intention of meeting with Asa. “Not at all,” he said, flashing him a fake smile. “In fact, we were just finishing up.”

They’d talked for maybe five minutes. He’d barely even looked at the reports she’d prepared. “But we haven’t—”

He picked up the folder of papers, giving her a little salute. “Thanks for these. If you can get me the numbers for what we talked about, that would be great.”

She glanced over at Asa, but he only raised his eyebrows in an expression she couldn’t quite read. It seemed to encompass his general feeling that Daniel was a douchebag, that Lauren was too mousy to stand up for herself, or all of the above. Whatever it meant, she shouldn’t let it get under her skin, because it would only lead to doing something very ill-advised, something like . . .

“Dinner tonight?” she blurted, and immediately cringed. But the words were out. There was no shoving them back in her mouth, so the only option now was to commit. “I mean, maybe we can talk more about the budget over dinner tonight. I’d love to hear more about your idea.”

Okay, that was laying it on too thick. She didn’t know if she could sit through a whole meal of him throwing out exorbitant numbers and sketching out some pipe dream about a snowboarding renaissance in Orlando. At least, not with any semblance of an appetite.

She didn’t want to look at Asa and see his expression of secondhand embarrassment, but she couldn’t help a glance. But he was just looking down at his lap and frowning. He’d brought a yellow legal pad and a pen to the meeting, she noticed, like he actually expected to take notes.

“Can’t tonight,” Daniel said.

Of course. He wouldn’t want to have dinner with her. Or maybe he would, but this was payback for the fact that she’d turned him down once before. She put a smile on her face and started to make the appropriate noises about how it was totally fine, she understood he was probably busy, when he cut her off.

“We have family coming in from Cuba for the holidays,” he said. “My mother is hosting a huge dinner. That’s where she is right now, in fact—last-minute shopping to make a bunch of ropa vieja and her guava cream cheese empanadas. She hasn’t made those since I was a kid. Do you know how hard it is to get her to cook? Especially with how much time she spends here. But she’s going all out for this.”

“Oh,” Lauren said. “Well, that sounds . . . nice.”

It did. The idea of having not only a mother but extended family? Cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents, this whole tree of people who cared about each other and were connected by something that ensured they’d be in each other’s lives forever? It was more than nice.

“I guess you could come,” he said. “It’s not until late—ten o’clock. That’s when their flight gets in. Dress is casual. You could wear that.”

He swept his hand dismissively over her. Lauren kicked herself for not spending a little more time on her outfit today. She’d easily have time to go home and change first, but would that make her seem like she was putting too much energy into it? If he hadn’t mentioned her outfit at all she would’ve changed before, no-brainer, but now she was paranoid.

She was surprised by how much she really, really wanted to go to this dinner. Not just because the idea of spending time with Daniel outside of work thrilled her. Not even because guava and cream cheese empanadas sounded amazing. Because the idea of being surrounded by this big, loving family seemed . . .

Well, it was the opposite of falling asleep next to a pile of clothes, for sure.

“Dolores wouldn’t mind?”

“It’ll be good,” he said. “You can help me sell her on—” He stopped himself, his gaze cutting to Asa. So he really didn’t want him to know about the whole Winter X Games idea. Interesting. “If you could put together that report and print three copies, that would be great.”

What report exactly did he think she’d be able to put together? Was he looking for something on where the funding would come from? Because she was a bookkeeper, not a magician. Did he want projections on what a winter sports park might bring in above and beyond their current profits, a break-even analysis? She wouldn’t even know where to start.

She was dying to ask him all these questions, but he was already making it clear the meeting was over. He spun in Dolores’ chair toward her computer, and she thought she saw him pull up Shaun White’s Wikipedia page.

And for the second time in a week, she found herself standing outside Dolores’ office with Asa, unsure of what exactly had just happened.

“What report is he talking about?” Asa asked, tapping his legal pad against his thigh. “What’s this idea he wants you to help him sell to Dolores?”

Lauren’s head was still spinning. That meeting hadn’t gone at all how she’d planned it, and she had a feeling it had taken a wrong turn the minute Daniel asked that it be moved from her office to Dolores’.

“If he wanted you to know,” she said, “I’m sure he would’ve shared it with you directly.”