Page 19 of The Dreidl Disaster

She paused a second. “We need to be there by seven, so maybe six thirty?”

“See you at six thirty,” he finally said. “Where?”

“My place,” she said, a little too quickly for her taste. But then again it was on the way. “I’ll give you the address.”

“Done,” he said, and she heard the sound of his fingers typing on the phone. “Looking forward to it.”

And as she ended the call, she realized that she’d have to somehow give him back his jacket.

Chapter Six

Artur wasn’t surewhat to do with himself, and he felt like he was missing some information, so before heading over to Geirowitz’s to pick up the babka, he called his contact at Empires HQ.

“Emily Gould-Smythe,” said an unfamiliar voice. “You’re no longer working with John but working with me.”

“Good to know,” he said considering he was talking with the woman who ran PR at the Empires. “I have a question.”

“How can I help?”

“Heading to a dinner hosted by Jennifer and Peter Cohen,” he said. “I know Jennifer’s background. But is there anything particular about Peter I should know?”

Aside from the fact that he may have run into Peter at an event a number of years before; a one-time job working with Ben Klein at comic con during his rookie season with the Empires in a situation where Empires Captain Chris Emerson had to be out of pocket.

There was a long sigh on Emily’s end. Which usually meant either trouble or a difficult to describe situation.

He erred on the side of caution. “Anything I should be wary of?”

“He’s fine,” Emily finally said. “He’s a fan, a dad, and sometimes blurs the line just a bit. He’s made friends on social media with some of the beat reporters, and a bunch of the fans love him. He’s a good guy, draws attention to the Empire Bridge Foundation and he makes some noise. Nothing big to worry about.”

Translation: Peter Cohen needed to be placated so that he would placate social media, but nothing at all said around him would be private. “Right. I’ll be careful.”

“Good,” she said. “Call me tomorrow with an update?”

He nodded. “Sounds good.”

An hour and a bit after he ended the call, babka secured, route nine traffic patterns on his side, he stood on the mayor’s front porch; she lived in a town house that reminded him of his place in Brooklyn.

He knocked on the door. “Hi,” he said, trying to look at the security camera that seemed to have flashed on. “I’m here.”

When she opened the door, he could barely breathe. She was too bright and gorgeous to describe in ways that could fit into a dictionary. Any and all of the languages he knew fell short.

There was simply something special about her.

“I see that,” she said, her voice smoldering through the frozen depths of his brain. He tried to focus but he needed all his mental capacity to grab his attention from the dress she wore, one that stole his coherent thought and shoved it through a strainer.

“Do you want to drive or should I?”

It took him a minute for the words to register. “You know the area,” he said. “You should drive.” Aside from being a smarter suggestion, if she was driving, he didn’t have to think about how he’d react to the prospect of her getting into his car…

But he was getting ahead of himself.

He wasn’t talking about the sports car that was sitting in the Brooklyn garage. This was a people car; he could have people inside it.

If they followed his rules…

He could.

Eventually. And yet having either gotten no sign of his internal debate, or taken his words at face value, she nodded, stepped past him as if he wasn’t even there, and closed the door. “Let’s go,” she said.

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