Page 66 of The Main Event

“I’m sure it will happen one day.” I exhaled heavily. “I want to hear all about you, Sherry. How did you and my dad meet?”

“Oh, that’s a boring story.” As I relaxed, Sherry seemed to as well. Seemingly she’d been more nervous about meeting methan she had been to meet Mom and Rosie. “I just transferred to his office from Manhattan six months ago. We met in the hallway. He had his shirt sticking out of his zipper when he was exiting the bathroom. I thought it was something else. We had a good laugh.”

“Sherry is like a flash of color in a very gray office,” Dad said.

“Your father has told me all about you,” Sherry supplied. “He thinks the sun rises and sets on you.”

Something pinged inside my heart. “He’s a pretty good catch.”

“He says you’re interested in your boss,” Sherry continued, ignoring the slashing motion Dad was making across his throat. “How is that going?”

“Is that so?” I leveled a serious look on my father. “Why would you tell her that?”

“We heard you mounted someone in the alley at the party,” Rosie replied. “From all accounts, you were with your boss that night. We just put two and two together.” She didn’t look all that bothered by my glare.

“I didn’t mount somebody in public,” I protested. “Does that sound like something I would do?”

“Well, there was Tommy Thornton under the bleachers when you were a teenager,” Mom replied. “I got called to the school for that one.”

“It was an accident.”

“Oh, you had grabbing marks on your shirt.” Mom made the same hand gestures Levi had when he described it, so I knew who she’d been talking to.

“Levi is in big, big trouble when I track him down after dinner. I had no idea he was even gossiping with you.”

“Oh, he likes to get his coffee around ten o’clock, before he heads in for his eleven o’clock shifts,” Rosie explained. “Then hecomes to gossip with us. How else do you expect us to keep up on your personal life? You’ve been tight-lipped as hell of late.”

“Now we know why,” Mom added.

Yup. I was definitely going to kill Levi. “He doesn’t even know anything. He wasn’t there, and he’s being such a pill that I won’t tell him anything.”

“Ha!” Mom snapped her fingers. “That means there’s something to tell. I knew it!”

“There’s nothing to tell.” I couldn’t believe that my father had brought a date to family dinner for the first time ever and yet they were all focused on me.

“We’ve been going out of our way to get a look at this Jaxson guy,” Rosie said. “He’s very attractive. I think you should go for it.”

“He’s George’s grandson.”

“So?” Rosie’s expression was blank.

“He’s my boss.”

“Meh.” Mom let loose a haphazard hand wave. “Your father and Sherry work together, and they seem happy.”

“There’s a difference between working together and one person being the owner of the hotel,” I argued. “That creates a weird power structure.”

“She’s kind of right,” Dad said, smiling when I beamed at him. I enjoyed having at least one person on my side. “However, unless you think he’s going to use his position to somehow hurt you on the work front—and from what Levi’s said when texting me that seems unlikely—then I don’t see why you wouldn’t go for it.”

My mouth fell open. “You’ve been texting Levi?”

“The boy likes to gossip. What can I say?” Dad shrugged. “He always has the really juicy stuff.”

“Unbelievable.” To give myself something to do, I grabbed the menu and pretended to peruse it. I’d eaten at Ledger somany times I almost knew the menu by heart. “I’m going to kill him.”

“Oh, leave Levi alone,” Mom protested. “I think he’s going through his own thing right now.”

I narrowed my eyes. “You mean with Corey?” Was Levi confiding in my mother instead of me? How had this even happened?

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