Page 41 of His Secret Gift

Leaning closer to me, she bumps my shoulder playfully and says, “But that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to hear every detail.”

I chuckle, but then I have to be honest. “I don’t know that anything else will ever happen.”

She shrugs. “Maybe so or maybe not. But what would you want to happen?”

“I—I don’t know.”

“Hmph.”

“What?”

“I was just thinking about how I’m going to have to one up you now and mack on Captain Bryant.”

“Callie!”

We laugh together.

“I’m just kidding. However, I also want you to remember to be careful.”

This warning changes the energy in the room.

“What do you mean?”

Callie crosses her legs and rests her clutched hands around her knees. “Jack can just be somewhat of a finicky person.”

“Finicky? How?”

After sucking air through her teeth, she adds, “It’s hard to explain. For a wealthy and successful guy, he can sometimes be indecisive.”

Huh.I haven’t encountered that side of him yet.

“Don’t get me wrong, he can obviously also make hard and fast decisions. Like pursuing this Yannis Drakos guy.”

“Yannis Drakos?” I’m a huge fan of his work. “That’s who he is going to Greece to meet with?” I knew he was in publishing, so that all checks out. I just had no idea which writer he was going there for.

“Mhm.”

“Wow.” I’d kill to meet the elusive author. There are only a few images of him online, and one of them is the photo he puts on the back of his books.

“You’ve heard of him?”

“Of course.His ‘Til the War Startsseries is amazing.”

“My mother read them, but I’ve never taken much interest.”

I sit up on my legs. “Oh, they’re amazing. I promise. I have the first few in my room. I’ll let you borrow them.”

I’m not sure if Jack is only interested in Yannis’s work because of the potential profit, or if he actually likes the content of his books too. If he does, that says a lot about him.

Callie wrinkles her nose. “What are they even about?”

“The storyline focuses on the love between Aikaterine ‘Kate’ and Isidoros ‘Issy’ between the end of the Morea revolt and the start of the Ottoman-Venetian Wars.”

“Okay…” I can tell by her flat tone of voice that she is losing interest, but now that I’ve started talking about it, I can’t stop.

“You see Issy was part of the failed peasant rebellion against Thomas and Demetrios Palaiologos. Whereas Kate was one ofthe maids of Thomas’s wife, Catherine. Anyway, it’s like a Romeo and Juliet or forbidden lovers’ kind of situation.”

“Uh-huh.” She’s taken out a file and started to do her nails.

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