Page 7 of Personal Escort

Cara gasps. “You had a saltines clue and you didn’t give me the heads up?”

“It’s only clear in hindsight.”

I look back and forth between them a few times before Cara takes pity on me. “I’m pretty sure my sister’s pregnant again,” she says.

“For the hundredth time,” Ben adds.

“Congratulations?” I ask.

Cara nods. “Oh, definitely for them! Although the noise level in their house is already insane.”

Ben laughs under his breath. “You’d think Elana having enough babies for all of us would be a good thing, but this is just going to ramp up Nana’s pressure on me to get hitched.”

Cara’s eyes go wide, just for a second, but she doesn’t say anything to that.

It’s the first I’ve heard of it, too, but unlike razzing him about work or women, I know better than to comment on anything Nana Russo says. To Ben, his grandmother is a saint who can do no wrong. And even if she’s pressuring him to settle down, he’d still be hard-pressed to criticize her.

She’s his mentor. Hell, she practically raised him, even before his parents split up.

“This is her fourth?”

“Fifth.” Ben scrubs his hand over his face. “And it’s a good thing. I’m happy for them.” He grabs the menu and raises his hand. “Yeah, let’s get some sake.”

Sure. That’s the desperate cry of a happy man.

I’m way out of my depth here. I don’t get why he cares about how many kids his sister has, and I feel like there’s a nuance I’m missing. That I should know, should be able to fill in, because we’ve been friends for more than a decade.

I try to remember how he reacted the last time she had a kid. Two years ago? That may have been when we were deep in the off-shoring project for tech support.

Time before that? No clue.

I’ve met Elana’s boys. They’re all carbon copies of her husband, in varying sizes. Ben loves them. He’s had them all over for sleepovers.

He’s a way better uncle than I’d ever be, even if I had siblings.

The closest I’ll ever get to being an uncle would be if Ben had kids himself.

Jesus. Is his biological clock ticking?

Is that a thing for guys?

Frankly, I don’t want to go there. I turn to Cara at the same time she turns to me.

“So, how’s school?”

“How’s work going?” She stops, laughs, and we try it again. At the same time, again.

Luckily, the waitress arrives with a bottle of sake. “Ms. Russo, this is from the chef. He recommends it with the tuna.”

Cara turns pink and spins in her chair, waving her hand in the air at the grinning Japanese man behind the counter at the back. “Oh, how sweet!”

Two billionaires at the table, and it’s the pretty grad student who gets the star treatment. I get why she likes this place.

She rattles off an order, upping the numbers on some of the sashimi when Ben gives her a raised eyebrow.

As we wait for our food, I pour drinks all around. Then we get talking about work, and school, and before I know it, we’ve polished off two trays of impressive sushi and sashimi.

Just as the waitress is taking our orders for ice cream to cap off the meal, his phone chimes. He looks at the screen and swears under his breath.

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