Page 38 of Absolutely Not in Love
That sounds like a loaded statement, and I’m about to ask Gracie to explain if only just to shift the conversation off of my own strained family relationships, but she asks another question before I can.
“You said your dad is a real estate developer? Is that what your grandfather did too? I’m maybe starting to understand how you own this entire building.”
She doesn’treallyunderstand.
If she were to google Derrick Jamison, she’d find a glossy website with links to his real estate portfolio—the largest in Chicago—a venture capitalist firm for which my father is the managing director, and the Jamison Foundation, the nonprofit organization my grandmother started and my mother now runs that shuttles millions of dollars a year to underserved arts programs in communities and public schools across the nation.
Dad isn’t exactly Bill Gates wealthy, but he’s close.
Close enough that when I dropped my mother off at the airport this morning, it was a private jet owned by my father’s company she was boarding.
Needless to say,thisbuilding wouldn’t even be on his radar.
“Okay, your face is telling a serious story right now,” Gracie says, her hand motioning up and down in front of me. “What’s with the tense jaw and the frowning eyes?”
The lightness in her tone reminds me to relax—no onehereis judging me—and I manage a smile. “Frowning eyes?”
She nods. “Absolutely. They’re very expressive. As soon as I mentioned your father, they turned sad.”
“How about now?” I ask, glaring at her with an exaggerated frown.
She laughs. “Now you look like the beast fromBeauty and the Beast.Which, come to think of it, youdohave the right bookshelves.”
“The beast? Really?” I joke. “You find me that unattractive?”
“Just that one expression!” she quickly says. “And most women think the beast is sexier anyway.” She rolls her eyes and nudges my thigh with the back of her hand. “Look at you fishing for compliments. You aren’t blind, Felix. Youknowyou aren’t unattractive. ”
“Maybe. But knowing I’m attractivegenerallyand knowingyoufind me attractive are not the same thing.”
She freezes, her gaze locked on mine for a long moment before she clears her throat and looks away. “We were talking about your father, right? Let’s keep doing that.”
I blow out a breath, my brain cataloging everything about the last fifteen seconds. There was a fire in Gracie’s eyes, something that makes me think she reallydoesfind me attractive, and I add it to the list of tiny things keeping my hope alive.
It’s a little desperate, maybe, but I’ll tell her anything she wants to know about my father if it will keep her here, talking to me like this. “Because my eyes are sad when we talk about him,” I finally say, and the playful mood between us sobers.
Gracie must sense it too because she bites her lip like she’s nervous. “I mean, I also heard you talking to him earlier—right after I got out of the shower. That might have helped me draw some conclusions.”
She tugs down the sleeves of her hoodie—my hoodie—then tucks her legs under her, pulling a pillow off the couch behind us and settling it in her lap. It occurs to me that it’s been long enough, the first dryer load of her clothes is probably dry. She could change into something else if she wanted to, but I don’t remind her. I like her wearing my things.
“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” Gracie says with a small shrug. “But I’m happy to listen if you do.”
The depth of my father’s pockets and how that has complicated the last decade of my life isn’t something I ever like to discuss. I’ve gotten used to women who are interested in me only because I play hockey—apparently, a new trend in romantic fiction has turned hockey players into every woman’s dream—but billionaire romance was a thing even before hockey romance was. I’ve enjoyed moving away from the influence of my father’s wealth and out of a city where women heard my last name and immediately assumedmoney.
But that’s not who I am. And I’d rather Gracie hear that from me than google my family and draw her own conclusions based on what she finds on the internet.
I pull out my phone and open my internet browser, where I navigate to my father’s website. I hold out the phone, and Gracie takes it without question.
“This is my father’s website,” I say. “You can click around a little if you want.”
She nods, then clicks and scrolls for a minute or two before she sets the phone down on the floor between us.
It’s probably dumb we’re still sitting on the floor—our meal is long over, so we ought to just move up to the couch—but somehow, sitting on the floor like this keeps the conversation casual, which is helpful considering the seriousness of our current topic.
“Okay,” Gracie says. “So you’re saying your dad is low-key important and has a little bit of extra spending money.”
I chuckle. “Yeah, something like that.” I look around my apartment. “He wouldn’t have bothered with a building like this in a town like Harvest Hollow. And he doesn’t think I should have bothered either.”
“But you bought it anyway,” Gracie says.
