Love in Bloom's (25 page)

“Wow.” Julia’s eyes clouded with tears. She glanced up to find Joffe at the window, viewing the Broadway traffic through the dingy glass. He turned at the sound of her voice. “This is beautiful.”

He chuckled. “It gets worse.”

“I don’t care. It starts out great.”

“You’re not crying, are you?” He frowned.

“No.” A fat tear skittered down her cheek, making a liar out of her.

He crossed to the desk. “Hey, if it’s going to get you all upset—”

“I’m a big girl, Joffe. Let me read it.” She lowered her gaze to the papers, but another tear slid down her cheek and dropped off her chin, hitting the top page and creating a blot.

He pulled the article from her hand, used his thumb to tilt her face up and peered into her watery eyes. “I’m not that good a writer, Julia. What’s the problem? PMS?”

“Why do men always assume that if a woman gets emotional she’s got PMS?”

“Because nine times out of ten, we’re right.”

“You’re an ass.”

“Yeah.” He grinned. His hand was still tucked under her chin and his face was so close it seemed like a waste not to kiss him. This time he didn’t pull away. He returned the kiss, deepened it, stood between her legs and lifted them around his hips. Her body shimmered and tensed. He was working his magic again, and she welcomed it. She didn’t have PMS, but her emotions were raw, right on the surface. She’d just experienced an
epiphany about her life and her future. She didn’t want to go back to practicing law. She wanted to stay at Bloom’s. There were things more important than escaping her destiny, and one of them was embracing her destiny.

For the moment, Joffe seemed to be part of her destiny. She’d cried in front of him—well, not really cried, just shed a couple of tears—and he’d accepted those tears. He’d teased her about them, but he was kissing her, wasn’t he? Comforting her and stroking her back and moving his hips against her crotch in such a way that she not only didn’t forget why she’d been crying but recognized him as part of the reason. He’d captured Bloom’s in his article. He understood it. And he was so wonderfully sexy, and he made her feel sexy even when she’d never thought of herself as sexy before, and she knew she looked shitty right now because she always looked shitty when she cried, and he understood.

The desk vibrated beneath her as he leaned his weight into it, as he rocked his body against hers. He lifted his leg, using his knee to rub her inner thigh, and she moaned softly. She wanted him. The door was closed, and he’d written beautiful, brilliant things about Bloom’s, and she wanted him.

He moved his knee against her thigh again, and his foot banged against one of the drawers. “Ow,” he muttered against her mouth.

“Are you okay?” she whispered.

“Um…no.” He leaned back and wavered slightly, balanced on his left foot. “My shoe is stuck.”

She unwrapped her legs from around him, smoothed her bunched up skirt across her lap and peeked over the edge of the desk. The toe of his sneaker was jammed into the handle of one of the side drawers. She laughed.

“It’s not funny.” He wobbled and gripped the desk to keep from falling. “Get my foot out of the sneaker, would you? It’s hurting my ankle.”

Stifling her giggles, she reached over the edge of the desk and tugged on the sneaker’s laces. They came undone and she
loosened them. He wiggled his foot back and forth to free it, and she heard a rattling noise.

“There’s something inside,” he said, tossing his sneaker to the floor. “Did you hear it?”

Julia nodded. She almost wished she hadn’t. She wanted to go back to kissing him, or reading his article, or pondering her revelation about being happy working here.

“Don’t you want to find out what it is?” he pressed her.

“If it’s my grandfather’s bones, no.”

“Come on—where’s your spirit of adventure?”

“It was busy kissing you,” she said, watching with misgivings as he shoved his foot back into his sneaker and then dug in his pocket. He pulled out a pocketknife and pried loose the awl. “What are you going to do?”

“Pick the lock,” he said.

“What if I tell you not to?”

Frowning, he stared at her. “Don’t you want to open it?”

“I—I don’t know.” One minute ago she’d felt daring, liberated, ready to plunge into an unknowable future. But now…Now she was apprehensive, and she didn’t know why.

“How about if you leave the room while I pick the lock? If there are any bones in it, I’ll shut it and lock it again so you won’t have to see them.”

“Those weren’t bones,” she said, attempting a smile and failing. Whatever was in there had sounded small and light. It was probably something no more sinister than an old chewing gum wrapper. But it had been in there for so long. No one had used the desk since her father died. Maybe even since long before he died.

Joffe was already poking at the lock on the center drawer with his pocketknife. Julia took a deep breath. She wanted to be strong and tough and mature. She wanted to be a leader, a president, the person who’d catapult Bloom’s into the twenty-first century. Surely she could handle the contents of the old desk.

“Easy,” he cautioned himself, maneuvering the awl attach
ment deftly, sliding it in and out of the keyhole in a way that struck Julia as erotic. She climbed down from the desk and took more deep breaths, trying hard to regain her equilibrium. “Okay…okay…There it is.” She heard a click, and he pulled out the center drawer.

It was empty. She sighed, far more relieved than she should have been.

“No bones,” he announced, reaching for the top right-hand drawer and opening it. It contained a pencil stub and an old pink eraser. “There are your bones.”

Her heartbeat returned to normal. Her body heat subsided to a healthy range. “A pencil.”

“And an eraser.” He pulled out the items, felt inside the drawer to see if there was anything else, then shut it. Then he pulled out the second drawer. “Empty,” he reported.

Her cheeks relaxed into a natural smile. Emboldened, she hunkered down and yanked open the bottom drawer—and let out a yelp. “Oh!”

“What?” He knelt beside her and peered.

There, lying inside the otherwise empty drawer, was a box of condoms.

R
on was all in favor of getting at the truth—hell, he wouldn’t be much of a journalist if he didn’t believe in searching for facts in the darkest corners and turning a bright light on them. While he’d decided that the facts of Ben Bloom’s sex life didn’t belong in an article in
Gotham Magazine
, he believed that, in general, most people were better off knowing the truth about things.

But finding a box of rubbers in the bottom drawer of a desk in her late father’s office was probably not a good way for Julia to learn that her father had spent time in his office doing the horizontal tango with someone who wasn’t her mother.

She lifted the box out of the drawer, tilted it and read the tiny print on the side flap. Was she trying to figure out when the box had been purchased, based on the expiration date? He’d never had a package of condoms lying around unused long enough to find out what happened after they were a year old, but that was another story.

Mere minutes ago, she’d been reduced to tears by the opening paragraph of his article. That guy in her office when he himself had arrived had cranked up her emotions, too. And the hot bout of kissing they’d just engaged in couldn’t have had a calming effect on her. So she probably wasn’t in the right mood right now—as if there was ever a right mood to be in when you stumbled onto evidence of your father’s hanky-panky.

Still holding the box, she moved to the sofa and sank onto it. He scrambled to figure out what his role in this scene was supposed to be. Providing comfort, he guessed. Hugging, but not kissing. A gentle arm around her, a shoulder to lean on, an ear to absorb her furious ranting.

He doubted that telling her about his chat that afternoon with her uncle Jay would improve her spirits. The guy had babbled like one of those New Age tabletop fountains on high speed. Bloom’s wasn’t in major trouble, according to Jay, but it was in minor trouble, and the reason was that its current leader, Jay’s precious and beloved niece, for whom Jay had all the respect in the world, was so hung up on the trees that she was unable to see the forest. This was Bloom’s basic problem, according to Jay: the company needed a president who could see the big picture. Ben had been a big-picture guy, but he had passed on, and no one but Jay possessed that same panoramic vision, the same reach, the same global perspective on how to sell delicatessen delicacies to the masses. According to Jay, Julia was plagued by bagel counts when there were entire worlds to conquer. Jay knew how to conquer them, thanks to his Internet-savvy approach to marketing and promotion. Julia thought like a lawyer, he’d explained, which meant she was always looking for the tiny mistake that could turn an argument inside out. None of which was to say he didn’t adore his niece and think she was wonderful…

With uncles like that, who needed enemies? Ron had thought as he’d departed from Jay Bloom’s office at the far end of the hall. He would have pitied Julia for being stuck in such a dysfunctional family, except that his own family was just as
dysfunctional and nowhere near as rich. If anyone was going to be feeling sorry for anyone, he was just as deserving as she was.

But she was the one who needed comfort right now—an arm around her shoulders and a compassionate ear. And no cracks about PMS.

He lowered himself onto the sofa next to her and slid his arm along the back cushions. She immediately hunched forward, her body language screaming that she didn’t want him to touch her.

Damn. Was she going to decide, based on her father’s misbehavior, that all men were scum? He’d dated a woman like that once. Her previous boyfriend had done something awful. As Ron recalled, it had had something to do with refusing to attend a couples-sensitivity weekend because the Giants were in a play-off game. Once Ron had entered her life, she’d always been watching him, just waiting for him to choose football over sensitivity, and blowing up at him if he so much as hinted that televised sports appealed to him. “You men are all alike!” she would rail. “You’d rather watch overpaid athletes throw a funny ball around a field than connect with a real woman.”

He’d choose sex over televised football any day. He might even choose sex over fifty-yard-line tickets at Giants Stadium for a play-off game—probably, if he got to pick the woman involved. But he’d choose a diet of liver and broccoli over a couples-sensitivity weekend. There were connections, and there were connections.

Julia clearly didn’t want to connect with him right now. She only wanted to stare at the expired box of prophylactics.

“Hey,” he murmured, trying to jar her out of her trance.

“What?” She whipped her head around to face him. He saw anger and embarrassment and distress in her glistening brown eyes.

“Why don’t you think of it as kind of a first-aid kit? Something a person keeps on hand but hopes he’ll never need.”

If that sounded as inane to her as it did to him, she would
have laughed. He’d discovered over the weekend that Julia laughed a lot. She’d laughed at his attempt to make grilled cheese sandwiches in the microwave, at the Monty Python poster in his bathroom and at the story—one-hundred-percent true—he’d told her about how he’d gotten a scar on his butt during a Little League game. His baseball pants had been loose around the waist and he’d forgotten to wear his belt. The pants had started sagging while he was running the bases on a triple, and when he’d slid into third base the pants had drooped a couple of inches too far down and his ass had smacked against the sand and pebbles in the base path.

Finding condoms in her father’s old desk apparently wasn’t as hilarious as hearing about how in sixth grade, Ron had sacrificed his tush for the sake of his team.

“My father was having an affair,” she declared.

“That would be my guess, too,” he said in his most placating voice. Should he tell her what Reuben Melnick had insinuated about her father and Deirdre Morrissey? Of course not. He was supposed to be offering comfort, not pouring acid into the wound. This whole situation was his fault because he’d insisted on picking the lock on the damn desk. He sure wasn’t going to make it worse by suggesting whom the condoms had been purchased for.

“Right here, in the office. In the heart of Bloom’s.”

“These things happen, Julia.”

“They don’t just
happen
. You make it sound like a quirk of fate or something. People trip over potholes. People catch pneumonia. People have affairs in their offices.”

“Well, they do.” He might have pointed out that given the way she’d kissed him just minutes ago, she and Ron had been heading full-speed toward condom use in this very office, in the heart of Bloom’s. But of course, it was different when one of the parties was your father. Your
married
father.

She ran her fingers obsessively along the edges of the box. It was still sealed in clear plastic, which had to count for something.

“He never used them,” Ron said hopefully. “Didn’t you tell me you had a younger brother? Maybe your dad bought them for him.”

“My father would never buy condoms for Adam.”

Unfamiliar with the dynamics of their father-son relationship, Ron didn’t argue. “The thing is,” he said quietly, “people do stupid things. No one’s perfect. You can’t judge someone based on the one stupid thing he might have done.”

Eyeing the box, she muttered, “This would have enabled him to do twelve stupid things.” She tossed the box onto the table in front of her and scowled. When Ron leaned toward her, she turned away. “Why are you defending him? My father…my father…” She obviously couldn’t get the rest out.

“I’m not defending him. I’m trying to make you feel better. Tell me what you want me to do.” It occurred to him that making Julia feel better was the only goal of any importance to him at that moment. It astounded him to realize he cared that much about her, but he did.

He risked touching her shoulder, and she sighed. “He was my idol,” she muttered, her gaze straying back to the box. “He was like a king in our house, one level above us ordinary folk. He worked so hard, he spent so many late nights at the office, and I always felt kind of bad for him—and in awe of him, too, because of the way he knocked himself out to make Bloom’s successful. And all that time, instead of working, he was burning through condoms with someone. Who? Who could he have been having an affair with?”

“Does it matter?” Ron asked, hoping to steer her in another direction.

“I’m trying to think of everyone who came to his funeral. The chapel was packed. Dozens of people I’d never met before were there—they all knew him from work. His coffee broker. His honey supplier. Some guy who sold the store the plastic tubs they put potato salad and cole slaw in. He had a wart on his hand. I didn’t want to shake it but I had to.”

Ron nodded sympathetically.

“There were women, too,” she continued, “but I don’t remember who they were. None of them had warts.” She sighed again. “What if it’s someone I know? Someone here at the store—one of the clerks, maybe? A lot of them have been with us for years.” She shook her head. “I can’t imagine my father with any of them, though. I can’t imagine him with anyone other than my mother. Actually, I can’t imagine him with her, either.”

“Not a very romantic guy, huh.”

“Apparently, there was a side of him I never saw.” At last she leaned back and let Ron loop his arm around her. “You must think this is so tawdry. It would make a good headline for your article, wouldn’t it—‘Benjamin Bloom Left a Bustling Store and a Box of Contraceptives When He Died…’”

“None of this is going in my article,” he assured her.

She gazed into his face, not in gratitude as he would have hoped but in curiosity that quickly evolved into suspicion. “You knew.”

“I knew what?”

“You knew my father was screwing around. You knew before this.” She gestured toward the box.

“How could I have known?” Ron wasn’t good at pretending to be ignorant, but he gave it his best shot.

“You’re a reporter, Joffe. You’ve been researching this store for a month. You probably talked to everyone I met at the funeral, even the guy with the wart on his hand.”

“I might have talked to them, Julia. I talked to a lot of people. I didn’t see their hands. I did most of the interviews over the phone.”

“Did you talk to any women?”

Evasion was one thing, dishonesty another. He wasn’t going to lie to her. “I spoke to a few,” he said vaguely. “And no, none of them volunteered that she was fooling around with your father. But what difference does it make? Your father had his strengths and his weaknesses, and now he’s dead.”

“So why aren’t you putting this in your article?” Again she waved at the condoms. “I bet it would sell magazines.”

He wasn’t putting it in his article because he didn’t want to hurt Julia. Because as much as he loved magazine work, as much as he treasured his integrity, as much as he got a rush from beaming bright lights into dark corners, he couldn’t bring himself to humiliate her family by publicizing Ben Bloom’s zipper problem. “It’s not relevant to the story,” he said. “Bloom’s is a delicatessen, not a brothel. If it were a brothel, I’d write a different kind of story.”

“You know who he was screwing,” she accused, her eyes narrowing.

He remembered that she was a lawyer, that she’d had experience interrogating witnesses and taking depositions. Her shit detector had been fine-tuned in her previous career.

“Don’t do this, Julia. Forget the condoms. Let’s pretend all we found in the desk was Grandpa’s spirit.”

“My grandfather did not have a Trojan spirit. Tell me who it is, Joffe.”

Her voice was steely. He sensed none of the weepiness she’d exhibited earlier, none of the emotional spillover. She was a tough prosecutor now, demanding the truth.

If he told her, could she handle it?

He respected her enough not to patronize her. “All I know is what people have hinted to me,” he warned.

“And they’ve hinted…?”

“Deirdre Morrissey.”
Don’t fire her, Julia
, he wanted to add.
Don’t kick her skinny ass out of here. You need her at Bloom’s. She’s got more sense than your mother and uncle combined. Get past this if you can
.

Julia took a deep breath and let it out. Another one. He heard the air hissing through her teeth. She wasn’t going to cry, and he felt a surge of pride and admiration sweep through him. He much preferred women who wept over nonsense than those who wept over real crises and heartaches, the challenges a person had to face with strength and courage. Julia was strong and courageous.

“My parents split up when I was a kid,” he told her. “It
sucked. Sometimes it’s better if parents stay together. You had both parents. Maybe that was worth a little deception on your father’s part.”

“It wasn’t little. Deirdre,” she murmured, shaking her head. “His office wife. What a cliché.”

“We can’t all be original.”

“What am I going to say to her?”

“Why say anything at all? She works here. She does good work. Judging by my interviews with everybody, she’s holding this place together and keeping it running. And she’s probably grieving for your father, too. Leave her alone.”

“She had an affair with a married man.”

“And he had an affair with her. It’s history now.”

“Only because my father pigged out on funky sturgeon in St. Petersburg.” She didn’t pull away when he took her hand. Her fingers were cold and he sandwiched them between his palms, trying to warm them. “What will I tell my mother?”

“Nothing.”

“How can I lie to her?”

“Don’t lie. Don’t say anything at all. What’s the point of telling her about it at this late date? It would only hurt her.”

“Maybe you’re right.” The sigh she let out this time was so deep it seemed to have originated on the first floor. “Oh, Joffe…I don’t know what to do.”

“Don’t do anything.” He pulled her against him and wrapped his arms around her. “There’s nothing for you to do. This isn’t a problem you can fix. Just leave it alone.”

He felt her head move against his chest as she nodded. She fell silent, and he kept his arms around her, thinking that for a clueless guy who’d just paddled a canoe over Niagara Falls, he’d done a pretty good job. He hadn’t capsized, hadn’t drowned, hadn’t lost Julia to the treacherous current. Maybe he’d even kept her dry. Knowing he’d been able to navigate her safely through all that demonic white-water filled him with a sense of accomplishment he’d never felt from writing an article that moved readers, or exposing some son of a bitch in print. He
felt accomplishment…and wonder. He’d gotten Julia through what might be the worst thing ever to happen to her, and she hadn’t drowned.