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Evan
In the twoweeks since Alexa had moved in with me, I’d switched from staying late at the office to leaving in time for dinner withmy girlwhen we ate in. Dinners out had slowed to two a week—enough to stay minimally in the spotlight, but not the hectic rate of the first weeks.
My girl—I wasn’t calling her that out loud, except for that one time down in the lobby, but that was how I thought of her now.
Today I was running late when I left work to make my way back to my building, my home. I used to refer to my condo as myplace, but after being chastised by Alexa thatplacewasn’t an appropriate description for what she referred to as apalace, had recently decided thathomewas a fitting title. Alexa had made it seem like more than a collection of rooms and a place to hang my clothes at the end of the day.
“Good evening, Mr. McAllister,” Becka said when I entered the lobby. “You have some mail.”
I took the envelopes from her and sifted through them on my way to the elevator. I pressed the call button.
“Son.” The familiar voice came from the building’s front door.
I turned, and he strode toward me as I held the elevator door open. “Hi, Dad.” It was odd that he hadn’t summoned me to his office. That was his habit. Phone calls didn’t suit Fergus McAllister, if he could avoid them, and his office was his power center.
“We need to talk,” he said as he walked past me into the elevator car.
“Okay.” I used my keycard to get the car moving. “I didn’t know you wanted to see me.”
“Spur of the moment,” he said as we ascended, not saying another word on the way up. “This should be done out of the office,” he added when the door opened on the top floor.
“Sure.” I let us into my unit and closed the door behind us. Apparently I’d beaten Alexa home, which was good luck with Dad here. They’d be oil and water together.
Dad stopped in the middle of the great room and swiveled to take it in. His eyes landed on the newspaper Alexa had left on the sofa this morning, along with her laptop on the coffee table. “Perhaps you should schedule your cleaning lady more often.”
Alexa had said when she first saw this space that it looked like a model home, that it didn’t look lived in, and she’d been right.
“I don’t see a problem.” Lived in and casual were growing on me.
“How do you expect to captain the family company someday if you’re leaving things like this?” he asked. “A captain sees to it that his ship is always clean and orderly. If it had been an investor visiting you instead of me, you wouldn’t want to present yourself like this.” His hand swept over the sofa.
There it was, the constant assumption that ruled my life—the one that had sent me to prep school and then to Yale before I joined the company. As the oldest, I was expected to take over as the head of the family company when Dad retired, just as Dad had after Gramps.
The English had a saying for it—an heir and a spare. Noah led a carefree life as the spare, without any of the expectations placed on me.
I dug my fingernails into my palms to contain myself. Dad never allowed anything messy in his house, but this was my territory, not his, and I wasn’t in the fucking Navy. “If an investor called on me, he wouldn’t show up unannounced.”
Dad’s jaw clenched, but he decided not to spar with me over this.
I relaxed my hands. After all that he’d put me through recently, I no longer cared that my comments annoyed him.
“Aren’t you going to offer me a drink?” Demanding and to the point, typical Dad. He wasn’t anything like Gramps.
“Macallan?”
“Naturally.”
I went to the liquor cabinet and poured a tumbler for each of us, his taller than mine. I still had work to do this evening with Martin on Northern Aerospace.
He took the glass, sniffed, and sipped. “Very good.” He motioned to the sofa and took the wingback opposite it for himself. He was probably put off by the mess on the cushions.
I folded the paper and set it on the coffee table before sitting. “So what brings you by?”
He sipped his whiskey. “I’d like to know why you decided to disobey me.”
I twisted the glass in my hand. I don’t know what I was expecting, but those words weren’t it. “I don’t understand.”
“The Borelli girl.”
