Page 9 of Wish Lists and Road Trips

“So, Houston,” he said. We took a rattan table, and he pulled my chair out for me. “We should be able to get a direct flight from there back to New York.”

“Perfect,” I said in my new bird voice. Then I’d drive back to Boston to my old bedroom in my parents’ house, a broken engagement and a new tank top to show for it. It was enough to kill the buzz of my morning in paradise. “And this flight—”

“Plane ride,” he corrected.

“You noticed that too?”

Nick rested a hand on his flat stomach, and I watched it rise and fall with rapt attention.

“I couldn’t get back to sleep after I heard it. I was hoping it was just semantics but—” he looked over his shoulder at the thick jungle canopy “—I think that’s wishful thinking.”

“Are you afraid to fly? Is that why you were traveling by boat?”

“No.” He picked up his menu and it was clear we weren’t going to swap origin stories. Though he was filling in like a pencil sketch with each little thing he declined to share with me.

I was what some people call an empath. I wasn’t psychic or anything, although I did go to one of those palm readers on Revere Beach once and she told me that I probably could be if I’d learned to harness my power. Whatever that meant.

I didn’t have any power, I was just acutely aware of other people’s emotions. Sometimes painfully so. I felt little shifts in their mood, tiny micro-movements that gave them away. It wasn’t supernatural, it was just like super-smellers or people with creepy good hearing. I took in more of what people naturally put out.

What Nick was putting out was heavy. The way his upper lip had curled last night when I’d asked him why he wasn’t at peace had made me hungry to read him more, but the way he’d taken an unconscious step backward had told me it wasn’t happening. Not yet at least.

I pretended to read my own menu. “Will you miss much work?”

“We’ll probably be back around the same time we would have if we were on the ship,” he said.

“What do you do?”

“I’m a real estate developer.”

“Oh. So, you’re like a millionaire.” I snorted. Maybe I should propose, get back in my parents’ good graces. My dad had an affinity for what he called “self-made men” like himself. As if my grandfather hadn’t died and willed him the capital to start his investment firm at the age of thirty. The same will that was going to allow me to buy my studio.

Still, Sean had instantly endeared himself to my family with his snobbish affection for top-shelf bourbon and tailored suits. Apparently, that was more important than loyalty and kindness in the man who’d proposed to their daughter.

Nick laughed lightly and shook his head. “It’s a mildly successful family business. My uncles are contractors, my dad was an urban planner by trade. Callaway and Sons was their first baby. My cousins, Tom and Drew, are more operations types, and I have an MBA, so—” He paused, cleared his throat.

“So you’re like the heir to the throne?”

“No,” he said firmly. I watched a muscle in his jaw twitch and I wondered why that suggestion made him uncomfortable. “Anyway, we mostly do residential projects. Not the commercial stuff you’re thinking of. That’s where the millionaires play.”

“Residential. Like cul-de-sacs?”

“Yeah. I’ve been trying to convince my dad to get into commercial for years but he’s not a big risk-taker, so we stick with subdivisions, flipping multi-units. I own a couple of them myself for some side income.”

A waiter came and took our orders and filled the coffee mugs that were upside down at our place settings. Nick gulped his.

“You must be handy then.” I sipped my rich, Costa Rican brew, stifling the urge to moan.

He nodded. “My cousins and I have flipped a couple of smaller projects ourselves on the side.”

“I’m about to buy a house,” I blurted. “It’s sort of a, um, fixer-upper.”

Nick’s eyebrows slashed inward. “You’re buying it alone?”

I wasn’t sure if that was a smooth way of finding out if I was single or another judgment on my ability, but I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. “Just me. I’m sort of between homes at the moment.”

He looked adorably alarmed.

“I’m staying with my parents.”

---