Page 19 of Come Ride With Me
Thankfully, Nash didn’t press further, probably because they were at the door to apartment 2C by this point. He opened the door and Mica once again followed him inside.
It wasn’t a big place—living and dining rooms combined with a small kitchen. Straight to the back were patio doors which she figured led to one of those small balconies she’d seen from the outside of the building. Furniture was sparse and dark brown. There were no pictures on the beige painted walls. The television mounted on one wall was big—not as big as the one her father had installed in what was now her house—and the glossed wood floors were bare. There were blinds at the two windows across the room, a floor lamp in one corner, remote controls on an end table. It was neat and it smelled just like Nash. Another deep inhale and Mica exhaled quickly, shaking her head in warning to herself. She wasn’t here to smell him, or to long for another one of his kisses. This was about the dealership and that was all.
“Have a seat,” he told her as he held out a hand for her coat.
She unzipped the coat, took off her hat and gloves and handed them all to him. Then she moved further into the apartment, heading toward a love seat with one white pillow in its center. She picked up the pillow before sitting down and ran her hand over the embroidered top thinking how dainty it was amidst this obviously masculine place.
Minutes went by before Nash joined her. He’d removed his coat but still wore his boots, pants and a t-shirt that shouldn’t look so good as it molded against his thick muscular physique. He sat in the recliner to her left and looked more than comfortable there.
“Earl came to us today talking about some cuts he’d like to make. I thought maybe you were working with him in some way, telling him what’s best financially for the dealership, since that’s your area of expertise.”
He was talking slowly, as if he was still thinking about all possibilities. Mica was okay with that. She’d thought about his quick accusation when he’d approached her, during her ride over here. She had simply shown up out of the blue and made no secret that she was trying to find out if the dealership was financially stable enough to stay in business. But he was dead wrong about her working with Banyon. In fact, in light of the things she’d discovered, the plan she was now putting in place was in direct contrast to that scenario.
“I didn’t know Earl Banyon before I came here and I’m not working with him now.” It was a simple statement. A truthful statement.
He sat back in the chair then, letting his hands fall to rest on his thighs. “I don’t trust him.”
“Neither do I.”
“But I don’t think there’s anything I can do about it. Nothing legal that is,” he said with a shrug.
She should tell him that she could do something about Banyon. That she could have him out of the dealership in the blink of an eye. Then again, no, she couldn’t tell him that. Not yet anyway. At the end of the month—which was two more weeks away—she was going to announce who she was and all the changes she planned to make to the dealership for its future growth. She was also going to fire Banyon and there might also be criminal charges in the man’s future.
“Were Earl and Bell close friends?” she asked Nash.
“I don’t think I’d call them friends. Bell was sick for a long time.” He sighed heavily with those words. “Looking back, I can remember when he started to look differently. When that cough became more than ‘just a tickle’ as he always used to say. I should’ve asked if he was seeing a doctor. He would’ve done that for me.”
Mica nodded. From the people she’d spoken to in the last weeks she’d heard that Bell was a giving and compassionate guy. He was respected and loved and that all made her even sorrier that she hadn’t gotten the chance to see all those things in him herself.
“Lung cancer,” she said, citing her father’s cause of death. “Stage four when it was diagnosed.”
“Did you know him well?” he asked, catching Mica off guard.
She’d thought it either luck or fate that nobody had asked her about her relation to Bell before now. They’d accepted that she was there at the lawyer’s behest, but none of them ever wondered if she had a real stake in the dealership. That could be construed as a good, and bad thing.
“I met him two years ago,” she admitted, again giving as much truth as she possibly could. “He seemed like a good man in the time I spent talking to him. Then he informed me that he was sick and I wanted to come here to see him.”
“All the way from Paris.” It wasn’t so much a question, but a slow observation. “You were going to come see him and then what? Were you two having an affair?”
Mica’s mouth gaped as she stared at Nash in disbelief. His brow was furrowed, lips drawn tight after asking that absurd question.
“Of course not! He was old enough to be my father,” she said raising her voice much more than she’d intended to. She’d wisely left off the “hewasmy father” and clasped her fingers nervously.
He shrugged. “People have been wondering, so I just had to ask.”
“That’s a pretty wild thing for someone to wonder,” she countered.
“Not really. You’re an attractive woman,” he said, his gaze raking over her unabashedly.
Every part of her warmed under his perusal. And when his tongue snaked out to swipe along his bottom lip, her gaze rested there.
“I’m much younger than him,” she said, her traitorous voice way to soft now.
“Age is just a number,” he replied.
Nash was ten years older than her. A fact she’d thought about frequently since their kiss. In fact, she’d wondered if once they’d gotten the age out of the picture, if that hadn’t been why he hadn’t touched her since that day. Why there’d been no more offers to take her for a ride, or attempts to kiss her or more. Of course, if she really wanted to take things there with him, she could’ve gone to him and made her needs—because at this point this attraction to him felt more like a burning need to experience him—known, but she’d chosen not to. She chose to focus on business first.
Perhaps Nash had made that choice also. It certainly seemed like that was all he’d been concerned with tonight, until just a few moments ago.
