Cuffed by His Charm (Dirty Little Secrets 4)

“Yes.” I give a firm nod, crossing my legs, resting my coffee cup on my thigh. “To be honest, I never see this side of you. The Gabe I know runs a quaint but successful Irish pub. But this”—I wave out around me—“this is another ballgame that I guess until now I really didn’t think about.”

“Again, I like that,” he says. “I don’t want to be seen as this guy.”

“But why? You are this guy, too.”

He drops the pen on the table and leans back in his seat, running a hand through his hair. “I was this guy.”

“What exactly does that mean?” I ask, then sip my coffee.

“It means that when O’Keefe’s began to take off, I was the man who ran the show. We had a smaller building then, but I was the face of the company.”

He picks up the pen again, scans one of the papers, and then flips it over, reading the back side before he signs his name. I’m sure he thinks I might give up on this, but I’m nowhere near done. “I can’t even imagine you sitting behind a desk in an office. Did you wear a suit?”

“Yes.”

“Crazy.” I shake my head, trying to picture that. Impossible. He always wears his O’Keefe’s T-shirt and jeans, and I bet if I looked now he probably had one suit in his closet and that was only in case someone died or something. “So, how long did you do the whole office thing?”

“A year.”

“Just a year. What happened?”

“I hated every goddamn minute of it,” he bites off, and he lifts his head, creases of tension around his eyes. “Being a CEO is what I was raised to do. Christ, I went to Harvard for business. It was an expectation that I would grow up and get into business like my father did.”

“You followed in his footsteps?”

He smiles, the tension in his face gone just that easily. “I did, yes, but I was miserable.”

I cock my head, regarding him, unable to picture Gabe as miserable. The stable nature of his mood is one of things I like about him. He never grumbles too much, seems to take life not too seriously. Well, not lately, of course. “So, what changed?” I ask, staying on point.

“One night, I went to the pub to have a drink,” he explains, eyes glossing over, lost in a memory. “When I got there, Joey was understaffed. One of the bartenders had got into a car accident on the way to work, and the other bartender we had was sick.”

I smile, knowing exactly what he’d done, because it’s what I would do, too. “Let me guess, you jumped over the bar and helped out for the night?”

He nods, stretching out an arm across the back of the couch, flexing his biceps. “That’s exactly what I did, and that night changed everything for me. I felt happier in those hours than I had in years.”

“So that’s when you decided to leave all this behind”—I wave out to the office—“and work in the pub?”

“Simply, yes,” he says. “But, of course, things were more complicated than that.”

“What things?”

His mouth twitches. “My mother.”

I note the flatness in his voice, the hardness in his eyes. The times that I’d met her she seemed a little snotty, but more so just privileged. She expected a certain kind of treatment. I couldn’t fault her for that, she’d been raised that way. “I take it that your mother wanted you to stay in white collar?”

“Of course, she did.” He signs another document and then one more before adding, “Working in the pub hadn’t been something she’d ever supported. For a long time, I had to justify it to her, had to remind her what my endgame was.”

“Which was turning the pub into a chain?”

“That’s right.” He signs one more document before gathering up the paperwork. “The goal was to make O’Keefe’s a multi-million-dollar company, so that kept her quiet for a while.”

“But what changed?” I ask. “I mean, you eventually left this kind of life behind, living much simpler, and that was after you made O’Keefe’s what it is today.”

He draws in a long deep breath, visibly releasing all his tension, and grins. “I no longer cared what she thought.”

I pause and ponder all things Gabe O’Keefe. Knowing all this makes me look at Gabe a little differently. He’d been raised a certain way, too, and in all the time I’ve known him, I have never really seen this side of him. Seeing this, learning this about him, fills in all the missing pieces of Gabe I didn’t know.

His head suddenly cocks, eyes probe mine. “What’s that look all about?”