The old Nina would have apologized. Would have retreated. But the new Nina did not. “First of all,” Nina said. “Tim and I aren’t dating anymore. So I didn’t cheat on anyone. And second of all, what Rafael and I told you was true at the time we told it to you. We were just friends. The fiasco last night, as you call it, was Tim getting too drunk and too jealous for anyone’s good. And as far as the campaign strategy, I don’t work here anymore. I can talk to Rafael about whatever ideas I want.”
Jane looked at Nina openmouthed. Rafael had an amused smile on his face. “Watch out, Jane,” he said. “Nina’s on fire.”
Nina felt a rush of adrenaline after speaking up that way. She smiled back at Rafael.
“You both are killing me,” Jane said. “I was going to talk to you about how we should handle the photographs that are being leaked from last night, but it seems to me like we might need some other kind of strategy now. There’s still goddamn lipstick on your face, Rafael.”
“Sorry,” Nina said. “Chanel stays on pretty well.”
“Chanel!” Jane threw her hands up in the air. “Jesus Christ. Both of you stay here while I get soap and Mac. We need to figure this out.”
She left the room and Rafael started laughing. “Am I really wearing Chanel lipstick?”
Nina looked at him carefully. “Barely,” she said.
He slid his arm around Nina’s shoulders and she leaned into him. “You know Jane’s right,” she said. “We shouldn’t start anything now. What we talked about last week is still true. We should wait until the election is over before we pull any attention from your policies, before we mess around with your voter margins.”
“I know,” Rafael said. “But we hadn’t kissed then. I don’t know if I’ll be able to think about anything else now.”
Nina looked up at him, feeling that magnetic pull not only in her lips but in her heart. “Of course you will,” she said.
“Don’t think so,” Rafael answered, and then she was in Rafael’s arms and he was kissing her, his lips warm and soft. He slid his hands down the back of her dress and ran them over her hips. She laced her fingers together across his shoulders and pulled him closer.
They broke apart for a moment. “Rafael—” Nina started. But then his mouth was on her neck, kissing the hollow of her collarbone.
Nina leaned her head back, exposing more of her neck for him to kiss. “We have to stop,” she murmured, not wanting to. “Jane’s going to be back.”
“Mmm,” was Rafael’s response.
“I’m serious,” Nina said, even as she slipped her hands in the back pockets of Rafael’s pants, so she could pull him toward her.
“Me too,” Rafael said again. And then his lips were on hers and their bodies were pressed together so tightly that she could feel the buttons on his shirt pushing into her skin.
Nina took a deep breath and stepped back. She closed her eyes and breathed slowly, deliberately, trying to tamp down the desire she felt, the need to be close to Rafael. French fries. Milkshakes. Interoffice envelopes. Her old tricks still worked, but barely.
“This is torture,” Rafael said.
“There’s more lipstick on your mouth now,” she said, grabbing another napkin to wipe it off.
And that was how Mac and Jane found them when they walked into the room. Nina wiping Rafael’s lips with a napkin.
They were not happy.
64
After a dressing-down from Mac, after promising she wouldn’t give any more speech input, and after swearing that whatever was going on between them would be private, out of the spotlight so that they wouldn’t make headlines so help them God, Nina and Rafael were alone again in the conference room.
“So what do we do now?” Nina asked, wanting to touch his hand, to move closer, to press herself against him.
“Well,” Rafael said, looking at Nina so intently it felt like he was trying to memorize every square inch of her face. “I have a few interviews to do today. I’d love to see you after that, but I’m afraid dinner at a local restaurant is out. I’d suggest cooking at my place—or at yours—but Mac would kill us both if someone snapped a picture of us walking into either one of our apartments alone together at night.”
Nina thought of her mother’s house. Her house. Hardly anyone knew it existed. “What are your thoughts on the Hudson Valley?” she asked.
“Nice apple picking this time of year?” Rafael answered.
“I’ve got a house there,” Nina said. “That’s basically a secret. If we make our way there separately, no one will know. It’s only about an hour and a half from here.”
Rafael handed her his cell phone. “Key in the address,” he said. “My last interview should be done by eight tonight. Then there’s a drink with a donor . . . and final prep for tomorrow’s meeting with the union reps . . . so how about . . . I’ll meet you up there around eleven thirty?”
“I’ll book a driver now,” Nina said.
Rafael gave her one last kiss as he took his phone back. “Until soon,” he said, heading for the door.
Nina tossed him a napkin. “Wipe your mouth!” she said.
* * *
• • •
As she waited in the conference room alone, Nina realized she felt truly alive for the first time since her father had died.
65
Being with Rafael made Nina feel stronger. Smarter. Like she could tackle whatever needed tackling. So she headed over to the Gregory Corporation headquarters. They were on the twenty-ninth floor of a glass high-rise building in Midtown.
After taking the elevator upstairs and telling the receptionist she wanted to see TJ, who, as far as Nina knew, still thought she was dating his son, Nina sat down on an overstuffed taupe couch. She picked up a Gregory Hotels pamphlet and flipped through it, surprised to find a photograph of herself at ten years old standing next to the sign for Nina’s Nest, her hands on her hips and a smile on her face. She remembered when that was taken. She was wearing red sparkly shoes like Dorothy’s from The Wizard of Oz. She’d loved those shoes so much that her father had bought her a second pair when they got too small. The caption said: Even Nina Gregory knows how great birthdays can be at our hotel restaurants.
Her dad used to bring her to Nina’s Nest all the time, making sure to take her picture next to the sign, watching as Nina grew taller than the letters that spelled her name. He used one for a publicity campaign when the hotel had been open for sixteen years. The tagline said: Sixteen Never Looked So Sweet!
“But I’m eighteen in that picture,” Nina had said, on a phone call home from college, after people had started sending her shots they’d taken of the billboards with Nina’s photograph on them. “It’s the hotel that turned sixteen. Why did I need to be in it?”
“Because you’re prettier than I am,” her father had joked, not picking up on her annoyance.
She wondered if he was the one who had chosen to include the picture of her ten-year-old self in the pamphlet. And if that was before or after the billboard incident. The surprises seemed endless.
* * *
• • •
“Nina,” TJ said as he walked across the lobby. “So glad to see you. I hadn’t realized you were coming by today.”
“Sorry I didn’t give you any warning,” she said, getting up and following him through the glass doors that he unlocked with a wave of his key card. “I’d said I’d start at the company after the fund-raiser had ended, and this afternoon seemed like a good time to start sorting things out.”
They’d reached the executive hallway. Nina looked to her left and saw the door to Caro’s office, but she wasn’t inside. They kept walking to the corner of the building, where TJ’s executive suite was, next to Nina’s father’s old office.
“You can head in there, if you’d like.” He nodded down the hallway toward her father’s door. “We haven’t touched it. We’ve been waiting for you.”
Nina walked the twenty feet alone. She had a distinct impression that everyone was staring at her—the people in the offices on the other side of the hallway and the people in the cubicles out front. She nodded at Melissa, her father’s former administrative assistant, and then walked into his office and closed the door.
She looked around. There was a picture of her and Tim on her father’s desk from the day Nina was born. Tim’s red hair was in corkscrew curls and he had a bundled Nina in his lap. The look of awe on his face was unmistakable. Nina’s heart clenched. She could make out Caro’s hand in the photo, reaching in to avert any potential disaster. No matter how hard Caro tried this time, disaster struck. Even with evening plans to see Rafael on her mind, Nina still felt the hole that Tim left behind.
She kept looking at the shelves. There was a picture from her business school graduation. The mosaic picture frame she’d made for her father the Christmas her mom died was there, too. The picture inside showed Nina and her dad sitting next to each other on the couch, their heads bent over a book of children’s crossword puzzles. Her mom had taken it one Sunday—up in the country, Nina now realized, recognizing the print of the couch. Not in 21-B.