The Invitation

Brent flashed a smile I wanted to punch. “Absolutely.”

The minute we were out in the hall, Jack poked the bear.

“Brent looks good, doesn’t he?”

I glared in response.

“They make a cute couple, him and Stella.”

“You’ve made your point. Now go tell him to get the fuck back to work.”

Jack smiled. “Can’t do that. He doesn’t work for me.”

Luckily for my friend, Robyn walked out of her office. “There you are. I have some good news to share.”

I had to plaster on a happy face when all I wanted was to kill my buddy and use his limp body as a bat to knock out the pretty boy back in the studio.

“We’re here, and you just killed it up on stage taping the segment for Signature Scent,” Jack said, “I think we’re already floating in good news.”

Robyn handed me a packet of papers. “We usually test potential products with a focus group before we take them on—to see if they appeal to our known audience and to find out what they’ll want to know most about the product. We didn’t have time for that with Signature Scent since it was a last-minute add, but we had a group here today for another project. I had Mike, the segment producer, sneak over with a few minutes of what we taped earlier in the day, and it tested through the roof. I think we need to increase our sales forecast.”

I looked down at the numbers. She wasn’t kidding.

How likely are you to buy the product – 94% said extremely likely.

Have you found a similar product anywhere else – 0% said yes.

How relatable was the guest host – 92% said she was relatable.

And on and on—three pages of numbers that were truly remarkable. I flipped through, scanning them all. “This is…” I shook my head. “It’s incredible.”

“You know what else it is?” Jack said. We both looked to him. “Cause for celebration.”

***

That evening, Stella and I drove to the restaurant together. Robyn and Jack were meeting us there, and we were ten minutes early and the first ones to arrive.

“Drink at the bar?” I asked her.

“That sounds great.”

We told the hostess where we were going and found two stools next to each other.

The bartender walked over and placed a napkin in front of each of us. “What can I get for you?”

I looked to Stella.

“I’ll have a merlot, please.”

“Would you like to see the wine menu to select one?”

She shook her head. “House wine is fine.”

He looked to me. “And for you?”

“I’ll take a Coors Light.”

Once he walked away, I raised a brow at Stella. “No gin to sniff?”

She smiled. “Not tonight. I don’t think it’s a good idea to mix business with hard liquor.”

“You also don’t think it’s a good idea to mix business with dating. Yet you’re going to ask me out.”

She laughed. “Oh, am I?”

I’d spent the entire day watching her from a distance. The makeup people had painted her with much more than she normally wore, including a bright red lipstick that still hadn’t dulled after all these hours. I couldn’t take my eyes off her mouth.

I swallowed, staring at her lips. “Some rules were made to be bent.”

She let out a nervous laugh. “Are you a rule-bender, Hudson? I feel like you know so much about me, yet I don’t know too much about you.”

“What would you like to know?”

The bartender brought over our drinks, and Stella lifted her wine to her lips.

“I don’t know. You’re divorced. What happened there?”

I frowned. “This is supposed to be a celebration, not a funeral.”

She smiled. “That bad?”

“I gave her my grandmother’s ring when I proposed. A few days later, I came home and she had a different ring on. She’d sold the ring and bought one she’d liked better.”

Stella’s eyes widened. “Oh my.”

I sucked back my beer. “Serves me right since I married her anyway.”

“Why did you?”

That was a damn good question. People always asked why we broke up, but never why I’d married Lexi to begin with. “If you’d asked me that before the wedding, I would have said I was young and we had a lot in common—we both liked to travel, we ran in the same social circle…”

“But the answer isn’t the same now?”

I shook my head. “Hindsight is a lot clearer. My mother had died the year before. I was working in the family business, taking on more and more responsibilities because my father had taken a step back from things after his first heart attack. It felt like what should come next. That sounds really ignorant saying it out loud today, but my family was falling apart, and I think I just wanted what I’d had, so I went about making my own. I’d been with Lexi for a few years, so I took the next steps. Basically, I was an idiot.”