LITMIR.BIZ

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come over tomorrow? She can be persuasive—and as stubborn as they come if she needs to be. Maybe if the two of you gang up on your mother, she’ll listen.”

      “An intervention of two?” Ally said facetiously.

      “Pretty much. I’d make it an intervention of three but I’m the keynote speaker at a conference tomorrow that I can’t miss. But if you and Bubby together can’t get through to your mother tomorrow, I promise I’ll add whatever influence I have to convince her to have those tests done.”

      Ally had been staring at the floor but she glanced at him then, finding a kind smile on his face.

      He got up and came to stand in front of her, reaching a big hand to her arm and squeezing it comfortingly. “I know this is rough.”

      Did he also know how warm his hand was? How strong? How good it felt and that something elemental in her sparked?

      “Let’s just take it a day at a time for now,” he added, his deep voice drawing her from her thoughts. “Tomorrow we’ll bring in reinforcements with Bubby, and then we’ll go from there.”

      Ally nodded.

      “Get some rest,” he advised.

      Ally nodded again, shocked by how sorry she was when he let go of her arm.

      She got to her feet. “I’ll walk you out and peek in on my mother to make sure she’s still asleep.”

      Jake led the way for the trip back through the house, opening the front door when he reached it.

      But he didn’t immediately go out. Instead, he turned to look at her. “I’ll check in again tomorrow night.”

      Ally nodded, gazing up into those smoldering eyes and suffering another wave of that strange mix of emotions that volleyed back and forth between hating this guy and being confused by the feelings he stirred in her.

      “I’ll be here,” she answered.

      “That’s important,” he said before he reached for her arm again and did another of those reassuring squeezes.

      Only this time he rubbed his thumb against her arm, too, and somehow that made it seem less comforting and more…intimate.

      But then he said good-night and left, and Ally wasn’t sure if she had only imagined that.

      Chapter Three

      “I’ll have to take this.”

      David Hanson excused himself from the dinner table to take a phone call. When he did, Nina Hanson’s children—Zach and Izzy—asked if they could be excused as well. That left only Jake, Bubby and Nina—who was Bubby’s granddaughter and Jake’s friend since they’d met as teenagers—sitting in the Hansons’ dining room.

      It was Friday evening. Jake had a standing invitation to the traditional Shabbat celebration that Nina held each week. As part of the religious observance, Nina, Bubby and the kids lit candles, said kiddush, and afterward they all enjoyed a meal together. And even though Jake wasn’t Jewish, he liked to be there whenever he could because it was a warm family time that gave him a sense of belonging that was almost as good as having a family of his own.

      “Poor David,” Nina said with a loving look in the direction her husband had just gone to take his phone call. “He’s probably going to have to go to Kyoto next week while Tom Holloway goes to San Francisco. There’s trouble with both the Taka hotels.”

      Jake knew that Nina’s husband’s family business—Hanson Media—had merged with a Japanese-owned company called Taka Corporation a few years ago and that as a result, their business interests had expanded. They were now in the process of developing a chain of upscale hotels, with the first two in San Francisco and Japan.

      “What’s going on?” Jake asked.

      “There are accounting irregularities in Kyoto,” Nina said. “And the promises the interior designer made that he would get back on schedule by this month have fallen through. That puts the soft opening of the Taka San Francisco in jeopardy.”

      “Does Drake Thatcher have anything to do with it all?” Jake asked. Nina had told him just last month that the tycoon had planted a woman named Shelly Winston within David’s organization to spy and sabotage things from inside. It hadn’t been successful because Shelly Winston and Tom Holloway—the new head of corporate finance of the hotel division—had fallen in love and ended up together, but it seemed to follow that any other unexpected occurrences might track back to Thatcher, too.

      “They don’t know. Anything is possible at this point,” Nina answered. “All I know is that things are a mess.”

      “Speaking of messes,” Bubby interjected. “I visited with Estelle and Ally this afternoon, Jacob.”

      Nina didn’t seem to mind her grandmother’s abrupt change of subject, because she began to stack all the dirty dishes she could reach from where she was sitting. And since Jake had been anxious to ask Bubby what had come of her trip to Estelle’s house today, he welcomed finally being able to get into it.

      “I didn’t want to bring the subject up with David and the kids around—I knew it wasn’t anything they’d be interested in—but I was going to ask you about it as soon as I had the chance. How was Estelle today?”

      “The same—sometimes the old Estelle, sometimes…” Bubby raised both palms toward the ceiling, shrugging her shoulders at the same time to convey her own lack of understanding of what was happening with her friend. “She’s a handful, that Estelle,” Bubby concluded. “She went to the bathroom, never came back. We found her packing her bag. She said her husband called and wanted her to go on a business trip with him—the man’s been dead forever!”

      “And what did her daughter think of that?” Jake saw Nina’s eyebrows rise and he knew his victorious tone of voice had been the cause, so he explained himself. “I had a hard time convincing the daughter that there’s a problem.”

      “Poor Ally, she can tell her mother’s not right in the head now,” Bubby said sympathetically. “This is a lot for that girl to take in, Jacob. We’ve all been seeing Estelle slip, but her daughter—”

      “Would have seen it, too, if she’d had more to do with her.”

      “Oy, such a big deal with this one!” Bubby said to her granddaughter.

      Nina laughed. “You know how he is—he can’t believe anybody who has a family can take it for granted. But he does seem awfully invested in this particular family, doesn’t he?” she responded to Bubby as if Jake wasn’t there. “Do you think it has anything to do with how pretty you said Estelle’s daughter is?”

      “Pretty?” Bubby exclaimed. “Pretty doesn’t do her justice. And me? I saw Jacob at the hospital—before he knew who Ally was, when she just came in the door and was at the reception counter? His eyes were glued to her. He didn’t even hear Ruth Cohen ask him if he wanted a cup of coffee out of the machine. It was like in the movies when everything else fades away and he only knew there was her.”

      Jake shook his head at the absurdity of that. Yes, Ally Rogers had caught his attention, but it didn’t mean anything. “The key word in all of that is before—before I knew she was the daughter who neglected Estelle.”

      “What neglect? When Estelle needed Ally for the gallbladder, Ally came. Estelle hasn’t needed her for anything else until now, and where is she now? Here again, that’s where. So what neglect? Those foster homes, those group places you had to grow up in, Jacob, they made you daydream of what real families are. But it’s not so realistic. Families—there’s some good, there’s some not so good—families are families. What they’re not is fairy tales.”

      “If you’re even a little pale one day, Bubby, isn’t Nina going to notice it? And why? Because she sees you. She knows you. She knows what’s going on with you. Would I have to call her and order her to go to your apartment?

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