A Date You Can't Refuse by Harley Jane Kozak Read Free Book Online Page A

red visor ride the breezedown into the canyon. She wore a sporty dress, tight and sleeveless, showing off a flat stomach and muscular arms.
    Parashie looked through a telescope, into the canyon. “I see it, the hat.”
    Donatella joined us, giving Alik a kiss. “Hello,
ragazzo
. Kimberly it is too breezy to eat outside. We shall be covered in soup.” And back into the house she went, with all of us following. What was it like for her, watching her ex-husband live out his life with his trophy wife? And Kimberly? How was it for her to live and work with her husband's previous wife and a knockout stepson her own age?
    “I don't psychoanalyze, by the way,” Alik said to me. “I'm not an analyst. But I want to do a Myers-Briggs on you, Wollie. After lunch. The short version. It'll be fun.”
    “You and your Myers-Briggs,” Kimberly said. “Wollie, it's the standard psychology student pickup technique. I'd lie if I were you.”
    “What is a pickup technique?” Parashie asked.
    “American girls,” Dontalla said, “do they fall for this silliness?”
    “Stepmother,” Alik replied, “you would be shocked.”
    “Come, come,” Yuri said. “Wollie has just met us. Wollie, you're family now, and
en famille
, informality rules. When the trainees arrive, we become more discreet.”
    “We try,” Alik said.
    “Respect,” Yuri said, “for cultural and religious backgrounds is imperative. We resist sexual innuendo and avoid the careless use of the name of God.”
    “So I guess Pope jokes are out,” I said.
    Alik put an arm around my shoulder. “Not to me. I love Pope jokes.”
    “Stop flirting with her, Alik,” Kimberly said. “She might not like you.”
    “She doesn't know me well enough to dislike me, Stepmother.”
    “Shut up,” Kimberly said.
    “This must be my orientation,” I said.
    “In fact,” Yuri said, “I planned to do a proper orientation this afternoon, but Zagreb just called. I fly to New York tonight. Kimberly, make that happen, will you, my love?”
    Kimberly walked over to a keypad on the wall and pressed a button. “Grusha, are you there? Pack up Yuri again. He's going to New York.”
    “Lunch first,” Grusha's voice barked back.
    We seated ourselves at the conference table, joined by a middle-aged woman who introduced herself as Nell and avoided eye contact. No one explained who she was.
    Grusha came through an archway with pot of soup. Alik went to take it from her and was told to sit and not treat her like a weakling.
    “Yes, Grandma,” Alik said, and he winked at me.
    I turned to Yuri. “Grusha is … your mother?”
    “My mother-in-law,” Yuri said. “From my first marriage.”
    So Yuri's household was composed of a wife, an ex-wife, the mother of a dead wife, the son of the dead wife, the daughter of an as-yet-unidentified mother, and Nell, sitting next to me.
    And me, of course, taking over a dead woman's job.
    “You,” Grusha said to me, ladling soup into Wedgwood bowls. “No beets, no sauerkraut, no liver. So. Now you eat.”
    I looked across the table to see Alik smiling at me.
    “Welcome to
la famiglia,”
he said.
    Lunch conversation centered around cars. The Porsche I'd seen Yuri driving to court turned out to be Alik's, and was the automotive black sheep of the family. “The Audi's out of the shop this week,” Kimberly said, munching on celery, “so we can take the Porsche in.”
    “To do what?” Alik asked.
    “To convert it to biofuel.”
    “Dream on,” Alik said. “Can't be done. First, it's not diesel—”
    “Stanislas says he'll be able to—”
    “Kimberly, you're not feeding bacon grease to my Porsche. Forget it.”
    “Honest to God, Alik, how can you morally justify that car?” Kimberly asked.
    “It is no better than the Corvette,” Donatella said. “Bourgeois in the extreme.”
    Yuri broke off a piece of crusted bread, then said, “I am not convincedbiofuel is the Holy Green Grail. I want to see agricultural impact numbers before we do