Love and Miss Communication by Elyssa Friedland Read Free Book Online Page A

other, he approached Evie when she stepped away from her table to listen to a voicemail, and offered to buy her a drink. The first thing she heard was his accent. It was definitely British and definitely hot.
    Evie assessed that he was handsome but not out of her league. He stood about three inches taller than her in her heels and had fair skin, steely blue-gray eyes, and brown hair worn a touch on the long side. She guessed he was about midthirties. The small gap between his two front teeth immediately made Evie curious about his background. Where she was from, everyone got braces the day after their bar or bat mitzvahs. He had a raw sexiness about him, emphasized by a five-o’clock shadow and the motorcycle jacket he managed to pull off without any irony. In a word—he had swagger.
    “I’m Jack,” he said, grabbing a few handfuls of smoked nuts at the bar. “And I’m absolutely starved after a rubbish sushi dinner in Midtown.”
    “Midtown? Why were you eating there? My office is in Midtown and the restaurants are terrible. I’m Evie, by the way.”
    “And what is it that you do? In Midtown?”
    Courtesy of the alcohol ratcheting up her self-esteem a few notches, Evie responded proudly that she was a corporate attorney at Baker Smith, instead of muttering “lawyer” under her breath.
    They ended up discussing for ten minutes which neighborhoods in Manhattan had the best restaurants—teasing, joking, and spritedly fighting their way through a mock dispute. For the first time in ages, she actually ignored the persistent buzz of her BlackBerry, even though she knew a team of attorneys in the firm’s Menlo Park office was waiting on her feedback. Jack was just so passionate as he spoke—though really anything he said with that accent would have magnetized her.
    “So, Jack, what do you do that you have so much time to go out to eat?” She hoped to get at some explanation of why he was being filmed earlier.
    “Well, I suppose now is a good time to tell you, I’m a chef. Jack Kipling is my full name. Perhaps I should have told you that before we got into it.” He chuckled, obviously enjoying her jaw-dropped reaction.
    Jack Kipling was arguably the city’s hottest young chef. She was surprised that she hadn’t recognized him. He was not only a chef but also a successful restaurateur, owning several well-regarded restaurants in the city, most notably JAK, a French-style bistro on the Upper West Side near her apartment. He was a close pal and rival of Marcus Samuelsson.
    “But don’t worry, no offense taken about your comment that uptown restaurants are almost as bad as Midtown,” he said.
    “Wait—no—I actually love JAK! I eat there all the time. Honestly. Check your receipts. You’ll see lots of Evie Rosen AmEx charges.”
    “I believe you. Though I won’t quiz you on what your favorite dish is, just in case you’re lying to make me feel better. Listen these nuts are not really doing it for me—I’m still rather peckish. Do you want to—wait, sorry, I forgot I saw you over there with your friends.”
    “No, no, it’s fine. We were getting ready to leave anyway,”she lied. “I’ll just go say good-bye to them and we can get something to eat.”
    And that was the start of Evie’s relationship with Jack.
    Three shrill rings of her office phone brought Evie back to the present. Her secretary, Marianne, whom she shared with another associate, was away from her post, as per usual, so Evie scooped up the phone herself. Marianne was all big hair and big lips and something always seemed to need reapplying in the bathroom.
    “This is Evie.”
    “Evie, it’s Mitchell Rhodes. Could you come up to the conference room on the forty-second floor please?”
    Evie immediately felt nauseated. It couldn’t be that she was already going to be named partner, could it? It was too early for that, unless the firm was changing its protocol. Maybe they wanted to grill her on her recent matters, to see if she was