“My eyesight is twenty-twenty,” she retorted.
“So that’s a maybe, then?”
Alexis couldn’t help the laugh, a full laugh, the first in a long time, and his eyes crinkled a little at the corners as he watched her. “Tell me about you, Alexis, my new best friend.”
Damn, he was charming.
“Well,” she said slowly. “I’m not an accountant—sorry to break your number-crunching heart. But I, too, am a ‘recovering student.’ ”
“Do tell.”
“I finished up my master’s program at Boston College end of last year. Marketing and business administration.”
“Boston,” he said, the word sounding ridiculously appealing in his clipped accent. “And what brings you to New York?”
Alexis waved a hand over her laptop and the folder holding her business proposal. “This.”
“And this would be . . . ?”
She shoved the folder his way and took another sip of her wine—a big one.
He pulled it toward him, opened it, and began to read.
Having the entire thing memorized, Alexis couldn’t help but “read” along with him inside her own head.
The Wedding Belles is a boutique wedding-planning company committed to providing carefully curated weddings for the discerning bride . . . The Wedding Belles ensures the perfect combination of classic elegance and innovative modernity, promising a wedding that’s both timeless and contemporary . . .
Logan turned the page, and Alexis expected him to lose interest once he was past the marketing fluff, but to her surprise, he read every last page, analyzed every last chart she’d painstakingly created.
His food arrived and Logan gestured with one finger for another round of drinks, before absently pulling a fry off one of the plates and shoving the plate in her direction.
She bit her lip. She couldn’t. She shouldn’t.
But the smell of the chicken club, with melted cheese and ripe avocado between buttery, toasty bread, was too much to resist. She picked up a knife and cut off a quarter of the sandwich.
“Oh my God,” she whispered around the first heavenly bite.
Out of the corner of her eye she thought she saw him smile, but he never looked up from her proposal, careful to wipe his fingers between fries and turning her pages.
Finally, he’d read the entire thing, and Alexis was mortified to realize she’d eaten half his chicken sandwich, a quarter of the burger, a good two-thirds of the fish, and more than a few fries.
Logan didn’t seem to mind as he picked up the remaining half of his chicken sandwich and took a thoughtful bite.
He chewed slowly, methodically. Took a sip of beer. Then turned toward her once more. “Where are you with this?”
“How do you mean?”
“You need funding, yes?”
She nodded, reaching for the second glass of wine the bartender had brought along with Logan’s beer. She couldn’t afford it, but . . . what the hell?
“Yes. I’m envisioning a three-story, multiuse brownstone that could serve as both office space for the team, reception, as well as my living quarters. It’ll be more money up front, but I’ve done the math, and it makes more financial sense in the long run when you factor in the cost of moving, inflation, lease renewal.”
“You want to start it off right,” he said. “From the very beginning.”
She nodded, grateful that someone finally understood. “I know conventional wisdom suggests that I should start it out of my home and sort of build up, but the entire brand of the Belles is elite. The clients I want aren’t the ones who will meet in the living room of my Harlem apartment.”
“Any nibbles?”
She lifted a shoulder and pulled another fry off the plate, long past the point of playing coy about being desperately hungry. “I’ve had a few meetings. Nobody’s laughed me out of the conference room yet—just a lot of noncommittal ‘We’ll be in touch.’ ”
He nodded. “You have a location in mind.”
She smiled, loving that it wasn’t a question so much as a statement. As though he knew the way her mind worked, putting the cart before the horse and touring Manhattan real estate when she couldn’t even afford a second glass of eight-dollar wine.