Love in Bloom's Read online

  “I’m Ron Joffe,” he said, extending his right hand. “I write for Gotham Magazine. Julia told me she’d hired you to redo the windows.”

  The reporter. The guy Julia was sleeping with. Okay.

  She shook his hand and nodded, resisting the impulse to wink and smirk. “When is that article coming out, anyway? Everybody’s dying to read it.”

  “Soon,” he said vaguely. He really was kind of cute. Not her type—he had to be at least thirty, which as far as she was concerned was too old to be age-appropriate, as Julia would put it—but not bad.

  She pivoted to look at the window. The signs were readable, although she’d have to check in the morning, when the sun hit the windows, to make sure the glare on the glass didn’t obscure them.

  He pivoted to study the window, too. “They’re funny, but the window looks pretty barren.”

  “It’s not finished,” she told him, wondering whether this conversation, held against the buffeting noise of cars and buses and the jostling of passersby, was going to wind up in Gotham Magazine. “Don’t judge it until it’s done.”

  “Well,” he said. His hands were back in his pockets, giving his shoulders an amiably slouchy shape. “I’ve got to see your sister. I’m glad we had a chance to meet.”

  That was it? Her grand interview? Her moment in the media spotlight? Big whoop. She’d be lucky to merit a subordinate clause in his article.

  The signs in the window looked all right, at least. Maybe she should go inside and drag Casey out to the sidewalk to get his input. She’d told the magazine reporter it wasn’t fair to judge the window until she’d finished with it, but if she fetched Casey and brought him outside, it would chip a few more minutes off the twenty-hour block.

  Grinning, she headed into the store to find him.

  Ron actually did have business to discuss with Julia. He’d brought her a tear sheet of his rough draft so she could review it. The story wasn’t done yet—that morning, he’d talked to a chatty teller at the bank that handled most of Bloom’s business, and he hadn’t yet incorporated information from that conversation into the piece. And he’d sure as hell like to hear more from Julia about whether she thought her business was hemorrhaging or just trickling blood.

  The weekend they’d spent together had complicated matters. He hadn’t actually believed that screwing Julia would bring him closer to his story—but even if he had, he discovered that he possessed too much integrity to exploit their intimacy. One of the systems that Julia had succeeded in short-circuiting inside him was the one that said, “The story is the only thing that matters.”

  Julia mattered. The way she moved, breathed, laughed and came mattered. Last night they’d made love on the living room floor and in the shower, and then she’d tried going down on him. It had been clear she’d never done that before, but her ineptitude had excited him more than any skilled female mouth might have. He’d returned the favor, with a bit more proficiency, and by the time she was done moaning, she seemed so exposed, so vulnerable, he couldn’t possibly say afterward, “So, Julia, can you give me a ballpark figure on how much money Bloom’s is losing per annum?”

  But he did have to talk to her today. He probably should have phoned her to talk, and faxed her the tear sheet, but he was enough of a fool to grab any opportunity to see her. He’d keep his hands in his pockets and his tongue inside his mouth, and maybe they’d get through a conversation without locking lips or bodies.

  He waited until her sister, Susie, had gone back into the store, then strolled around the corner to the Bloom Building entrance and took the elevator up to the third floor.

  Emerging into the broad hallway that connected the offices, he saw Jay Bloom practicing his putts on the carpet. The Bloom’s executive lined up his putter, wiggled one elbow and tapped the ball, which rolled smoothly across the floor and into a tumbler lying on its side. Jay punched the air triumphantly, crossed to the glass to retrieve his ball, and turned to see Ron looming at the end of the hallway.

  Jay had the good grace to appear abashed. “Hi,” he said, straightening up and adjusting the collar of his shirt. “You’re…”

  “Ron Joffe. Gotham Magazine,” Ron prompted him.

  “Right. I knew you looked familiar.” He grinned and bent again to pick up the glass. “Just loosening up a little. Spend too much time slaving over a computer, and you can get pretty stiff.”

  “Isn’t that the truth,” Ron said, recalling that his initial impression of Julia’s uncle Jay was that he was a boob. The past two minutes had done nothing to change Ron’s opinion. But he viewed the man with gratitude. Boobs were often the best sources for a story. They didn’t have enough sense to comprehend how much they were giving a reporter.

  Ron was aware Julia was behind the door at the other end of the hall. His emotional radar sensed her nearness, beeping and blipping like a screen in the control tower at LaGuardia. But once he saw her, he wasn’t going to want to talk to Uncle Jay or anyone else for the rest of the day.

  Better to pump the uncle first, see what he could find out, then invade her office and test the limits of his self-control. “Have you got a few minutes?” he asked Jay. “Maybe we could talk.”

  “Sure,” Jay replied, adjusting his posture in a preening way. When he beckoned Ron to follow him into his office, Ron smiled, reached for his notepad and felt his journalist juices start to flow.

  Julia stared at the man before her and decided she would have to institute a new policy: no visitors without appointments. “What are you doing here?” she asked, trying to keep her tone free of the vexation she felt at his invasion of her office.

  He flicked a lock of hair off his forehead and grinned. “Just wanted to see what was so enticing about this place that you’d give up your life at Griffin, McDougal to sell sauerkraut.”

  “I don’t sell sauerkraut,” she explained steadily, her gaze circling the office. Granted, most company presidents had more elegant surroundings. They featured plusher carpets, cleaner windows, fancier sofas and no abandoned old furniture occupying valuable square footage. But her office at Bloom’s was an infinite improvement over the glorified cubicle she’d been assigned at the law firm, and Heath’s imperious smile irked her.

  He propped one hip on the corner of her desk and peered down at her as if she were his underling. “I had to visit a client at the Dakota and I thought, since I was in the neighborhood, hey, why not stop by and see how Jules is doing?”

  “I’m doing fine,” she told him, again struggling to remain cordial. She used to date him, after all. She used to watch him eat sushi. She owed him courtesy, at the very least.

  But he seemed like an alien to her, a relic from a life she could scarcely remember. In his Armani suit and his Bally tasseled loafers, with his burnished blue-blood features, he didn’t fit into the world of Bloom’s. Sure, he’d fit in downstairs, where the clientele included everyone from Fortune 500 CEOs to recent parolees from Sing Sing. But Heath was terribly out of place on the third floor, where the majority of Bloom’s executives were Blooms, and screaming at one another from office to office was the preferred mode of communication.

  “Your desk is still empty at Griffin, McDougal,” he reported, which flattered her until he continued. “Obviously, they’re waiting to find a replacement until May, when they’ll have a new crop of law school graduates to choose from.” In other words, she was replaceable by someone fresh out of law school.

  Perhaps she was. Only someone fresh out of school, as she’d been when the firm had hired her, would be willing to put up with their draconian hours and demands—which, she had to admit, weren’t so different from the hours she put in at Bloom’s or the demands of her family. But the store needed her attention right now, and her family would be bugging her whether or not she worked at Bloom’s.

  “I’m happy here,” she said, startling herself. It was the first time she’d actually expressed such a sentiment. She wasn’t even sure it was true. As her mother might say, what was t
o be happy? She had to mediate between her mother and Uncle Jay, with their thwarted ambitions and unthwarted jealousies, and chisel away at Deirdre, who did everything she was supposed to but never revealed a hint of feeling, let alone an opinion, and jostle Myron, who had grown so addicted to cranberry bagels she expected to barge into his office one day and find him sniffing pink crumbs through a rolled-up hundred-dollar bill. Her mother hated Susie’s window concepts, Jay bristled at Deirdre’s unearthly efficiency, Myron criticized Jay’s long lunches, Susie sulked about Grandma Ida’s disapproval of her and everyone despised Julia for some reason or other.

  How could she possibly be happy?

  Yet she was, in some perverse, indefinable way. For the first time in months, she actually awakened before her alarm buzzed. More often than not, she had a Bloom’s bialy for breakfast, instead of a stale doughnut, and she wore outfits she chose because they were comfortable, not because they made her look like partner material. She filled her Bloom’s mug with Bloom’s coffee each morning before coming upstairs to her office, where she spent her days engaged in trying to figure out how to beef up some departments and perk up others, how to maintain peace among the warring Blooms and how to improve the anemic bottom line. It wasn’t what she’d been trained to do, what her entire education had been geared toward, what she’d dreamed of when she’d lain in bed at night, thinking, Just because I’m a Bloom doesn’t mean I’m doomed to give my life to the store, the way my parents and my uncle and my grandmother did.

  “Yes,” she said, astonishment coloring her voice. “I’m happy here.”

  Heath appeared nonplussed. “I browsed through your deli, and—I mean, Jules, it’s food. Ethnic food. A lot of it is the sort of stuff your people came over here to escape.”

  “I think my people came over here to escape the pogroms and Hitler, not to escape the food.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Unfortunately, she did. She stared up at him, still seated proprietarily on her desk, and wondered what his attraction had been. He was bright, he was handsome, he was accomplished and he wore an Armani suit very well—none of which explained his appeal. What she’d seen in him was that he’d been the anti-Bloom. At one time, she’d thought escaping the insidious bonds of the family was more important than anything else. Neil had escaped by fleeing to Florida; Susie by tattooing her ankle; Adam by hiding out at Cornell, listening to Phish and fantasizing about becoming a math professor; Rick by making himself endearingly useless.

  She’d tried to do it by becoming a lawyer and dating a colleague whom she’d never wanted to have sex with because she felt no charge in his company, no zing, nothing but anti-Bloom-ness.

  Scrutinizing Heath, she realized that she could not picture him eating heat-n-eat blintzes or kasha varnishkes from the hot food counter downstairs. She couldn’t even imagine him attending a seder at Grandma Ida’s. She’d witnessed him eating sushi, Thai cuisine, stir-fry, quesadillas, coq au vin, paella, moussaka and sauerbraten. But she’d never seen him eat a bagel and lox. And she never would. That had once been his greatest attraction. Now it was his greatest shortcoming.

  And there was that other thing, too, she acknowledged when, all of a sudden, thanks to the absence of a policy banning unannounced visitors, she heard a tap on her open office door and turned to find Ron Joffe standing on the threshold.

  Passion. Yearning. Plain old guilty lust. Memories of everything they’d done to each other during the past few days caused heat to rise to her cheeks. Oh God—had she really used her mouth on him there?

  Not only had she, but she’d do it again, in an instant, just to feel him shudder with the kind of helplessness she felt whenever he touched her. Right here, in her office, if he wanted, she’d do it. He obviously had the power to turn her brain as well as her knees to jelly.

  She struggled to keep from sighing. The sound of Heath clearing his throat prompted her to impersonate a sane, composed adult. She pushed her chair away from her desk and rose. “Hi,” she greeted Joffe in an artificially calm voice. “What are you doing here?”

  Joffe eyed Heath, who reluctantly stood, as well. After a minute, Joffe steered his dark eyes back to her. “I’ve got something to show you—but you’re busy right now. I should have called.”

  “No, that’s all right. Come in.” What did he want to show her? Would it require her to shut and lock the office door? She hoped so.

  Heath cleared his throat again.

  Shaking her head to dispel the steamy thoughts Joffe’s mere presence stirred up, she said, “Ron Joffe, this is a former colleague of mine, Heath Blodgett. Heath, this is…Ron Joffe.” She wasn’t sure how to introduce him. A reporter? A lover? A man poised to humiliate her family in the pages of Gotham Magazine? A guy who did things with his tongue that she really shouldn’t be remembering at a time like this?

  Joffe and Heath shook hands in a show of macho camaraderie. Then they sized each other up, all traces of camaraderie gone. Heath had an inch or two on Joffe, but Joffe’s nose and chin were better defined. Heath’s apparel was probably worth ten times what Joffe’s had cost. Joffe’s shoulders were broader. Heath ate raw squid. Joffe was born to love pastrami on rye.

  Julia had never wanted to have sex with Heath. Just looking at Joffe caused her to overdose on her own hormones. “Heath was just leaving,” she announced.

  He shot her a glare, then acquiesced with a bitter smile. “Your office at Griffin, McDougal isn’t going to stay empty forever,” he reminded her.

  “I know.”

  “Think long and hard, Jules. Mid-May the hordes descend. Push is coming to shove.”

  “I know. It’s so thoughtful of you to warn me.”

  “Nice meeting you,” Joffe said helpfully. When his gaze intersected with hers, he flashed her a conspiratorial grin. She pressed her lips together to keep from smiling back.

  Heath looked uncharacteristically uncertain. He planted a hesitant kiss on her cheek, mumbled something about being in touch and left the office, far more tentative than anyone in Armani should be.

  Joffe watched through the open doorway for a minute, as if checking to make sure Heath didn’t change his mind and return, and then he shut the door.

  Good. Maybe he was going to show her something obscene.

  She couldn’t believe she was thinking that way.

  It didn’t matter. She was thinking that way, and she circled her desk and approached Joffe with one thing on her mind.

  He had something else on his mind. “A boyfriend?” he asked, angling his head toward the door.

  “A lawyer I used to work with at Griffin, McDougal.”

  He eyed her skeptically. “None of my business, right?”

  “He was almost a boyfriend,” she conceded. “He never quite made it all the way.” In any sense, she added silently.

  “It’s none of my business,” Joffe repeated, as she rose on tiptoe to kiss him.

  He moved his lips against hers briefly, then drew back. “Don’t,” he whispered. “I came to your office so we could talk.”

  “But you closed the door.”

  “I’m ambivalent.” He covered her mouth with his, nipped at her lower lip, then pulled away. “You free tonight?”

  “Probably.”

  “Okay.” One more kiss, and he took a step backward. “I brought you a tear sheet of the article. I thought you could check it for spellings and stuff.”

  “What, do I look like a secretary?” She wasn’t even sure what a tear sheet was, but she’d be damned if she was going to proofread his article for spelling errors. “Doesn’t your computer have a spell-check function?”

  “People’s names don’t get picked up by spell-check.”

  “Like Bloom is such a difficult name to spell.” She laughed to take the edge off her words. She was actually thrilled to have a chance to read his article before it went into print. If it was embarrassing, she could persuade him to tone things down. If it implied Bloom’s was financially shaky, she cou
ld beg him to concentrate on Bloom’s being a New York fixture, indispensable to the city’s sense of itself. She could remind him of how often tour buses stopped at its front door so people from all over the world could browse and shop. She could make sure he emphasized how superior their merchandise was. Even if it wasn’t a puff piece, she could convince him to puff it up a little.

  He pulled a folded sheaf of papers from an inner pocket of his jacket and handed them to her. “Here it is. Have a look.”

  She carried them to her grandfather’s old desk. For some reason, the new desk seemed tainted, now that Heath had sat on it. She didn’t want to go near it until any molecules Heath left behind had dissipated.

  She hoisted herself onto the desk, the way Susie always sat on it, and started to read the computer printout of the article: “Bloom’s is to New York City what the Louvre is to Paris or Beefeaters are to London: not just a symbol but a distillation of a city’s essence. When we think of New York, we think of the generations of immigrants who brought their culture here and made it their home, who built this city and continue to build it today. We think of food—not just tasty, nourishing food but food that represents the values those waves of immigrants brought with them when they settled here. Bloom’s is a place filled with your grandmother’s food and her values, the recipes she carried in her heart when she landed at Ellis Island.”

  “Wow.” Julia’s eyes clouded with tears. She glanced up to find Joffe at the window, viewing the Broadway traffic through the dingy glass. He turned at the sound of her voice. “This is beautiful.”

  He chuckled. “It gets worse.”

  “I don’t care. It starts out great.”

  “You’re not crying, are you?” He frowned.

  “No.” A fat tear skittered down her cheek, making a liar out of her.

  He crossed to the desk. “Hey, if it’s going to get you all upset—”

  “I’m a big girl, Joffe. Let me read it.” She lowered her gaze to the papers, but another tear slid down her cheek and dropped off her chin, hitting the top page and creating a blot.