A Fare To Remember_ Just Whistle_Driven - Vicki Lewis Thompson [17]
She’d taken off his jacket so her relatives wouldn’t get the idea that it was cold in New York. If she was cold, she didn’t act like it. Instead she flung her arms out and turned this way and that like a high-fashion model at a photo shoot.
He was fascinated with her. Too bad she thought he should quit his job, because he knew she really did, even though they’d dropped the subject for now. Well, he’d cut her some slack on that opinion. She was still very naive. Let her struggle in the big city for a while and see how she felt about throwing away perfectly good jobs just because the boss wasn’t a sweetheart.
Without his job, he wouldn’t be able to buy bouquets of flowers or take a date out for a nice dinner. He was finally making the money that Adrienne had thought he should make, not that he was doing it to prove anything to her. She’d never know.
So what if he didn’t play as much racquetball? The guys he’d played with had decided to leave the company, anyway. One of them was still in town and struggling to make ends meet. The other had left New York completely. Zach wasn’t about to run home to Auburn because his boss wasn’t sensitive to the needs of his employees.
Granted, a part of him would love to tell Medford to take the job and shove it. The guy was an unfeeling son of a bitch to be treating Ed that way. But this was the business world, not Sesame Street. Ed knew the score and was choosing not to play Medford’s game. Ed would have to take the consequences for that.
Zach took pictures of Hannah until she called out that they had enough and ran back over to him. He wouldn’t have minded taking a few more. Watching her perform for him as her personal photographer was more fun than he’d had in a long while.
“I don’t want to overdo it.” She accepted the jacket he held out. This time she put her arms in the sleeves, which were too long and made her look adorable.
“Why not overdo it?” He thought about the meager supply of pictures he sent home to Illinois. “My experience with families is that you can’t overdo the snapshots. You need some for Mom, Dad, brothers and sisters, grandmothers and grandfathers, aunts and uncles.”
She gazed at him wistfully. “It must be nice, having all those people to give pictures to.”
“You don’t?”
She shook her head. “Just my brother and sister.” Then she smiled. “Don’t look like that, all pitying. It’s okay.”
“I’ll accept that it’s okay. You’re living proof.” But his heart went out to her, anyway. “What happened?”
She tucked the camera back in her purse. “I was thirteen when my mom died, which was lucky because I was old enough to help Dad with my brother and sister, who were only four. Poor Dad was never the same after Mom died, and I had the feeling he was hanging on until I was eighteen, so the twins wouldn’t end up in foster care. He died a month after my eighteenth birthday.”
He was beginning to understand her need to take care of the whole world after conditioning like that. “But what about other relatives? Grandparents, aunts, uncles?”
“Both my parents were only children, nerdy types who married late in life. I barely remember my grandparents. My mom had me at the age of forty-one, and then, because she was always ready to buck convention, decided to try having a second child at fifty. She ended up with the twins. Who are both brilliant, since you asked.”
“I’m guessing you’re no slouch in the brains department, either.”
“I do okay, but nothing like the twins. They kept me on my toes, but they’ve turned into adults who can actually take care of themselves now. It’s a miracle.”
He thought she might be the miracle for weathering all those hard knocks and keeping her sunny disposition. “Did you feed them lots of tuna?”
She laughed. “Good one. Yes, I did. Brain food.” She gazed around at the crowds milling through Times Square. “This place is amazing. I had great plans to stay up until midnight seeing more of