Kiss and Makeup: A Second Chance Romance (A Chicago CEO Novel) by J. P. Comeau

Author:J. P. Comeau [Comeau, J. P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

One Tuesday, I left the office building of a company looking to become clients of Cruise Media and sucked a deep breath of winter air into my lungs. I could do this because somehow, miraculously, the air was warm enough not to freeze my chest solid and send me coughing like I had inhaled all the detritus off the Chicago sidewalks.

Since I knew that tomorrow I would likely be back to freezing my toned butt-cheeks off, I decided to walk to a nearby sandwich shop for a late lunch and enjoy this weather while it lasted. Plenty of other people had the same idea, so the sidewalks bustled with activity.

The closeness of the crowds, the people rushing from place to place and knocking into everyone else—usually, I hated it, but today I didn’t mind. The weather must have put me in a good mood. It felt nice not to freeze to death in my suit for a change.

Eyeing the large family with joined hands plowing toward me on the sidewalk ahead, I ducked into the doorway of a dry cleaner’s to avoid being stampeded. When I emerged, I spotted a very familiar ponytail bobbing through the crowd ahead of me.

“Kristen, wait!” I called, ducking and weaving through pedestrians like a slalom skier in the winter Olympics.

“Oh… hello, Xavier.” She didn’t look pleased to see me at all. In fact, anxiousness flitted across the set of her face before she replaced it with something more neutral.

“Could you stop doing that?” I asked. The weather also made me more blunt than usual, it seemed.

“Stop what?”

“If you don’t want to see me anymore, just say so. You never actually ask me to leave you alone,” I pointed out, overriding her words. “I ask what’s wrong, you say nothing, then you give me something about how I shouldn’t ask because it isn’t my business.”

Kristen shifted, glancing away from the sidewalk toward the buildings nearby. “Xavier, I’ll talk to you about this if you want, but now isn’t a good time—”

“It’s never a good time.” We had switched roles. I was the calm one. She couldn’t look me in the eye.

“This is an even worse time than usual.” She glanced at her phone, a little urgency lacing her tone.

I tried to catch her arm, but she stepped back, eyes trained on something over my shoulder. Nothing was there but a high, gated fence and a silent, empty playground. “Seriously, Kristen, please? I just want to know what’s going on.”

“And I just said I’ll talk to you, but not right now. Tomorrow after—”

A bell rang loudly, a clang rang through the streets, and I turned around to see the empty playground was now anything but that. Children spilled from what I now realized was a preschool like water, flowing around the adults who had opened the doors like little leaves blown by the wind. They piled onto the swings, the slides, and the tunnels, and for a moment I could hardly tell what was going on as an elderly woman walked over and unlocked the gates.

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