Love in Bloom's (21 page)

“She’s crazy,” he blurted out, then smiled apologetically. “I know that grocery store. I live on West Seventy-Sixth.”

“Really? I live on—”

She cut herself off. She looked the way she’d looked outside the restaurant, right after she’d stopped smiling when she saw him, as if she was happy and didn’t want him to know. “Where do you live?”

“West Seventy-Fourth.”

“So we’re neighbors.”

“It would seem.” She attacked her food with singular determination.

He successfully suppressed his own smile. But while he worked on his dinner he kept his gaze on her, trying to read her expression. Some tension in there, a hint of panic but a sort of fizziness, too, like bubbles in a bottle of soda someone had shaken. Just one twist of the screw cap, and they’d come squirting out.

He decided not to dwell on how terrific it was that they were neighbors. “Number one,” he said, “that grocery store isn’t cheap. And number two, Bloom’s is less expensive than it could be. Besides, you’d have gotten the food wholesale.”

“But then the store wouldn’t have made its profit.” She tilted her head slightly, and her sleek black hair brushed against her shoulder. “I hope you won’t put any of this in your article. I know my family is a little eccentric, but it would be cruel for you to make us look ridiculous in your magazine.”

“I have no interest in making you look ridiculous.”
Colorful
and
interesting
would be more accurate.

“I’ve been encouraging employees to use our merchandise. I couldn’t believe that people working for us would stop in at the McDonald’s to buy a cup of coffee to bring to work with them. It’s absurd. They should be using and enjoying the products they’re selling to others.”

“And they didn’t do this before you came along?”

“Apparently not. They probably think I’m some kind of crazy radical, turning the place upside down.”

He mentally stored her words. He’d try not to embarrass her family, but a lot of this stuff belonged in his article. She hadn’t said any of it was off the record, so he could use it if he wanted. “Are you turning Bloom’s upside down?”

“Maybe just sideways,” she said with a smile. “We’re redesigning our display windows, and if that’s successful, we’ll think about updating the interior a bit.”

“That doesn’t sound so radical.”

“
I
don’t think it’s radical. It’s just a little different from the way things have been done for the past sixty years.”

“What else are you doing to turn the place sideways?”

“We have meetings. I gather that before I took over, no one on the third floor had meetings. They just kept their office doors open and shouted back and forth a lot.”

“Do they like doing it your way?”

“I’m not sure. But I try to have a platter of Bloom’s bagels for them to nosh on during the meetings. I’m sure that helps.” Another smile, this one ironic. “I’m trying to upgrade the way we do business in general. My father ran the store brilliantly, but he did a lot of it by instinct. I lack his instincts, so I have to do things more step-by-step.”

Her father. The cold one who’d been so close with Deirdre Morrissey. Did Julia know about that special relationship? Did she know her father was a philandering schmuck?

“Because he did so much by instinct, there aren’t a lot of paper trails and road maps. So I’m still feeling my way along. But I’m getting there. I’m figuring things out.”

“Are you putting in the kind of hours he put in?”

She arched an eyebrow. “What do you know about his hours?”

“Julia, I’ve been talking to people—both in and out of Bloom’s. I’m a journalist. It’s my job to find things out.” He drank some wine. “Everybody I talked to told me your father worked twelve-hour days and seven-day weeks. He was always at the office, always doing Bloom business. That’s what people say.”

“I suppose that’s a fairly accurate description. He loved the store.”

“He spent more time there than with you.”

“Well, he—” Again she cut herself off. Again her cheeks darkened. “He worked very hard,” she admitted.

“Did you and your family resent that?”

“Of course not! My mother worked there, too. Even when we kids were young, she’d put in four or five hours a day on the third floor. We’d hang out at the store and get in the way. It was fun. Not too many kids get the run of a famous delicatessen like Bloom’s.”

“Where they aren’t even allowed to eat all that great food because it could be sold for a profit.”

She set her fork down on her plate with a staccato clatter. “I think we’re done.”

“No.” He reached across the table and covered her hand with his. “I’m sorry, okay?” he said, trying to ignore the smooth warmth of her knuckles against his palm, the jarring realization that he was touching her. “It’s a family business, and I want to get a sense of the family dynamic. That’s all.”

“You’re saying my father ignored his family.”

“I never said that.”

“He worked hard to honor the legacy his parents had created, and to make sure it was an even better legacy when it was passed along to my generation. He worked hard because running a delicatessen on the scale of Bloom’s isn’t easy. I’m learning that. It’s a monumental responsibility, and he lived up to it. When I was a kid, I didn’t care about eating food from Bloom’s. I never felt deprived.”

She was lying. He could tell by the darkness in her eyes, by the way she didn’t quite look at him, by the cooling of her hand beneath his. She’d felt deprived, and she didn’t need Ron to tell her her father was a schmuck. She knew it.

“Okay,” he relented, letting go of her. She flexed her hand a couple of times, then studied it as if she expected to find that he’d left a mark on it.

His own hand felt empty without hers. “I’m trying to get a sense of things, that’s all,” he said—another apology. “It’s what reporters do.”

“Right.” She sighed, and when her eyes met his she no longer looked resentful. “You’re just doing your job.”

“The more interesting stuff I include about your family and the history of Bloom’s, the better the publicity for the store. Trust me on this. Customers will pour into the place if they’ve learned a little of the background story.”

“Do you think so?”

“I’m sure of it.” He wasn’t just saying that to mollify her. People who read in
Gotham
that Ida Bloom was the iron-fisted queen, that her son Ben spent more time at the deli than in his home, that his children had the run of the place while eating inferior bagels from the supermarket down the street—this was the kind of color that lured the curious. They’d flock to the store just to see what it was all about. “I’m not writing a puff piece, but what I write is going to mean a lot more traffic for you at Bloom’s. I don’t want to inflict damage on the store. I just want to write an interesting story. Trust me.”

She stared at him for a moment. He held her gaze, hoping he looked suitably trustworthy. Finally, reluctantly, she smiled and took a final bite of portobello.

“I’m stuffed,” she said.

She’d made a respectable dent in the large portion, but there was still a bit left over. “Would you like some dessert?”

“No, thanks. Will they wrap the leftovers for me?”

He struggled not to laugh. Not only did Julia eat enthusiastically, but she had no qualms about requesting a doggie bag. Most women behaved as if they didn’t want men to realize they actually ate. Julia was uninhibited about eating.

Damn. Contemplating her lack of inhibition caused that short circuit inside him to start shooting sparks again.

“When is the article going to be published?” she asked.

“When I’m done writing it.”

“Will you need to interview me again?”

A million times. Every day. Every night
. “I don’t know.”

She sipped her wine and watched him. He couldn’t read her mind, and that bothered him. He considered being able to figure out what people were thinking one of his most essential skills as a journalist. And he’d figured Julia out pretty well throughout most of their meal. But not now.

He signaled for the waiter, told him to wrap up her leftovers and asked for the check.

As he pocketed his receipt, she said, “There’s something I need to ask you.”

He stood and circled the table to pull out her chair, but she was on her feet before he could take her hand. “Fire away,” he invited her.

She started toward the front door, then halted and turned, nearly causing him to bump into her. “Why did you kiss me?”

All right. She was going to force him to address the constant arousal he felt around her. It attacked like a low-grade virus, an incurable malady that left him functional but vaguely feverish. Surely she felt it, too. Surely it was as vivid to her as to him, as visceral, an invisible power plant pumping heat into the air around them and infecting them with its fumes.

He touched his hand to her shoulder and steered her out of the restaurant. Outside, the street was relatively calm—all the theatergoers were probably just returning to their seats after intermissions at the various playhouses in the neighborhood. The sky was dark, the air nippy.

On the sidewalk she stopped and turned to him again. Her eyes were wide, questioning, slightly impatient.

He would answer her question. She deserved that much. He’d apologize for the kiss he’d given her at her office, tell her it had been a reckless impulse, explain that he was a professional and didn’t behave that way, that he knew better, that he must have momentarily lost his mind that day. He’d describe faulty wiring to her, short circuits and the way they could cause fires and breakdowns and other problems.

She gazed up at him with those big brown eyes and that enigmatic smile, and he knew there was only one answer, one explanation, one way to get past that first kiss.

T
hey stopped kissing only long enough to climb into a cab. Then they started again—deep, luscious kisses, wet kisses, gentle kisses, greedy kisses. It was all one big kiss, actually, like a pasta salad that contained different shapes and colors of pasta, each of them distinct yet all of them combining to be ultimately about one single thing: pasta.

All his kisses were about one single thing: kissing.

She was scarcely aware of the cab’s movement, its aggressive swerves through the traffic as it carried them uptown. Her consciousness zeroed in on Joffe’s mouth covering hers, his tongue tasting of wine, his hand warm against her cheek, his fingers wandering under her hair to stroke her nape and a heaviness inside her, settling between her legs, making her want to rub up against him like a cat. The meter ticked like a time bomb.

When the ticking stopped, she came up for air. The cab had halted in the middle of West Seventy-Sixth Street, blocking the
road. She swallowed, flexed her lips to see if they still worked and found her gaze drawn to Joffe’s hip when he pulled out his wallet.

His hip. Oh God. What was she doing?

She knew what she was doing: going to his apartment to have sex with him. She, Julia Bloom, who generally avoided sex because she’d never found it to be particularly enthralling, was about to get naked with a man she hardly knew. She was doing this because his kisses turned her on enough to convince her that anything—even a halfway decent sexual experience—was possible. She was on the verge of going all the way with a reporter who might wind up humiliating her and her family in the pages of the most popular magazine in New York City, for no other reason than that she wanted to.

It was just the sort of thing Susie would do. That thought scared the hell out of her.

Joffe took her hand and helped her from the cab. Only after it sped down the street did she remember that her doggie bag was still sitting on the seat.

No big deal. If she was hungry now, it wasn’t for polenta.

He continued to hold her hand as he led her past a spindly tree surrounded by a knee-high fence and into one of the charming, well-maintained brownstones on the block. He unlocked the inner door and ushered her up the stairs. His hand enveloped hers, his fingers thick and warm between hers.

When they reached the third floor, he unlocked a door, pushed it open, tossed his keys onto a table just inside and drew her over the threshold. Kicking the door shut, he hauled her back into his arms.

The kissing began again, and she reveled in it. If this was what Susie went through when she was with men, no wonder she spent so much time with them. If Julia had known kissing could be this magnificent, she’d have been collecting lovers the way a philatelist collected stamps. She’d have had entire albums of them, licked and laid out.

It wasn’t kissing that was so magnificent. It was kissing Joffe.
She’d known there was something about him the first time she’d seen him, the morning at her office when they’d laughed about Grandpa Isaac’s desk and he’d kissed her before leaving the building—a kiss that had as much in common with tonight’s kisses as a raw potato had with a crisp, steaming latke. Unlike that kiss, these kisses were hot, moist, a little spicy and incomparably delicious.

He cupped her face in his hands and kissed her. Slid his hands down to her waist and kissed her. Slid them lower, to her bottom, and pressed her against him the way she’d wanted to press herself against him in the cab…and kissed her again. He kissed her so insistently that she might have stopped breathing, except that if she had she would have passed out, and she wanted to stay conscious, aware of every sensation, every touch. Every kiss.

Still kissing her, he tugged on the buttons of her top. His tongue playing with hers, he shrugged off his jacket and let it fall to the floor. He combed his fingers through her hair until they reached her shoulders, then eased her shirt down her arms and off. And kissed her some more.

They still hadn’t moved from the dark entry of his apartment. At another time, in another, saner life, she would have wanted to turn on a few lights and inspect the place, to make sure it was at least moderately tidy and to get an idea of his taste in decor. Instead, she pressed her flattened hands to his chest and let his warmth seep through his cotton shirt to bathe her palms.

He walked forward, forcing her to walk backward. She nearly tripped on a rug, and he swung her into his arms with all the panache of Rhett Butler carrying off a resistant Scarlett O’Hara. Julia was hardly resistant, and she’d never considered Rhett Butler much of a bargain, with his macho swagger and that all-knowing smirk. Thank God Joffe didn’t look all-knowing. Forcing her eyes open, she saw that he looked as bewildered as she felt, as crazed, as ravenous. The erstwhile sane Julia would have peeked past him to check out the room he was carrying her through, but the current, intoxicated Julia couldn’t shift her gaze from his lean, handsome face.

They entered another room and he lowered her onto a bed. She suffered a moment’s apprehension. At some point, if this thing kept going, he was going to find out that her talents did not include lovemaking. She’d do something awkward, something wrong, something that would cause the moment to fizzle like a campfire in a downpour.

She might as well enjoy this until the clouds opened up, she thought with a fatalistic sigh—and pulled him down into her arms so they could get back to kissing.

Articles of clothing disappeared—her skirt, his shirt, her shoes wrested from her feet and her panty hose peeled away. In rare moments of lucidity, she found herself astonished to be in bed with a man as hunky as Joffe. Once her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she was able to make out the dimensions of his chest. His physique didn’t imply that he worked out obsessively, but his torso was shaped by genuine muscle, sleek and athletic. A nice patch of hair spread across his upper chest—nothing that put her in mind of Sasquatch or shag rugs, just a modest wedge that made him look even hunkier, and that made her breasts perk up when his chest brushed against them.

Her breasts. Somehow he’d gotten her bra off, and her panties, and the rest of his clothing. She was stripped bare, in bed with a man who could do her store and her family enormous damage, and who probably hadn’t believed her when she’d insisted Bloom’s was in excellent financial health. She was nude, and he had stopped kissing her mouth to graze her throat. He continued downward until he reached her breasts. This man she neither knew nor trusted was nibbling her nipples.

She trusted him here, though, with this. She trusted his caresses, and the teasing flicks of his tongue. She trusted his weight on her, the way the muscles in his back flexed when she ran her hands down from his shoulders to his waist, the way his breath caught when she ventured as low as his rock-hard buttocks.

That one faint gasp was the only sound he made. He rose higher on her and she brought her hand forward, thinking that
if she touched him more intimately he might believe she knew what she was doing. When her fingertips skimmed his penis, it gave a little jump for joy.

She wanted to laugh, but he was kissing her again, sliding his hand between her legs and readying her for him. This was the point at which things were likely to go downhill, but she gamely let him keep at it because the stroke of his fingers felt much better than it should have, much better than anything had ever felt in bed before.

He leaned away from her, fumbled in his night table drawer and pulled out a condom, which he donned one-handed, with a deftness that alerted her to the fact that he’d perfected the technique through regular practice. That didn’t bother her—this wasn’t a love affair, after all, anything involving their pasts or their futures. Her only concern that she was a lot less experienced than he was, and any minute now he was going to discover just how inexperienced she was.

He surged into her, and it felt so much better than she’d expected that she writhed, forcing him deeper. He gasped again, and that reminded her to keep breathing.

But it was hard to breathe when she’d rather submerge herself, give herself up to the dark, wet tide, drown in it. He kept moving, stroking her body with his, and she kept feeling the pressure, the pull, the fluid pulse of it. One final kiss from him and she slipped under for good. Incredibly good, indescribably good.

His chest pumped against hers, hard, ragged breaths as he settled on top of her. Maybe she hadn’t drowned after all, because she felt blessedly, resplendently alive.

Okay. She might just be getting the hang of this whole sex thing.

Or else she simply might have found the right guy. Of course, she couldn’t imagine how Ron Joffe, of all people, could be the right guy.

“Julia,” he murmured, then grazed her shoulder with his mouth.

“What?” Her voice came out hoarse and cracking.

“Would you do me a favor?”

Anything
, she wanted to promise. “Depends on what it is,” she said, clinging to the few shreds of rationality she had left.

“Say my name.”

“Hmm?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say my name.”

“Joffe,” she obliged. He propped himself up on his arms and she peered into his face. He wasn’t smiling. “Ron,” she added, and got a glint of a grin out of him.

“I just wanted to make sure you knew who you were with.”

“Oh, I knew. I know.” She reached up and traced the lines of his face, his long, sharp nose, his angular chin. “It’s probably too late for me to warn you that I’m not very good at this.”

“At what? Saying my name?”

“No,
this
.” She wiggled her hips slightly. He was still inside her, and the billowing warmth caused by her movement made them both groan.

He laughed. “Right. You’re not good at
this
at all. Mediocre at best. Maybe not even that.”

She regretted her candor. “Don’t make fun of me.”

“There are a lot of things I’d like to do with you—and most of them are fun.” His smile faded. “Why on earth would you think you’re not good at this? Just from one time, I’d say you’ve leapfrogged right past the opening heats to qualify for the championship round.”

“Well, I usually…” She sighed. Discussing her previous failures in bed didn’t seem romantic, but it was her own fault for raising the subject. “Let’s say I usually don’t break the tape.” She usually didn’t even
reach
the tape, but she wasn’t going to admit to that.

“Julia. Sweetheart.” He touched his mouth lightly to hers. “I would say we didn’t just break the tape here—we incinerated it. We pulverized it. It has been obliterated.”

“Can tape be obliterated?”

“Were you here in bed with me?” At her nod, he said, “Then you’ve got your answer.”

She considered. Yes, tape could be obliterated. “It’s just…the whole thing is so bizarre. You’re a perfect stranger.”

“Perfect, yes. Stranger, no.”

She laughed. “Actually, what you are is a stuck-up ass. Remind me never to confess anything of a personal nature to you again.”

“I’ll remind you every chance I get,” he vowed, then kissed her, which was far too effective a method of quelling her indignation. “But only if you say my name.”

“Ron Joffe,” she sighed, then pressed her lips to his. “Ron Joffe.” He touched his lips to hers. “Ron Joffe,” she whispered, and the next kiss didn’t end for a long, long time.

Something was going on with the girls. Sondra couldn’t figure it out, and it was driving her crazy.

They’d come over for Sunday brunch, and Susie had dragged Rick along with her, insisting that he needed to be fed. He didn’t look undernourished to Sondra, but he was her nephew and she couldn’t very well turn him away. She supposed she ought to be happy her daughters were close to their cousins. She
would
be happy, if only those cousins didn’t have to be Jay’s sons.

She’d been hoping she and the girls would have brunch together, just the three of them, to discuss Bloom’s, among other things. Susie was going to start revamping the windows next week—this was a big project, and Sondra wanted to make sure she knew what she was doing. If she came up with some design that was too TriBeCa or SoHo or East Village, all funky and tattooed, it would scare the store’s regular customers away. Julia had assured her the new concept for the windows was going to be great, but that could have simply been Julia sticking up for her sister.

And then there was the financial stuff. Julia was turning the third floor upside down with her Sturm und Drang about the numbers not adding up. She hadn’t been in business long enough to know that numbers
never
added up. No one sweated
it. It was just like balancing a checkbook. If you came close, you rounded off the numbers and called it a day.

It wasn’t as if Bloom’s was under attack by thieves. If it were, they would have to be the most dull-witted thieves this side of Hoboken. The discrepancies amounted to pennies—maybe nickels—but the thing was, no one was talking organized crime here. A hundred bagels a week? Probably that gangly
shaygetz
Susie had the hots for was snacking on the job. Someone should talk to him—Julia, since she was the goddamn president. She should tell him to stop consuming the profits.

There. Problem solved. If Sondra were president, the whole mess would have been dispensed with by now.

Rick was eating everything within reach, despite Julia’s irritation that the food hadn’t come from Bloom’s. “I’ve explained this, Mom—how can we sell food we don’t even buy for ourselves? It’s a matter of knowing and supporting what we sell, of being so in love with our merchandise that we choose to use it ourselves.”

“They were having a sale on bagels down the street,” Sondra explained, not wanting to go through this silly argument again.

“It’s all delicious, Aunt Sondra,” Rick said, and Sondra couldn’t help leaning over to give his cheek a loving pat just above that scraggly little tuft of hair he called a beard. It looked like a cobweb clinging to the tip of his chin, but she was sure he considered his appearance quite sophisticated.