Everyone, however, sang Noah’s praises. He was smart, easy to work with, unflappable and had enough stamina to work around the clock if necessary—all of which, of course, she felt compelled to bring up later when she caught up with Noah outside his office.
“So, apparently your reputation is that you work hard and party harder.”
He smiled. “You sound annoyed.”
“It’s the kiss of death for reporters. No dish, no dirt, no anything.”
He held up his hands. “Hey, I didn’t tell them to hold back, just to keep their mouths shut about confidential business information.”
“Everyone’s afraid of antagonizing the boss, I bet.”
He shook his head. “Our attrition rates are very low for the industry, and we pay top dollar. People are here because they want to be here.” When she had no ready reply he said, “Come on, I’ll take you to lunch.”
She reluctantly accepted. Lunch, as it turned out, was not in the building’s well-stocked cafeteria, which she’d passed earlier in the day, but in Carlyle, at a charming little bistro.
She ordered the French onion soup, a half sandwich and a healthy serving of information from Noah.
He just laughed and ordered the crab cakes.
“So,” she said after their food had arrived and they’d dug in, “I’ve been reading a lot about you.”
He raised his eyebrows. “You’re not writing about me anymore in your column, so what’s there to read these days?”
“I meant about your past. I’ve been coming across articles while researching Whittaker Enterprises.”
His eyes flickered. “The past can’t be changed, so I don’t spend too much time examining it myself.”
“You had a great racing career going,” she said. “I didn’t realize how successful you were until I went back through the news reports.”
He wiped his mouth with his napkin and took his time answering. “What? Would it have changed how you wrote about me in your column?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. She hadn’t realized Noah had been such close buddies with the driver who’d been killed. It made sense though: they’d belonged to the same racing team. “It would have given me a different perspective though.”
He seemed to wait for her to go on.
“Auto racing seemed like an odd choice for you.”
He shrugged. “You’re not the first person to make that observation. The truth is, though, there are a lot of similarities between auto racing and what I do now. Professional auto racing is all about the technology.”
“How did you even get interested in it?”
“In a word?”
“Yes.”
“Go-carts.”
She raised her eyebrows. For once, he was looking earnest, instead of using his customary half-amused expression.
“It was a friend’s birthday party,” he explained. “It took place at a racetrack, and we got to race around in these little carts. I was hooked.”
“And you were how old?”
“Ten. I moved up to real cars in my teens. Took a hiatus from competitive racing for a while in college, and then I was back at it.”
“Until the accident,” she corrected.
He sat back, took a breath and then expelled it slowly.
“Yeah?”
He said it like a challenge.
“Why did you choose to quit? From the articles I read, you were a hot commodity, poised for a great career if not the record books.”
“Maybe it wasn’t a choice. Some things aren’t. If the highest card you’re dealt is a ten, you can’t put a king in play.”
She looked at him. Was he kidding her? He was gorgeous, wealthy and talented. “Most people would look at you and say you definitely got dealt a king in the card game of life.”
“Most people don’t know me,” he said, then added pointedly, “even if they think they do based on what they read or write about me.”
She took the jab and kept going. “They don’t need to know you to understand you grew up privileged—”
“Yeah, but sometimes it doesn’t matter how wealthy you are, you still have to deal with the irrevocable moments of life.”
“Is that what the accident was? Something you wish you could take back if you could? Is that why you threw away the racing career?”
He motioned the waiter for their check, then looked back and studied her for a second. “Maybe it was the other way around. Maybe the racing career threw me away. Or, maybe, Kayla—” he said, drawing out her name “—I just decided I didn’t want to race for the next ten or twenty years and that developing cutting-edge technology was more appealing.”
He was the closest to really ticked off that she’d ever seen him, and that included the time of their confrontation at the book-launch party. She shifted in her seat.
He narrowed his eyes. “I hope there isn’t some sort of strange reporter’s instinct at play here. You know, digging for some weird psychological profile for your article.”
She hadn’t been thinking about that—had only wanted to have her curiosity slaked—but now that he mentioned it…. “And what if there is? Is the accident the reason you became the hard-partying Noah of the past few years?”
After signing the check, he looked up. “You’re barking up the wrong tree. If you really want to understand what makes the techie guy in me tick, then look at my experiences at M.I.T. and at the office, not on the racetrack.”
She wasn’t so sure about that. Not so sure at all.
Six
There was no place to hide.
She’d looked.
A party hosted under a white tent afforded no inviting nooks and crannies into which a single woman seeking to avoid a fate worse than death could cram herself. Particularly a woman dressed in a sequined halter top and black sheath skirt and two-and-a-half-inch heels. For the sake of future events, she’d have to make a polite suggestion to the Charlesbank Association.
The evening had started off innocuously enough. Noah had picked her up, appearing more sinfully good-looking in a tux than any man had a right to look. Her pulse had kicked up a notch, a response that she was growing used to. She’d come to admit to herself that, yes, okay, she did find him very attractive—who wouldn’t? But she knew better than to think that acting on any attraction between them was a good idea, recent kisses aside.
Once they’d arrived at the charity benefit, Noah, as promised, had introduced her to the mayor as a journalist who worked for the Boston Sentinel and who was gathering material for an in-depth profile on Whittaker Enterprises. Fortunately, the mayor had not seemed to connect her face to the Ms. Rumor-Has-It column. And Noah had been right: with his introduction and implicit endorsement, the mayor had been friendly and approachable.