Oh. There was a sinking feeling in the bottom of his gut. He thought they’d been getting along well, but he might have overstepped. A late-night phone call and casual use of nicknames might be too much for their fledgling relationship. “I can go back to that, if you’d prefer it.”

“No,” she said slowly. “No, it’s cool. You can call me Teri.”

He grinned. Maybe he wasn’t as bad with kids as he’d thought.

Teri made a few suggestions for his list—some of them surprisingly good. Eli’s heart warmed. If he could win over his wayward sister, perhaps there was hope for him yet.

“How do you feel about Aria?” he asked during a lull in the conversation.

“She’s great.” The response was immediate. “You’re pretty lucky. She’s so out of your league.”

“You like her.” If Teri was going to be a bigger part of his life, and he was beginning to think he might like that, he needed to make more of an effort to consider her feelings. “But you didn’t like Victoria.”

Teri snorted. “Victoria is a witch, with a capital B.”

“You’ve only met her a couple of times,” he reminded his sister, resisting the urge to tell her off for using bad language.

“Believe me, that was enough. She acted like I didn’t exist. It was creepy.”

He’d never noticed that Victoria treated Teri in any particular way. Guilt slugged him in the gut. He should have noticed.

“Aria is different,” Teri continued. “She’s funny. Nice. She talks to me, except for when you’re making out with her—which sucks, by the way. She was my friend first.”

Eli chuckled. “I’m sorry.” But he wasn’t. Not at all.

“Are you going to marry her, or what?”

Sucker punch. Trust a kid to see right to the heart of the matter.

“I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “I want to spend more time with her, but she might not let me.”

“When have you ever let anyone say no to you?”

Damn it all, his sister was right. Eli was a good businessman precisely because he never took ‘no’ for an answer. He wasn’t about to start when it came to the most important deal of his life.

The next evening, Aria found Eli on her doorstep armed with a bouquet of daisies in one hand and a paper bag in the other.

“Hear me out,” he said before she could speak. “I know you have a problem with gifts, but I thought under the circumstances, it might be okay. I also thought you might prefer daisies to roses.”

The gesture touched Aria. “I love daisies!” she exclaimed. “They’re such happy, summery flowers. But you shouldn’t have. Did you forget—”