“Dogs are walked and Uber Eats is already ordered.” She crossed over to him and wrapped her arms around his solid middle. “Rough day at the office?”

“It always is when I get called in during the company’s designated work-from-home time because that always means something went wrong—very wrong. We just closed a distribution deal with a chain of high-end and very exclusive boutiques in South Korea for months and things went sideways and—” He stopped and gave her an apologetic look. “Sorry, you don’t want to hear any of this.”

“Of course I do.” She nudged him to sit down in the chair and took a seat herself on the ottoman. “Tell me everything.”

He hesitated a few seconds, as though people didn’t usually ask him about his problems, and they probably didn’t. She’d met his family, and it wasn’t that they didn’t love him. They did. It wasn’t like they ignored him like her family ignored her so much as they’d accepted that his part in the family was being the fixer. The thing was, though, who took that role for him?

Before she could ask him, he started telling her about his shitty day. As she undid his shoelaces for him and slipped off his shoes, he explained how an overeager intern accidentally deleted the boutique’s orders from the system. Then everything went straight to shit after that, he told her as he wiggled his toes and let out an appreciative groan when she went to work rubbing the arches of his feet.

Chelle only got the general gist of things when he started using jargon and going into specifics about logistics. Then there was the part about skin serums baking out on loading docks because they’d been packed into regular shipping containers instead of refrigerated ones that sounded like a huge issue. By the time she finished his mini foot massage and the Uber Eats delivery driver rang the doorbell, he’d spilled about a million other fiddly little details that lead up to one pain-in-the-ass result—a trashed relationship with a distributor and a multi-billion dollar deal on the edge of disaster.

Their dinner order from Athena’s Garden arrived at that part in the story. He went and changed out of his suit into his gray sweatpants and an Ice Knights T-shirt while she plated their spanakopita and poured a beer for each of them.

“So what happened next?” Chelle asked when he came back out.

He sat down across from her at the little bistro table in the kitchen. “Are you sure you want to hear more?”

She narrowed her eyes at him. If he even thought of holding out now when she had to know what happened next, she was gonna slide her always-cold hands under his shirt and plant her icy palms on his abs. That would serve him right.