“Max” sounded too informal. He was a senator, after all, and she’d only really talked to him that one time. Better to not call him anything.

Hi, this is Olivia Monroe. Thanks for the cake, it was delicious. I hope all is well with you.

Well, that seemed perfectly appropriate and very cold. She didn’t feel that cold toward him.

She sighed. Fine. She’d call him.

Luckily, since it was just after six p.m., he was probably still in a meeting, or at a dinner, or with his staff or something—it would probably go to voice mail. If there was one thing that being a lawyer had taught her, it was how to leave a polite but firm voice mail. That was much easier than a text message.

She tapped out his number on her cell phone and waited for it to ring. She definitely wouldn’t have to talk to him; no senator would have his ringer on. And he definitely wouldn’t answer a number he didn’t know.

“Hello?”

Shit.

“Hello, Max?” Maybe it was a wrong number. It was probably a wrong number—she always did that when she actually had to type a number into her phone.

“Olivia?” His voice was warm, and slightly amused.

Nope. Not a wrong number.

“Um, yeah. Hi. How’d you know it was me?”

He laughed.

“Well, I only give this number out to a handful of people, and everyone else who has it is in my contacts. And you told me you were from Northern California, which made sense with your phone number—you never wanted a New York number?”

He only gave this number out to a handful of people?

“Oh, I thought about getting a New York number on and off, but I’m so glad I never got rid of my Oakland number,” she said. “After a while, it was a point of pride for me. Plus, I think there was some part of me that always knew I was going to come home, even in my most insufferable ‘New York is the greatest city in the world!’ phase. Thank goodness I had the sense to take the California bar right out of law school, or else this whole process would have been a lot harder.”

She didn’t know why she was babbling on about her phone number and taking the bar. Why was she even on the phone with a senator in the first place? Not just on the phone, but on his private number. What the hell was going on?

“I had that ‘New York is the greatest city in the world’ phase, too, in my midtwenties,” he said. “The phase ended, but I still love that city. I’m always grateful when I get to go there, though these days my trips there aren’t as … exciting, let’s say, as they used to be.”

She grinned.