Vivian did not look amused. The jokes still needed work, then.

Then Jules remembered something and decided she needed to clear it up fast.

“What about Stan Oppenheimer?” She swallowed around the bitter taste in her mouth that had nothing to do with coffee.

Vivian looked at her as if she’d shown up to work wearing a blouse from the Gap. “Stan? What about him?”

If Jules tried hard enough, maybe she could dissolve into individual blushing atoms. This would be pure torture. She was supposed to talk about Vivian’s side piece? Worse, confess her own jealousy?

Might as well go for bravado. “There’s that whole thing where you’ve been dating him, for a start.”

“You think I’m dating him?”

She spoke as if it were the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard. For the second time in their acquaintance, Vivian looked as if she were about to laugh in Jules’s face.

“Don’t act like it’s impossible,” Jules said, stung. “Why wouldn’t I think that? All those lunches, and you met in the evenings, and you—”

“And I what?” Vivian pressed.

She had to say it. “You always came back looking happy,” she mumbled. “Really happy.”

“I did? How happy?”

“Just-had-sex happy,” Jules admitted, flushing.

Vivian blinked. Then her lips curved into the hint of a smile. “How interesting.”

Jules eyed her in confusion.

She waved her hand. “I am not sexually or romantically interested in Stan Oppenheimer.”

The part of Jules’s brain that was tuned in to office politics piped up: She can still be interested in other ways.

“You’re up to something,” she said.

Vivian didn’t pretend otherwise. “Better for you not to know. You will in time. I’m asking you to trust me, Julia.”

Jules’s coffee mug was empty now. A brown ring surrounded the inside of the white porcelain. She focused on it steadily and said, “Okay. Just a second. I want another cup. You?”

Vivian shook her head, and Jules took the opportunity to get her head together while she went to the counter. Turning her back on Vivian helped. Vivian’s eyes could probably make her agree to anything, but this proposition needed careful reflection.

Careful reflection? Jules almost laughed at herself. Understatement of the year.

She poured the coffee. “So you’re not interested in Stan Oppenheimer? What are you interested in?”

There was a pause so long that Jules couldn’t bring herself to turn around again, even after filling her cup.

Then Vivian said, “I won’t stand in your way. But London—really, Julia. There are jobs in New York too. I could help you get any of them, if you—”

Jules whirled around in horror. “Are you firing me?”

“No!” Vivian’s hands clenched on the countertop. She relaxed them and said calmly, “I’m offering you options with no strings attached. Options that mean you’ll stay in New York.”