“Hey, are you home yet? Can you come over?”

I was seconds away from pulling into my driveway, but his place wasn’t that far away. “Sure. Is everything okay?”

“I just need to talk to you about something.”

“Should I be scared? Your voice sounds like maybe I should be scared.”

“Not scared. Well, not too scared. We’ll talk when you get here. Love you, bye.” He was gone before I had the chance to respond. I grumbled at my cell phone, then tossed it onto the seat beside me. Whatever he needed to talk about, I felt sure I wasn’t in the mood.

I found Jamie at his kitchen table, his laptop open in front of him, his phone pressed to his ear. It was weird walking through the house knowing he was the only one who still lived there. Dave had moved in with Katie after the wedding since she hadn’t been too keen about bunking up with her husband’s twin brother. With Cooper gone, that left the whole house just for Jamie.

He motioned me into the kitchen as he ended his call. I sat but kept my jacket on. He’d said scary news. I kinda felt like I needed an extra layer of protection. He put down the phone and looked at me, his face sheepish and sad. “Hi.”

“Hi.”

“Please don’t hate me.”

“Please don’t give me a reason to hate you.”

He took a deep breath. “I can’t go home with you this weekend.”

I stared. He was joking. He had to be joking. “Jamie. My eighty-four-year-old grandmother flew all the way from Puerto Rico so she could meet my boyfriend. You can’t not come.”

“I know that. And I’ve been on the phone for hours trying to figure out a way to still be there, but . . . Lane, there’s a guy coming from Japan. This is huge. We’ve been trying to break into the international market on our own for months, and Byron just made it happen. Set the meeting up, invited him out. And he’s coming. I can’t miss this.”

“Let Dave meet with him.”

“Dave and Katie are having Thanksgiving with her family—their first as a married couple. Plus, he can’t talk marketing like I can. He’s too . . . technical. This guy needs to be wooed. That’s what I’m good at.”

Ha. Yeah. That was the truth. “When’s the meeting?”

“Thursday morning.”

“Are you serious? On Thanksgiving?”

“It’s not a holiday in Japan.”

“But Byron was the one who set up the meeting! Does he not have any respect for your personal life? For your family?” I hadn’t had the pleasure of meeting Byron yet, but I’d already decided. He was not a man I expected to like.

“Lane, if it were any other meeting, you know I’d skip it. But at this stage, everything is so critical.”