He was in a window booth when she walked in, still in his work clothes halfway through a sandwich, reading something on his phone. He looked up when the door opened. His expression shifted very slightly. Not surprise exactly, but a kind of recalibration. She was wearing a charcoal blazer over a cream blouse and heels that belonged in a different building entirely.
He watched her scan the room, locate him, and walk over with the composure of someone who did not intend to be the person who seemed uncomfortable here. She sat down across from him without asking. "Are you inspecting the contractor?" he said. "No," she said. "I'm trying to have lunch with a man who's turned me down twice." Something shifted at the corner of his mouth.
Not quite a smile, but the shape of one considering whether to happen. "What do you want, Ms. Pierce?" he asked. "To understand you," she said. "Most people when something is offered to them, they find a reason to say yes.
You find a reason to say no. I want to know where that comes from. He was quiet for a moment, turning his coffee cup in his hands. It doesn't come from anywhere complicated, he said finally. I just know the difference between an offer and a condition.
Most people don't. And you think my offers come with conditions? Everything comes with conditions, he said. The question is whether you can see them before you sign. Leona looked at him not the way she looked at people in meetings, cataloging their weaknesses and tracking their angles, but actually looked the way she had mostly stopped doing somewhere in the last decade.
What if I told you I wasn't offering you anything? She said, "What if I just wanted to have lunch?" He studied her for a long moment. Then he finished coffee. "Then I'd say the pastrami here is better than anything in your expense account," he said. And you're welcome to find out for yourself." It was the first time she had laughed, genuinely laughed, in front of another person in longer than she could easily remember.
They met three more times over the following two weeks. Once for coffee, once for a walk along the waterfront that neither of them had technically planned. Once in the parking garage of a building where he was finishing a service call, and she happened to be leaving a meeting. A 15-minute conversation standing next to her car that lasted 40 minutes before either of them noticed. He was not trying to impress her.
That was the thing she kept returning to. Victor Kesler was always performing, always angled toward her, always shaping what he said to land in a particular way. Nolan simply talked. He had opinions about things and stated them without first calculating how she would receive them. He disagreed with her twice in the span of one conversation about infrastructure planning and did not soften either position when she pushed back.
He asked her questions nobody asked her. Not about Orleans's growth strategy or her thoughts on the commercial real estate market, but things like, "What did you want to be when you were 12? And do you actually like the hotels or do you like building them?" She had to think about the second one for a moment. Both," she said finally. "But building them more." "That makes sense," he said.
"The finished thing is just evidence. The building is the actual work." She thought about that for a long time afterward. Before the fourth meeting, Nolan said something directly that she suspected he had been holding back. "I want to be clear about something," he said. They were standing outside the sandwich shop, the October wind pulling at her hair.
I'm not in a position to do this the way you're used to things being done. I'm not going to take you to places that cost what I can't afford, and I'm not going to let you take me to places that cost what I shouldn't accept. If that's a problem, it's better to know now. She looked at him steadily. What are you actually saying?
I'm saying I'd like to keep meeting you, he said. And I'm saying I have conditions. She almost smiled. Now, who's attaching conditions to an offer? She said he did smile then fully for the first time.
It changed his face considerably. Deal or no deal, Miss Pierce. She thought about the last man she had trusted. She thought about the investor meetings she had learned about after the fact, the emails she had found, the careful way he had always positioned himself between her and her own network. Then she thought about the way Nolan Ree had handed back an envelope with $6,000 in it without a second thought.
"Deal," she said. "And it's Leona." He nodded once as though that settled something. And the strangest courtship she had ever been part of quietly began the woman that every man in Seattle was trying to impress, deciding to work for the attention of the one man who hadn't bothered to try. The first time Leyona invited Nolan to an industry event, she told herself it was practical. She had two extra tickets to a waterfront investment dinner hosted by a commercial real estate coalition.
And she had already declined to bring her usual plus one, her director of communications, who had a standing invitation for exactly these occasions, and who always spent the evening doing useful work. She told herself she was curious to see how Nolan moved through a room he didn't belong to. She did not tell herself the other thing, which was that she had been thinking about him with an inconvenient frequency. For someone who prided herself on maintaining perspective, he showed up in a dark blazer over a plain white shirt, no tie. It was the right instinct, slightly underdressed for the room in a way that read as deliberate rather than careless, and she was aware enough to know she had not expected him to get that right.
He stood beside her for the first 20 minutes with the ease of a man who had nothing to prove and no one to impress, which meant that paradoxically, people kept finding reasons to approach him. Then Victor Kesler appeared. Victor had a talent for arriving at the exact moment he would be most noticed. He crossed the room toward Leona with a glass of Bordeaux in each hand, offered her one, and then turned to Nolan with a smile that was technically cordial. I recognize you, Victor said.