He turned to look at the shoes in question and then back to Olivia.

“My, um . . . mom helped me buy my suits. She didn’t pay for them,” he said over Olivia’s giggles, “but once I became DA she told me I had to start dressing the part, so she found me a guy at a store she knows and I went in and he measured me and had me try on a bunch of stuff and then I gave him my credit card number and then he sent four suits, ten ties, and twenty shirts to my house, with firm instructions on what went with what. Once a year I go back for him to measure me again and he sends over more clothes. But whenever I go there, I go in sneakers and use his shoes to try on the clothes; no one ever told me what to do about shoes, so I just kept wearing what I’d been wearing.”

Olivia stared at him, an expression he couldn’t decipher on her face.

“What is it?” he asked. “I can get new shoes, just tell me what to buy.”

She took his hand.

“I love you.” She looked down at their hands, then back up at him. “And it still feels early, but I can’t ignore it anymore. I love you.”

He hadn’t felt this explosion of joy since the night he’d won his Senate race, a year and a half before. He wanted to jump off the bed and throw his arms in the air; he wanted to run around the hotel shouting. But instead, he took her face in his hands.

“I love you, too.”

She leaned forward and kissed him softly.

“And you don’t have to buy new shoes, I’ll love you anyway. But . . . please do.”

He tackled her onto the bed, and she laughed and laughed.

Chapter Thirteen

When Olivia got home from work the next Friday, Max was already there. She’d had a late afternoon meeting on the Westside, and by the time she’d battled traffic to get back home, Max had landed at LAX, so she’d told him to just let himself into her place. She’d given him her extra key a few weeks back so he could easily meet her at her house after an event. But he hadn’t given her back her key, and she hadn’t asked for it.

She couldn’t believe she’d told him she loved him. And she’d meant it then and meant it more with every day that went by. Yes, it hadn’t even been five months since they’d met, but by this time in her life, she was a pretty good judge of character. And she knew she loved Max, even though she never would have expected it. It made her so happy to let herself into her house and know he was there.

When she walked in, she heard banging coming from the direction of the kitchen.

“Max?” It must be him; that was his car she’d driven by on the way here. He tended to park a block or two away, and in a slightly different place every time so no one would notice his car in front of her house.

“I’m in the kitchen!”

Was he . . . cooking? Max had many strengths, but she’d never seen him do anything in the kitchen other than move takeout from boxes to plates.

She walked down the hallway and saw him leaning over the counter, a lump of dough in front of him and a rolling pin in his hands.

“What in God’s name are you doing?”

He looked up at her and made a face.

“Well, I was trying to make you a pie. Strawberry rhubarb, your favorite. But . . . I’ve run into some difficulties.”

She moved closer to the counter.

“I can see that.”

He stuck out his tongue at her.

“I didn’t do a . . . great job of reading the recipe before I started—I thought I’d be able to surprise you with a pie when you got home, but I didn’t realize the dough had to rest in the fridge for an hour after I made it. And now I’m trying to roll it out, and it’s rock hard!” He banged the rolling pin in the middle of the dough again and tried to move it from side to side. It didn’t budge.

Olivia held in her laughter.

“Where’d you get the rolling pin?” she asked. “I don’t have one.”

He gestured to the bag on the other end of the counter.

“Yes, I realize that now. I bought it, along with a pie pan.” He smiled sheepishly at her. “Also, um. I’m sorry about the mess. I promise I’ll clean all of . . . that up once I’m done with this part. And I swear, I absolutely did not kill anyone in your house this afternoon!”

Olivia walked around him and saw the bowl of cut-up strawberries and rhubarb next to the sink . . . and the bright red spatter everywhere around it.

Now she laughed so hard tears streamed from her eyes. After a few seconds, Max joined her.

“It does indeed look like you committed a murder in this kitchen,” she said as she gasped for air.

Max smashed the dough again with the rolling pin. Olivia thought she saw tentative movement.

“I knew conceptually that strawberries had lots of red juice, but I didn’t quite understand what that meant in practice until today.” He rolled again. “Oh, look, it’s moving! Thank God.”

Olivia opened the fridge and poured herself a glass of wine. This felt like the kind of thing where she should stand back and watch instead of offering to help out.

Plus, no one had ever made her a pie before. She didn’t even care how it turned out; she wanted to enjoy this.

“There!” Max said, forty minutes and two glasses of wine later, when he slid the pie into her oven. “It should bake for . . . an hour? It takes that long for pies to bake? Damn, okay, good thing I’m not going anywhere for a while.”

She grinned at him.

“And good thing I ordered dinner while you were occupied with the pie. Food should be here any minute.”

He went over to the sink to wash his hands. That apron looked far too sexy on him, even though it looked like he’d stabbed someone in it.

“Oh thank God you’re the smart one in this relationship,” he said. He grabbed a sponge to clean up the counters. “I’m starving. Pie making is hard work, you know.”

Olivia sipped her wine and smiled at him. She couldn’t believe he’d done this, just to make her happy.

“It looked like it,” she said.

After the food came, they went into the living room to eat, and he looked around and smiled.

“You got new bookshelves! No more stacks of books on the floor.”

She put the food down on the coffee table.

“Yeah, I’d had them for a while, and I finally put them together last night. I knew I couldn’t prep for the pitch today any more than I had, and I needed to do something to get out all of that nervous energy.”

Max put the napkins and plates down on the table.

“How did the pitch go?”

Olivia put spring rolls onto both of their plates and sighed.

“I don’t know. I mean, it felt like it went well; I know we did a fantastic job. But that doesn’t seem to really matter—the one client that we got so far from a pitch was the one I thought hated us, and all of the other pitches have felt great and we haven’t gotten them. They say they like us, but they want people with more experience, or a bigger firm, and even though our rates are on the low end, that doesn’t matter.”

“Is that code for ‘they want to hire white men instead’?” Max asked.

She glanced up at him, surprised and pleased she didn’t have to spell that out.