with bittersweet shavings, set the drink on the counter, smiled at the young woman waiting, and turned back to my ex.
“You wouldn’t be avoiding your mother because she’s been chewing your ear off to cancel the wedding, would you?”
Matt massaged his eyes. “Let’s not go there.”
“Well, I wouldn’t blame you. She’s been chewing my ear off about it, too. For months.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay . . .”
I moved back to the espresso machine, unlocked the portafilter handle, dumped the packed cake of grounds into the under-counter garbage, then moved to rinse the filter in the small sink. The mochaccino order appeared to be my last of the evening. Gardner Evans was due to relieve me any minute, and most of the twenty marble-topped café tables were empty, which was typical for a Monday evening in April. The tourists wouldn’t start flowing back into the historic district for at least another month.
“Anyway,” I told Matt, “all of us have enough to do this week to keep us out of trouble. You’ve got your pals flying here from every country of the coffee belt, don’t you?”
“Practically. They’ll be arriving all week, but I’ll see most of them as a group on Thursday.”
“At your mother’s luncheon?”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re going to have a bachelor party with them, too, right?”
“A bachelor party?” Matt snorted. “She would murder me if I had a bachelor party! Didn’t I mention that?”
“She who? Your mother?”
“My bride-to-be.”
“Breanne would murder you? Just for having a bachelor party?”
Matt slipped off his exquisite Armani blazer and laid it carefully on the high bar chair next to him. As he rolled up his sleeves, my gaze drifted up his tanned, sculpted forearms to the open neck of his fashionably tie-free dress shirt.
For as long as I’d known him, Matteo Allegro had been his own man, a hiking-booted, extreme sports-loving explorer. Ever since his involvement with Breanne, however, I swear my ex had been fitted with an invisible collar and leash (compliments of some name designer, of course).
“You want a double, right?” I said, moving back to the espresso machine.
“Single.”
“But you usually have a doppio espresso at this hour.”
“Single. That’s what I want.”
“O-kay,” I said.
I ran the burr grinder, which I’d set up earlier with some very special beans, and wondered if a drink order could be Freudian. “Set me straight here. If ‘what Breanne doesn’t know won’t hurt her’ when it comes to your bedding down upstairs, then why don’t you feel the same way about a bachelor party with your buddies?”
“Because what Breanne doesn’t know will become known if paparazzi take embarrassing photos of the thing and post them on the Net. Or worse, sell them to ‘Gotham Gossip.’ ”
“Oh, I see. So it’s more like what Randall Knox doesn’t know won’t hurt her?”
“Right again.”
Knox was the New York Journal’s new “Gotham Gossip” column editor. I’d never met the man, but Tucker Burton, my actor/playwright assistant manager with an unhealthy appetite for celebrity prattle, had warned me already about the guy’s rep:
“Knox is wired into this town, Clare. They say he has tentacles running around every New York inside track. And when those slithery limbs retract, look out!”
“Look out?” I said. “For what?”
“Bombshells, sweetie. Usually scandalous, always readable!”
“Damn the man,” Matt muttered. “Did you know Breanne has some sort of history with him?”
“History?” I said. “What do you mean, history? Were they lovers?”
“No. Bree says their relationship was professional. That’s all I know. That’s all she’ll tell me. Either way, the prick’s only too happy to publish dirt on her—”
“Or you,” I noted.
Matt shook his head. “You don’t know the half of it . . .”
“What do you mean? Are you talking about that snarky item Knox published on Joy?”
Our daughter had been arrested for a terrible crime a few months back. When the news broke, there was enough dirt to fill ten pages, let alone a single gossip feature. Strangely, however, Randall Knox spent some of those precious column inches pretzeling his report so he could embarrass Breanne, and even Matt, whom he described not as an international coffee broker but as “Breanne Summour’s flavor of the month.”
“It has nothing to do with that item on Joy,” Matt assured me. Then he sighed and ran a hand through his short, dark Caesar. “I don’t want to alarm you or anything—”
Few things alarmed me more than my ex saying, “I don’t want to alarm you.”
“—but Knox has got some photographer trailing me around the city, waiting for me to do something embarrassing. Breanne saw the man