Her stomach rumbled as she remembered she’d eaten lunch early. “I think that’s a yes,” she said. She also hoped Ed might give her some insight into Trainor’s problems with his father. She had a feeling she was going to need help navigating that particular issue.
“Come with me,” he said.
They walked through what Chloe mentally labeled the showrooms—huge spaces meticulously decorated down to the last expensive paperweight—arriving in a more inviting room with a glass wall that looked out onto a terrace like the one upstairs. A round wooden table and four high-backed upholstered chairs stood on one side of the room. The other half held a big plush sectional sofa and large cushiony chairs arranged in front of a giant flat-screen television. The colors were sophisticated taupes and mossy greens, clearly chosen by some master decorator, but still the room felt lived-in, possibly because there were shelves of books that looked like they’d been read, not bought by the foot, and an array of magazines stacked on the embossed tray topping the padded leather coffee table. A sleek desk made of pale wood trimmed with aluminum jutted out into the room from one wall so the person occupying it could look directly outside.
She could picture Trainor with his laptop open, frowning out at the Manhattan skyline. Then she’d come up behind him and slide her palms onto his shoulders and down his chest, feeling the solidity of his muscles and the heat of his body. She would lean down and whisper something in his ear that would make him smile and close the laptop with a snap.
She pulled herself up short. She needed to stop these crazy daydreams before she started to think they might come true.
“Make yourself comfortable, Ms. Russell,” Ed said. “I’ll have the chef bring out some hors d’oeuvres. Would you like wine or another beverage?”
“Please call me Chloe, and just water, thank you. If I had wine, I’d be sleeping right along with Mr. Trainor.” That hadn’t come out right. She felt a blush scorching her cheeks. “I mean, not with him, but like him.”
“I understood,” Ed said, poker-faced, as he swept his fingers across one of those pad thingies like the one in Trainor’s bedroom. He spoke a couple of orders and turned back to her. “Is there anything else you need?”
She threw caution to the winds. “Information.”
Surprise sent his eyebrows up toward his hairline. He looked at her without speaking.
She strolled over to the couch and sat down, patting the cushion beside her. “Your boss is having an issue with the wedding invitation.”
“An issue?” Ed was being cagey, but he sat down.
She decided to use her only leverage to get the butler off balance so he’d talk. “He asked me to go with him to the wedding.” That much was true. She didn’t need to add that she’d refused the invitation.
Ed gave her his polite but silent attention.
“He told me that his father has never forgiven him for not going into the military. Something about a family sword.” That was to prove that Trainor had opened up to her. “But why haven’t they seen each other for two years?”
“You’ll have to ask Nath—Mr. Trainor that.”
Chloe gave him a pleading look. “I need some guidance here. I’m going into this situation blind, and I don’t want to embarrass Mr. Trainor.”
Ed searched her face. “How long have you known Mr. Trainor?”
“Since Tuesday. His illness has accelerated our relationship, I guess.”
“Something certainly has.” He paused a moment. “I served under Mr. Trainor’s father and knew Nathan as a boy.”
This was even better than she’d hoped. She leaned in as Ed kept talking.
“General Trainor is the kind of commanding officer every Marine dreams of. He led by example and believed in the code and structure of the military. Nathan is brilliant in a completely different way. His mind works in great bounds of intuition.” Ed shook his head. “Nathan couldn’t please his father, so he went out of his way to provoke him. He grew his hair long; he wore sloppy clothes; he kept his room a mess. He even refused to polish the sword.” A ghost of a smile played over Ed’s lips. “He had a long list of page 11s.”
“Page 11s?”
Ed went back to being a butler. “My apologies. That’s military slang for negative comments on a Marine’s record.”
“But he invented a computer battery that helps the military as well as civilians,” Chloe said.
“General Trainor and Nathan don’t see it that way.”
Chloe sighed. “It’s so hard to break the patterns of childhood, no matter how out-of-date they are.” She remembered the wedding. “Are Nathan, er, Mr. Trainor’s parents divorced?”
Ed spoke as though he was weighing every word. “His mother died five years ago. It was hard on him and his father.”
Chloe was puzzled by his carefulness. What he said was sad but not out of the ordinary. Her mother had died when Chloe was twelve, which had been very difficult for her and her father. That was when Grandmillie had stepped in to help. “But grief didn’t draw them closer together,” she said.