Jonas wasn’t dressed for a picnic, either, but for dinner at one of New York’s finest restaurants. He looked completely at home in a dark charcoal suit and knife-pressed narrow slacks. The brilliant shirt looked—and had felt—like silk. The tie was also dark charcoal, with a raised pattern of darker swirls on it. The pocket square was a perfect, slender rectangle of white.
“I’ll just go wash my face,” Krissy said.
An hour later, Jonas had purchased a blanket and they had picked up the food from a restaurant that Krissy recognized as a New York hot spot, where it was nearly impossible to get a reservation. They made their way into Central Park.
He set out the blanket on the gentle slope of Cherry Hill, overlooking Bow Bridge. A confetti of finished pink petals drifted on the ground like snow.
Krissy sat down, thinking she would feel awkward, but no, she tucked her legs to one side and watched as Jonas got rid of the jacket, then the tie, tossing them casually on the blanket and then sitting down, stretching his legs out in front of him.
He began to take items out of the basket. She understood suddenly exactly what he had meant when he’d said, “That’s no object.”
Money, obviously.
“Did they give you real plates?”
“So it appears. And, look, real wineglasses.”
“We’re not allowed to drink alcohol in Central Park!”
“Oh, well, they put in a bottle of wine.” He looked at it. “A very good bottle, too. And glasses, so we’ll live dangerously this once.”
“Somehow, I don’t think living dangerously is a one-off for you.”
For some reason, that made her look at his lips. And suddenly living dangerously felt altogether too enticing!
CHAPTER TEN
“ME LIVING DANGEROUSLY?” Jonas wagged his eyebrows at her. “It seems to me it’s you who has nearly gotten us arrested before, not me.”
“How do you figure that? It wasn’t me knocking on the door in the middle of the night.”
“It wasn’t exactly the middle of the night. And I did have an appointment.”
Krissy enjoyed this teasing, the back-and-forth banter, more than she should have. The setting was just so lovely, the evening light perfect, warmth in the air. A young couple went by in a rowboat, him putting his muscle into moving the boat, her trailing her hand in the water. She splashed him, and their laughter drifted up the hill.
“Remember you asked me if I’d ever done kid things?” she asked him. “How funny we would end up here today. My aunt brought me here once. We rented one of the rowboats. I think that was exactly her intention, to do a ‘kid’ activity with me.”
“And how was it?”
Krissy laughed. “You would have to know my aunt better than you did to know how funny it was. She had on high heels and a Chanel suit. She loved crazy hats and she had on this huge sunbonnet. She tried to row the boat, and she kept going in circles. So then we changed places and nearly capsized the boat. The wind came up and took her hat off, and we chased it all over the reservoir. She nearly fell in half a dozen times reaching to get the hat. Every time her fingers would touch it, it would drift away. I feel like I can hear her laughing now. Even though the hat was ruined by the time we did retrieve it, and we were both sunburned and exhausted, she said it was the best day ever.”
“What a great memory,” he said warmly.
Jonas finished unpacking the bag: beautiful white cardboard boxes came out, one by one, each with a handwritten label. Baked Brie with Pecans. Mixed Green Salad with Dates and Goat Cheese. Smoked Crab with Herbed Crème Fraîche. Assorted Dessert. With a sigh of surrender, Krissy realized it was exactly the kind of meal one would eat in this kind of dress.
He handed her a plate and an appetizer, then put wine in one of the tall, long-stemmed glasses.
“Cheers,” he said, and lifted his glass to her.
Somehow, as their glasses clinked and their eyes met over the rims, she knew her aunt would approve of her christening the dress like this.
“Here’s to getting to know each other,” he said, reminding her that there was a mission, after all. He pulled a list out of his wallet, carefully unfolded it and set it down on the blanket. He took a pen out of his breast pocket and wrote something down.
“What did you write?”
“Knows her way around a rowboat,” he said, and the laughter leaped up between them, easy and comfortable.
Krissy took a bite of the Brie. It was incredible.
“I don’t even know what you do for a living,” she said. “I mean aside from the fact it involves lawyers and owning all the hotels on the Monopoly board.”
Jonas laughed. “I own a company called Last Resort. Basically, I buy properties that are run-down or struggling or both, bring them up to standard, put an operational plan in place, run them until they’re making money again and then flip them.”
“That’s an interesting business.”
“I was born for it. I mentioned to you our family resort was pretty hand-to-mouth. When my parents died, there was an insurance policy. I took a chance that I could turn it around. I looked around at all the failing resorts in the Catskills and tried to figure out what to do differently. What would make people come back for that kind of vacation?
“I started researching to see what people wanted when they were looking for a place to have a vacation.
“The hardest issue for them to resolve seemed to be pets. People wanted to holiday with Rover, and resorts did not want pets. And so we became the first pet-friendly resort in our area. I brought the cabins up to a new standard, including dog bath stations outside each one. That first time, I hired Mike, and we did all the work ourselves. And then Theresa and I worked on dog-focused programs like weeklong
