“You don’t need a background check, and you don’t need to talk to my staff, I can handle that. I don’t think either of us wants this to be a big, complicated rollout, do you?”

He respected his staff a lot, but the less they had to do with this, the better, as far as he was concerned.

“Definitely not,” she said. There was silence on the line for a few moments. “Okay. Saturday night, Dolly Parton. That sounds good.”

He couldn’t wait.

“Fantastic. And see you tomorrow night. Want to meet me at my place? I shouldn’t be home too late. I love you.”

“I love you, too,” she said. “See you tomorrow.”

He hung up the phone and immediately picked up his office line to buzz Kara.

“Can you come into my office for a minute?”

She was there within seconds.

“What’s up, sir?” she asked.

He couldn’t help the smile that spread across his face.

“I’ve been wanting to tell you this for a while, but I had to wait until it was okay with her. I’ve been dating someone. She’s a lawyer in L.A.; you’d love her. We’ve been trying to keep it quiet, but we’re ready to be less quiet about it.”

Kara grinned back at him.

“I’ve been waiting for you to tell me this, sir. Congratulations. You seem very happy.”

He sat back and stared at her.

“You knew? How did you know?”

She laughed.

“I already suspected, but if you thought you didn’t make everything clear when you told me about your ‘friend’ who had the great idea for the town halls . . . well, we need to work on your poker face. It also helped explain why you’ve been in such a great mood lately. So after we had that conversation, I came up with a plan. I drafted a press release, you can look at it shortly, but first, we can— ”

He held his hand up to stop her.

“I appreciate that so much, but I think we both want this to be pretty low-key. No plans, no briefing, no press releases—we’re just going to go to the Hollywood Bowl together this weekend without me in any baseball cap or glasses or anything like that. We’ll just take it from there.”

Kara sat down across from him.

“That’s lovely, sir, it really is, but this weekend? Can you at least hold off another week? Maybe I could just have a call with her, to talk about . . .”

He shook his head.

“Thank you, Kara, I really am grateful you think about all of these things for me, but I don’t want to make a whole thing about this. I don’t think people will care all that much about my personal life. Plus, she’s nervous about this, understandably, so I don’t want to make this more stressful for her.”

He wanted to ease into this—do something fun with Olivia this weekend, and then maybe by the end of the summer she’d be able to come with him to all sorts of events and it wouldn’t be a big deal.

“I understand that, sir, but I’m pretty sure people will definitely care about this. You were on those most-eligible-bachelor lists in both DC and L.A., remember?”

He brushed that off.

“Those were both last August in very slow news weeks, but the news has been more of an onslaught these days; I don’t think we have to worry about all of that.”

Kara folded her hands together.

“Can I convince you to let me make sure there’s a friendly photographer around? There will be a ton of people there—someone is likely to take a picture of you, and it’ll get out, I promise. Think about this from her point of view—you may not care if the pictures are unflattering, but she likely will.”

This was yet another reason why he was glad he had Kara.

“Good idea, please do that.”

Kara stopped, right before she opened his office door.

“And, may I ask—what’s her name?”

He smiled.

“Olivia Monroe.”

Kara smiled back at him.

“Congratulations again, sir. And good luck this weekend.”

Chapter Fourteen

Olivia took longer to get ready for her date with Max that Saturday night than she had for any other date in her life. She’d been a little taken aback when Max told her his chief of staff had arranged for a friendly photographer to take photos of them on their way into the Hollywood Bowl. That seemed so . . . intentional. But she agreed that she’d rather have good photos out there of her than bad ones, so “friendly” photographer it was. Friendly photographer or not, though, she had to look perfect. She’d searched Instagram for pictures of people at the Hollywood Bowl to see what they wore to concerts there; she’d washed, moisturized, and twisted her hair the night before so it would be perfect and bouncy today; and she’d spent an entire hour doing her makeup, when she usually spent no more than five minutes.

She was a little surprised she hadn’t had to talk to Max’s staff before this, but she was relieved, too. That probably would have stressed her out even more. She still didn’t quite know why she was doing this, but that was the story of her entire relationship with Max. Why had she talked to him at the bar? Why had she gone out with him in the first place? Why had she started dating him? Why had she told him she loved him, no matter how true it was? There was just something about Max—the way he smiled at her, the way he looked at her, the way he loved her—that made her feel as if he saw her, all of her, and loved every single thing about her. And against all odds, she felt the same about him.