You, like, exist to rain on our parade, Dreamer snapped.
I, like, exist to keep our shit tight and not get walked all over, Logic snapped back.
“Shut up,” I snapped at the cake.
Oh my God, I was talking to myself, not like normal people talked to themselves, like split-personality people talked to themselves.
Yikes.
I needed a break. I needed a vacation.
But I was about a hundred cakes and a hundred shifts at SC short of being able to afford that.
After I stamped the box with my cute Willow’s Good Stuff logo, wound my pink and green bespoke ribbon around it and fashioned a cute bow, the cake ready to rumble, I checked my watch. With relief I saw I was going to be on time in my promised fifteen-minute delivery window.
This meant I was going to have to fight rush-hour traffic on the way home (who had a five-year-old’s birthday party at suppertime on a Thursday?), but I’d be home before five-thirty for the first time in forever with blissfully nothing to do.
I could take a long, hot bath.
I could read a book.
I could open a bottle of wine and chill.
I could do all three.
On these unusually happy thoughts, carefully, because that cake was a masterpiece, I hustled it out the door.
I was nearing the switchback stairs to the upper level when I caught sight of him.
I also noted he’d already caught sight of me.
Damn, crap, argh.
Just my luck, Gabe was jogging down the stairs, probably after debriefing from some important mission with Cap and/or Eric.
Oh, by the by, me and my fellow AAs were untrained, unpaid vigilantes who did what we did to right the world’s wrongs. But also, we did it because Raye started it all due to the heartbreakingly tragic history she had, and, you know, besties were besties, so you clicked in when shit got real.
Even if you yourself were making it real or wading into it when it had not one thing to do with you.
Gabe, on the other hand, was a member of the Nightingale Investigations & Security team, so he was a bona fide badass—trained and paid.
I couldn’t ignore him, since he was staring at me, and the small fact he was even hotter jogging down a flight of stairs in faded jeans and a black T-shirt that valiantly remained in one piece as it stretched across his formidable pecs.
Further making ignoring him impossible, (again, my freaking luck) we both were in the same zone at the bottom of the stairs at the same time.
Thus, I said, “Hey.”
He did not say hey.
His eyes narrowed on my face, his head tipped to the side, and then he stepped in my way.
With no choice, I stopped short.
“Sorry, don’t mean to be rude, but can’t chat.” Not that he wanted to chat with me. In fact, he’d avoided me so splendidly (bluh) the last months, I didn’t know what he was doing now. “I’m on my way to make a delivery.”
Not speaking a word, he whisked the cake out of my hands.
No.
