Unfortunately, my cheery outlook on life didn’t last long. It deserted me once I reached the checkout counter at the grocery store.Sure, I had enough money to pay the rent and buy groceries this month, but what about next month, and the one after that?
On the way home with my two bags full of provisions, I kept an eye out forHelp Wantedsigns in shop windows. I hadn’t walked this way during my earlier job search, and I spotted one in a clothing store’s window and decided to walk in and apply on the spot. Except the store was closed.
I peered through the windows and knocked on the locked door, hoping someone might be around, but nobody emerged from the back of the shop. I told myself to remember to apply for the job at another time, and then I resumed my homeward trudge.
I’d almost reached the Mirage’s front stairs when I drew to a stop on the sidewalk. A metallic green BMW convertible sat parked by the curb, its top down. It looked like it had just been driven out of the showroom, the car’s paint gleaming in the sunlight.
Usually, Jemma’s red Camaro was the sportiest car to stop on the street. I’d never seen this convertible before.
“Do you like cars as much as you like dinosaurs?” a man’s voice asked from behind me.
I thought my body might short-circuit. The sound of the voice sent a tingling thrill over my skin while simultaneously making my heart stutter and my stomach sink. One-half of my brain screamed,No, no, no!while the other screamed,Oh, hell yes!
Slowly, I turned around.
Wyatt sat on the Mirage’s front steps, looking casual and sexy and way too damn good to be fair. He wore a black T-shirt with his jeans today, and he was grinning at me, but in no way did that make me weak at the knees.
(Sometimes we just need to lie to ourselves, right?)
“What are you doing here?”
He’d caught me so off guard that the question slipped out of me before I could stop it. I knew full well that there was only one reason he was sitting outside my apartment building.
Sure enough, he held up my phone. “Returning this. You did tell me I could stop by.”
I set my groceries on the bottom step and sank down next to him, not because I wanted to extend our meeting, but because my feet were desperate for a rest. (Another lie? Maybe.)
“What else did I tell you?”
One of his eyebrows quirked up in a quizzical way that was absolutely not sexy.
(I was on a roll.)
“My friend wrote the texts, not me,” I explained.
“So you don’t think I’m hotter than a jalapeño and…” He consulted his own phone. “Want to spice things up?”
My jaw dropped, and I made a grab for his phone, ready to kill my best friend the next time I saw her. Wyatt easily held the phone out of my reach.
He laughed. “Just kidding. She didn’t write any of that.”
I groaned. “Not funny.”
“It was a little.” His grin was infuriating and absolutely did not make him hotter than a habanero.
He handed me my phone, and I managed a grudging “Thank you.”
Finally, his smile faded, and the butterflies in my chest—which I’d studiously been ignoring—acted more like normal butterflies rather than ones amped up on amphetamines.
“I hope I didn’t cause any problems by pretending to be the detective you hired,” he said with a hint of regret in his voice. “I heard the way that guy was talking to you, and wanted to wipe the smirk off his face.”
He hadn’t been the only one.
“I might have problems,” I said, “but they weren’t caused by you.” Unless relentless butterflies qualified as a problem. Which they might, if they didn’t get a grip and settle down. They were more than a little distracting. “If nothing else, I got a kick out of the look on his face when you introduced yourself.”
“Like a deer caught in headlights,” Wyatt said with a nod and a grin.
Agnes Gao interrupted us as she came up the steps. That was probably for the best. I was starting to enjoy our conversation a little too much.
