“Well, yeah,” I defend. “This farce needs to be believable.”
“Cecily’s right,” Paloma cuts in. “Why don’t you two date for real?”
“His ex wants him back.” Removing a cut lime from the little dish in the center of the table, I squeeze it into my drink. I’m wearing a solid mask of nonchalance on theoutside, but my insides are a swirling mass. Standing in his kitchen, still reeling from our near-kiss, I’d had to listen to his ex shoot her shot. I detested each second of it, too. At first I felt bad for her, the way her voice wavered. But that stopped when Klein told me what happened between them. My sympathy ground to a halt.
“Does he want her back?” Paloma asks patronizingly.
“It doesn’t appear so.”
Paloma gives me an exasperated look, so I add pointedly, “It’s none of my business.”
“You know,” Paloma says, pulling a lip gloss from her purse. “For someone so intelligent, you can be a realidiota.”
“No translation needed for that one,” Cecily says with far too much enthusiasm.
Ok. Time to steer away from the topic of me with Klein.
“You’ve been working with him, right?” I ask Cecily. “Getting his social media set up and all that?”
Cecily sips her hot tea. “I’ve already put time on your calendar to go over the set up and our approach.”
I nod, slipping out my phone and pulling up my work calendar. Angling my screen away, I try to sneak a peek and see if Klein was invited to the meeting Cecily set up.
I haven’t seen him since the night of our near-kiss. He’s been working more shifts at the restaurant to make up for the week he’ll be on the island, but we’ve managed to talk enough through text messages that if I scrolled through our history, I would have to keep going and going.
It’s not that I miss him, because I totally don’t, but I’mwondering if his hair is still the same. Did he get a haircut? Does he have a five o’clock shadow? How about his thighs? Are they still obnoxiously well-defined?
“I sent Klein a meeting invite,” Cecily says.
“Oh, that’s nice,” I respond airily. Nothing to see here. The information means nothing to me.
Cecily narrows her gaze. “You have the worst poker face.”
The server approaches with our food.
“Saved by the soup,” I say, digging in with an inappropriate amount of fervor.
Two days later,Klein appears in the conference room at P Squared Marketing.
He wears a tan shirt, black shorts, and to my great relief, his thighs are as defined as ever.
“Royce,” he says, a head nod accompanying his greeting. He says my last name formally, as if we haven’t maintained a steady stream of text messages the past three weeks. As if I haven’t met the three most important people in his life. As if he hasn’t sent me half a dozen ice-making videos, to which I responded with my own dog temper tantrum videos.
As if he didn’t give me a nickname.Hello?! The name’sAce!
As if he didn’t almost kiss me the last time we saw each other after I spilled my guts about my parent’s marriage and divorce.
“Madigan,” I say cooly, my gaze locked onto him as hesettles in a chair opposite me at the table. He looks at the ceiling, the tabletop, the artwork, his gaze finally resting on something out the window.
Cecily breezes in, her dark hair flowing behind her. “Hello.”
“Hi,” Klein replies, his voice all puppies and kittens.
I frown. I got mangy alley cat. What the hell?
Twisting my hair up on my head, I secure it with a pen and wait for Cecily to cast her screen onto the monitor on the wall.
Hurt darts through me, but I’ll never show it. Hell, I’ll barely let myself feel it.
