“Now, you let me know if you need anything else,” she told him.“And when you’re ready for that pie, just holler.”
“I’ll do that.”Sawyer smiled.“Thank you.”
“You’re very welcome, sugar.”With a last beaming smile—and without looking at Chloe once—Carol walked away.
Sawyer picked up the little silver pitcher of cream—artfully wrapped in a paper napkin—and poured a dollop into his cup before holding it out.“Want some?”
Chloe took it, so entertained she forgot to be jittery when her fingers brushed his.“Does this happen to you a lot?”
Sawyer took the lid off the sugar bowl and added a spoonful.“Most people are more subtle than Carol.”
“That wouldn’t be hard,” Chloe said with a snicker, and was rewarded with a flashing grin.
“Touché.”He lifted his coffee for a sip, then set his cup down again.“So.You’re a friend of Julia’s?”
Suddenly nervous again, Chloe shook her head.“I’ve never met her.But my friend Bailey is her stylist—her hair stylist—and she gave Bailey your name to give to me.”
“I see.”
“I wrote that when I filled out the form on your website,” Chloe explained, then frowned.“But I was kind of nervous, so maybe I wasn’t very clear.”
“I got the gist,” he assured her.“Thank you for your thoroughness in answering the screening questions, by the way.That was helpful.”
Chloe nodded and tried to quiet the frogs jumping in her belly.“Do you, um, have any questions for me?”
Sawyer nudged his coffee aside.“I’d like to talk about what you’re looking for, if you’re comfortable with that.”
Comfortable?Nothing about this was comfortable.But she’d paid two hundred and fifty dollars to have this meet and greet—well, Bailey and Gwen had—and incurred the wrath of the senior citizen population to boot, so she might as well go all in.“Sure, we can do that.”
“My first question is why.”
It took her a moment to understand what he was asking.“Why the…threesome?”she mouthed.
Amusement quirked his lips, and he nodded.
Making an effort to keep her voice casual, like they were talking about learning to make Peking duck or rebuild a carburetor, she shrugged.“It’s been on my to-do list for a while.”
“How long is a while?”
“Since college, so about eight years.”
His eyebrows edged up in surprise.“That is a while.Why haven’t you done anything before now?”
“I think it started out as a fantasy,” she confessed, toying with the handle of her coffee cup.“Something that sounded exciting, but that I didn’t actually want to do, you know?”
He nodded.“I do.”
“Plus, I didn’t have anyone that I was remotely interested in doing it with,” she went on, “so it wasn’t hard to keep it in fantasyland.”
He hummed in agreement.“When did that start to change?”
“A few years ago, I guess.I still didn’t have any, you know, candidates, but it started feeling less like a fantasy and more like, I don’t know, a goal.”
“And now?”he prompted.
“Now?”she repeated.
“What made you go frommaybe somedayto contacting me?”
