She slammed her daiquiri glass down, had to veritably leap over Christian’s long legs (and Battle’s) to latch on to me and tug me from my seat.
“It’s time!” she all but shouted, and as I desperately attempted not to spill any Cosmo, she dragged me from the room while I looked over my shoulder at the inhabitants of said room.
Christian looked crestfallen.
The room disappeared from view.
I left it until we were on the servants’ stairs before I pulled her to a stop.
“Get right back up there and send Prue down,” I ordered.
“But, Vivi?—”
I cupped her face in my free hand and put mine in it. “Honey, I get you. This is scary. But you like him, am I right?”
“He’s really handsome,” she whispered. “And he likes plants, like me.”
“So why did you escape the room?”
“I don’t?—”
“Listen, you know this is all about vibes and cues. And I don’t want to freak you even more, but you’re giving that man riotously mixed vibes and totally indecipherable cues.”
She blinked. “I am?”
I took my hand from her face and leaned back. “I know we want men to get what us wearing pretty sundresses to garden means. But let me educate you, men are clueless.”
“He tried to talk to me a little while ago,” she admitted something I already knew. “I made a fool of myself. I think it turned him off.”
“I’m certain you didn’t because he didn’t know a single person was in that room, but you.”
Hope lit her face.
I seized on it and kept at her.
“It’s going to be hard. I know it is. But you have to give him something to go on. And I can tell you, racing from a room he’s been in all of five minutes is not the cue you want to be giving him. Go back. Send Prue to help me. Or Battle. Sit with him, and…I don’t know. Ask him what those sticks are that he shoves in the ground.”
“But I know what they are. They’re soil probes.”
“Okay, then ask him what readings he’s getting on his soil probes…or something.”
“I could…maybe ask him what the title of his dissertation is,” she suggested.
“Go with that,” I encouraged.
She looked uncertainly up the stairs.
“Go, honey,” I prompted. “He’s into you. Trust me. And if he made the first move, and you froze him out, since now you’re giving him an in, I suspect, once you break the ice, he’ll take over.”
At least, I hoped so.
“I…okay,” she said.
“Okay.”
She didn’t move.
I gave her a gentle push, verbally and physically. “Go, baby.”
