Both Dean and Lucas cocked their heads at me, but Lucas faithfully wrote down Al Gore, along with an asterisk, and unquestioningly announced what I’d said when someone asked about it.
After the person in charge looked it up, we got an extra point for having even more useless information about an already useless piece of trivia.
“Woo,” Lucas said, pointing at a nearby table and jeering. One of the women from my department was there, I realized. “Told you we’d beat your ass now that your boss is on our team.”
Julia, from my work team, was sticking her tongue out at him. “Probably time you had a break, I guess. And of course my boss is smarter than you.”
I ducked my head, my cheeks flaming up at being spoken about so... loudly.
Still, it wasn’t a real argument, because Lucas stuck his tongue out in return, and when he turned back to us, he was grinning.
We got a few more right, and a few more very wrong—how anyone was supposed to remember Zbigniew Brzezinski, let alone how to spell his name, I had no idea.
Getting down to the end, we were actually tied for first with Julia’s team, which was a nice surprise.
She, apparently, had known who... that guy was.
“These lyrics come from what song?” the quizmaster asked. “And there’s a few bored faces at the back, all/Wishing they weren’t there.”
“Fake Tales of San Francisco,” Dean and I said at the exact same time, and halfway through, his eyes locked with mine, registering surprise as I finished, “by the Arctic Monkeys.”
Lucas was distracted by writing the answer down on his little white board as fast as his fingers would move and throwing it up in the air to try to beat Julia’s team, he didn’t even notice that Dean and I were still sitting there... staring at each other.
Lucas jumped out of his chair a moment later, howling with... whatever. I couldn’t even tell if he was thrilled or protesting, because all I could do was stare into his brother’s deep black eyes.
I was so screwed.
CHAPTER 4
DEAN
We won.
We’d never won before, and it wasn’t lost on me that, without Landon, we wouldn’t have stood a chance. Lucas and me, well, we weren’t exactly this brand of smart. When Landon had pulled out that thing about the internet?—
Well, I remembered a time before I’d had a cell phone, but the internet? It felt like that had always been there. Not like the green-energy guy had any kind of hand in it.
And there was no way Landon was older than me. I couldn’t see a single damned pore on his nose. His skin was a smooth, glassy, warm gold, made all the more distracting by the late-autumn hue of his light brown hair.
He was just a genius, and all I could do was stare at him, because he wasn’t just good with computers or whatever they had him doing over at Crescent. He knew about the founding of the internet.
He knew about my favorite band.
Lucas grabbed Landon’s shoulder and shook him back and forth, grinning. That was what broke the spell. Landon started, flushed, and nodded.
“Good job,” Landon said as my brother jerked him around excitedly, and while I thought he meant to say it to us both, he was only looking at me. I got that hair-raising feeling that rushed down my arms and up the back of my neck.
“You did the hard part,” I said quietly, the words lost under the sounds of Lucas’s celebratory performance.
Landon shook his head. “You knew that last one.”
I smiled, the expression coming on me unbidden. I didn’t know how strange it’d feel until I was already doing it, and then—well, it’d be weird to start frowning at the guy, right?
Especially when he—he knew the lyrics. Just as fast as I had, he’d pulled them out of nowhere.
Julia came over, pushed her way between Lucas and me, and shoved her hand out across the table toward Landon. “Nice one, boss.”
His smile wavered, but just for a second. I wouldn’t have noticed, except—well, those were the kinds of smiles Henry had zeroed in on. He gravitated toward the people who weren’t quite sure of themselves, and set himself up firmly in their corner.
