“You bet,” he said. Then he shoved aside his detached professional competency for a second. “And hey, Mabel?”
She popped her head out the window, blue eyes round with curiosity. “Yeah?”
“Dave’s right. Spidey’s web shooters are definitely mechanical.”
Her mouth dropped open for a split second before she tossed her hair with a shout of laughter. “Another nerd! Oh, you’re gonna fit infinearound here.”
Then she slammed on a pair of sunglasses, reversed out of the spot, and roared away, leaving him staring after her on the boiling asphalt, the cables dangling from his hand and her laughter echoing in his head.
Three
“Oh good, you’re goofing off. That means you can help me out.”
Mabel looked up from her phone and narrowed her eyes at Dave’s wife in mock outrage. “That’s it? No hello? No ‘so good to see you, old friend’? Just ‘you’re lazy, please help me’?”
That earned her a smile from Ana Chilton. “Hello, old friend. So good to see you. Can I steal a moment of your very valuable time for a project that’s kicking my ass?”
“Duh.” Mabel levered herself off the greenroom couch with a grunt and shoved her phone in her pocket. “Whatcha need?”
“My husband, for one thing.”
Mabel jerked her head toward the studio where Dave was conferring with Skip about which local artists to promote on New Music Wednesday next month. Ana walked over to the window and waved until he spotted her, and Dave unfurled such a delighted grin that Mabel had to swallow past a hard little ball of envy in her throat. Not that she wanted Dave, of course. But had any man ever been that delighted to seeheron the other side of a pane of glass?
No. That answer was a definite no.
“Hey, baby.” Dave exited the studio to greet his wife with a kiss, squeezing the sturdy brunette close. “How’d I luck into a workday visit?”
“I’m here to shamelessly use your brain.” She rested her hand on his cheek briefly, then tossed a look at Mabel over her shoulder. “That one too. She’s clearly not busy.”
“Hey!” Mabel protested. “I was staying abreast of current affairs so I’d be able to contribute on air tomorrow.”
“She was on Twitter,” Dave said.
Dammit. “Anyway,” Mabel said, “what’s up?”
Ana shrugged out of her blazer and dropped it on the back of the desk chair. “Work put me in charge of the questions for our women’s shelter fundraiser in two weeks. I need to see if actual humans can answer the things I’m pulling together. And you two are close enough approximations to humans for me to test them out on.”
Dave rubbed his hands together, competitive glee lighting his thin face. “Excellent. We’ll crush it.”
“This isn’t a competition, darling. Nobody’s winning anything today.” Ana’s voice held the saintly patience she’d perfected with their two toddlers.
“Okay,” Mabel said, “but you’ll also tell us how supersmart we are if we can answer them all, right?”
Ana rolled her eyes. “You’ll have the gratitude of Beaucoeur’s largest social service agency for helping us make trivia night a success.”
“All right then.” Dave grabbed the pages Ana held out, his eyes moving across the words. “Pssht. Child’s play.”
He grabbed a pen from the desk and got to work jotting down answers while Ana leaned toward Mabel and said in an undertone, “So. The guys from Lowell Consolidated.”
Well, that brought things back down to reality.
“Oh, um,” Mabel began, “the guys have only been here for what, a week and a half? And Brandon promised no big changes—”
Dave looked up from the paper with a scoff. “Sure. They bought us, and now they’ll let us do business as usual. Seems likely.”
Her optimistic, everything-rolls-off-my-back-like-I’m-a-Slip-’N-Slide partner sounded so gloomy, and it killed her. “Hey, it’ll be fine,” Mabel told him. “Maybe Lowell’ll pump a bunch of money into our show, pay for some billboards or something.”
“Guys, no.” Ana interrupted them. “Dave, quit listening for a sec. I want to talk to Mabel about their hotness. I bumped into them on the way in today, and they are just… so, so hot. No offense, dear.”
