“What’s Rowe’s favorite food?” Brody asked. Obviously, the topic of family on my side seemed to be off-limits now. Good, because I wasn’t sure if Xavi would be able to say I had a sister even though we’d talked about her. He hadn’t remembered my name, for God’s sake.
“Pizza,” Xavi said, pasting a bright smile on his face.
A complete guess, and wrong. “That’s right!” I nodded with a fake grin. “And Xavi loves empanadas. Especially if they’re made by that deli on fourteenth.”
Xavi stared at me. I could read the thoughts running through his head easily. I was right, and I knew it. Last year on his birthday, all he’d talked about all day long was how he was having a party with his friends and he’d got his favorite deli to cater it, and everyone was going to have to eat empanadas whether they liked it or not. He wouldn’t stop telling everyone who came by his desk, even though no one from the office was actually invited.
“I love that place!” Caleb exclaimed. He glanced at Aubrey with a mournful look. “I’m not allowed to go there anymore. Doesn’t fit the plan the team nutritionist laid out.”
“Sad times,” Cade said, elbowing him good-naturedly. “On that topic. Rowe, what’s Xavi’s favorite sport?”
I laughed out loud. “Xavi doesn’t do sports.” Just the thought of him getting involved in any kind of team sport made me want to laugh for days. As for solo sports – well, he didn’t have the body of someone who worked out. He wasn’t unattractive by any means, but he definitely had a softer look.
“What about Rowe, Xavi? Does he make you watch anything?” someone called out – one of the women further down the table. She was sitting by one of the other football players whose names Xavi had forgotten, so I guessed she was asking from personal experience of being made to watch something herself.
“No, he doesn’t,” Xavi shook his head. That was true, at least. He glanced at me and I saw a look in his eyes that immediately made me panic. He was about to make a wild guess and – “He loves tennis.”
I gritted my teeth in a fake grin as I nodded. I had never seen a tennis game in my life.Please no one ask me about tennis, please no one ask me about tennis…
“Who’s your favorite player?” Olly asked, looking at me with intense curiosity.
I swallowed. “I love the Williams sisters,” I said. They were just about the only tennis players I could think of.”
“If you had to choose one?” he challenged me.
I desperately tried to remember which of them was the most successful. I couldn’t remember. Venus or Serena? Venus or Serena?
“Venus,” I croaked, watching his face to see whether I was about to get approval or be laughed out of the room.
“Underdog,” Olly nodded. “Interesting.”
I had no idea whether that was good or bad, but I didn’t care. Apparently, I’d passed the test and convinced him that I really did enjoy watching tennis, which was good enough.
God help me if he started asking me about the finer points of the rules or about specific matches Venus Williams had played in. I thought maybe there was a scoring system that involved words instead of numbers, like love and something else, which made absolutely no sense to me.
Were they even called matches?
“Okay,” Ace said, and I knew by the wicked glint in his eyes that he was about to ask something neither of us could answer – something that would trip us up completely. “What’s Xavi’s preference, top or bottom?”
“Hey!” Cade exclaimed. “There are parents at the table!”
“Maybe that’s enough of that game,” Aiden said hastily. “Hey, look – the waiter’s coming over!”
The talk shifted, everyone flipping through menus and making last-minute decisions, tripping away from the awkward topic Ace had brought up.
Two thousand dollars burned in my head.
If Ace wasn’t convinced, Xavi wouldn’t pay me the other half. There was a lot I could do with a thousand dollars, but two thousand dollars could go twice as far.
I leaned forward, around Xavi, and fixed Ace with my most innocent smile – the one I often used to bail Xavi out of trouble at work. “Neither,” I told him sweetly, confident I was right. “He likes everything, and he does all of it well, too.”
The look on Ace’s face told me everything I needed to know.
Final score: Rowe - five, Ace - nil. And Xavi? Well, he’d managed to get a point – but I was pretty sure it was by dumb luck alone that I’d mentioned my Dad only minutes before.
This was going to be a long weekend, and if we didn’t go back to the hotel room tonight and cram as much as possible, we were going to get caught out.
So, why did I have the feeling that Xavi wasn’t exactly the type to study?
