“You’re pretending I broke your heart. Don’t you think you’d be so upset that there’d be some crying on your part?”
Ha. No. “Not a chance.”
Her chest heaved on her exhale. “I think you’d cry for me.”
“No.”
“Give me sad, longing looks?”
“No.”
“Then I guess I’ll make that call to police.” Heather started to walk away.
He hesitated for an instant. “Longing looks, mostly sad.” He held his hand to her.
She turned. “Fine. With one exception.”
“What?” His hand still hung in the air between them. Unshook.
“I don’t lie to my friends.”
“Fair enough. Just my family.” He gave a pointed glance to his still outstretched palm.
She shook it, latex gloves and all, a naughty smile touching her lips. “Nice doing business with you.”
Shit. If she kept that up, he would be in tears. Or at least he’d wind up on his knees.
Then again, that could be fun, too. On his knees. In her bedroom. Or office. Or kitchen.
They headed back toward the scene of the crime.
“Why aren’t we reporting the accident?” Velma asked, genuine confusion written across her face.
Okay, just so they were clear.
“Babushka doesn’t have a license,” Jase began. “It’d be a huge help to me, a personal favor, if we didn’t involve the police.” Police who very well might arrest his grandmother for driving without a license…again.
Velma stood tall. “And you’re gonna replace Heather’s van.”
“I am. And make Heather’s deliveries for her in the meantime.”
Ethan would murder him if he found out he was delivering penis-cookie bouquets. But Jase would deal with that. And everything else. When the time came.
4
Chapter Four
“You want to talk about it yet?” Velma asked from where she sat across the worktable in Heather’s commercial cookie kitchen.
Heather had figured out the layout herself. The ovens and the huge kitchen vent were on one side of the room, separated by a line of racks for cookie-cooling. The other half of the room—the one closest to the front of the store—was for decorating and boxing.
Velma had offered to stick around and help ice eyeballs on the snuggle-bird cookies Heather had to finish up. She was on maternity leave but hated being stuck at home. So she sometimes came to help Heather while baby Lily napped in Heather’s office.
Meringue icing flooded a wing of one of the birds on Heather’s tray. The cookies, heart-shaped with two iced birds snuggling inside, were a customer favorite. “There’s absolutely nothing to talk about.”
“Okay.” Velma went back to piping the black pupils on the birds. “You’re just doing Jase a pretty huge favor.”
A favor that would net her leather seats and satellite radio. Heather ignored the way her blood pressure knocked around her heart at the mention of Jase.
