“No, I don’t. Consider it a blind date.”
“But I’ve already seen him.”
“That’s a plus.” She pointed a finger down. “I mean, have you reallyseenhim?”
I gaped. “Oh my God.”
She looked like a puffer fish about to puff as she parted her hands from each other making an invisible—and incredible—length in the air that was supposed to resemble that of his…package.
It looked like an exaggeration, but from the size of his thongs, I knew it wasn’t. I shook my head in disbelief at how my brain was working now. I shouldn’t be analyzing this. I should be scolding her for looking in the first place. She was married with three kids for God’s sake.
She leaned in for a whisper. “And I think he was hard…for you.”
“Zoey!” A hot flash assailed me, and I was starting to think I was hitting menopause for real. Another reason I shouldn’t be considering a twenty-six-year-old even for a fake date.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t look.”
“I didn’t. This is…” Was he really hard for me? Maybe I should have looked. My hands flew in the air between us in exasperation. This, thinking about other men’s…anything, was not me. This madness had to stop. “He’s probably had women throwing themselves at his feet since birth and knows how to control hisreactionsaccording to his intentions. He must have thought I’d have seenthatand might have changed my mind, but it couldn’t have been real.” Could it?Hewould get hard forme?
“Oh it was so real,” she swooned. “Just please call the hottie before he gets busy with abusiness arrangementtonight. I bet he gets a dozen every night.”
Shit. She had a point, not that I was reconsidering his offer. “Well, good for him as I’m definitely not calling. If I am to take someone with me to the ceremony, he should at least be able to hold a conversation at a prestigious literary event. Beauty like his is rarely paired with equivalent intellect.”
“That’s debatable, and I don’t think a guy like him needs to do something as trivial as talking. He doesn’t need to do anything other than just be.” She mused, as if she was talking about some god, and it wasn’t hard to guess what part of that god she was fantasizing about now.
I hoisted my purse over my shoulder. It was so heavy as always that I couldn’t hold my posture upright and leaned off balance to the right. “I’m leaving.”
“You said he loved Italian poetry. Don’t you think that’s good enough to hold a conversation at a literary event? I know it’s enough to end such a boring conversation and start a far more interesting one in a hotel room with less formal clothing.”
Again, she had a point.
She gave me a shit-eating grin. “I’m calling him for you.”
I jumped, reaching for the card, eyes bulging. “No, no, no.”
She moved the card away and fished her phone out of her pocket.
“Zoey, give me that right now.”
Ignoring me, she started with the digits, and I tried again for the card and the phone, while she dodged every move. We must have looked like idiots, two grown ass women running in circles after each other like a cat chasing its tail. “Zoey, I’m serious. What if he’s a Fletcher spy?”
That got her to stop tapping those numbers. “Huh?”
“Corporate espionage is real. What if Fletcher has sent him to spy on me? Our deal with Rina? Or get intel on our authors to steal them away and leave me no choice but to accept the merger?”
“You’re reaching.”
Maybe I was a second ago, but now… “Think about it. Don’t you find it a little bit more suspicious that Fletcher shows up first thing in the morning to put that whole ‘you need a date’ crap in my head, and then a second later Zappa appears out of nowhere offering to be that date, and going the extra mile with the free night deal, making that offer so tempting it’s impossible to refuse?”
She blinked. “That’s…farfetched, boss. Fab was here because of the laundry mix-up, and don’t say it might have been arranged,” she said before I’d have exactly suggested that was the case. “With Sadie, you know it wasn’t.”
With a shrug, I grunted my agreement.
“But…your theory might have merit, and that is another reason why you should take Fab up on his offer tonight.”
“What?”
Her eyes sparked deviously. “Come with me.”
