It wasn’t her usual routine.
This vampy, sex-kitten routine had always belonged to Riley. And the flirty “gotcha” vibe had been Julie’s.
So what had been Grace’s shtick?
Hell, she couldn’t remember.
Had she even had one? Somehow she didn’t think that accidentally dropping your pencil in college and then planning to marry the guy who picked it up just because he had a nice smile counted as a shtick.
It was mostly just pathetic.
“So how do we do this?” Grace asked, tearing her eyes away from Jake’s. “How are we supposed to evaluate the other when we both know the other’s evaluating us?”
“We forget about all that.”
Impossible. “I don’t think so,” she muttered.
“You know, in some ways it’s actually fortuitous that we’ve met before,” he said cheerfully. His brief discomfort over her little surprise was seemingly a thing of the past. “Now we can pretend that this is happening organically. We can just forget that this is business, and think back to that taxi ride. Think about the goose bumps you got when I touched your hand before you went scampering out.”
She pursed her lips. How had he known?
“I did not have goose bumps,” she lied.
He continued as though she hadn’t spoken, slowly reaching out a hand to wrap his fingers around her wrist.
“Now, let’s pretend that instead of running away, you’d stayed,” he said huskily. “Let’s pretend that you gave me a chance to do what I wanted to do in that taxi. Let’s say I asked you out. Can you envision it?”
“No,” she breathed. “No,” she repeated, louder this time. God, was she sweating?
“I would have said, ‘Have drinks with me. Say, Lambs Club? Thursday?’ ”
Grace found she couldn’t look away. His hand found hers, and his thumb was moving over her wrist just as it had in the cab that morning.
Damn, he was good.
But this was exactly why she’d accepted this gig. To show the world that she was good too. And nobody’s fool. Grace 2.0 gave her a little slap. Get back on track. He’s playing you.
Grace leaned in just the tiniest bit, savoring the way his eyes dipped briefly to her chest. “Let me guess,” she said. “That little thumb across the pulse routine lands the date nine out of ten times, am I right?”
His eyes flickered in confusion before they dropped to their joined hands, as though surprised to see that he was still touching her. But he recovered quickly. “My turn to guess. This is going to be the one time out of ten that I fail, isn’t it?”
“Oh, I’ll go out with you again,” she said with a sassy little smile. “For work. The boss is insisting that we do at least five dates for this little charade.”
“Gee, I’m having a hard time containing my enthusiasm. You seem so enamored with me.”
Grace took a sip of her cocktail to avoid admitting that she just might be well on her way to being enamored. “So, Jake Malone. Tell me about yourself.”
“Thought you’d have it all figured out by now.”
“Oh, I do,” she replied. “But we’re supposed to be mimicking the real deal, remember? Your rules. Just pretend you’re interviewing me for the role of your bedmate or girlfriend.”
“The dress alone would have landed you the first one,” he said, taking a sip of his drink. “But your personality is making it a little hard to envision the second …”
“Gosh, I can’t wait to get that in writing. You know, after I write this article, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if women are lining up around the block to get a date with you so they can be constantly insulted.”
“And my male readers will be leaving twenties on the dresser when they hear about that dress.”
“Twenties, Malone? Really? Surely this is more of a triple-digit kind of dress.”
He smiled at that and rolled his shoulders, as though prepping to get his head in the game. “Okay, so you want real first-date chatter, is that it? Here we go … I was born and raised in Green Bay, Wisconsin, the only boy among four sisters, and you know what that means—”
“Gay?”
“Packers fan,” he continued, unperturbed. “And I suppose I was one of those pretentious, driven kids who knew what he wanted, even from a young age—”
“Herpes?”
Again he continued as though she hadn’t spoken. “My eighth-grade teacher is really the one to blame. A couple buddies and I broke into the school one Saturday with the intention of stealing the third-grade class’s hamster. We got caught, naturally, but instead of standard detention, we were assigned to random extracurriculars, which was the newspaper for me. I got hooked.”