She needed a handbook. Probably there was unspoken etiquette for what to do after you slept with your colleague and arranged to manipulate his aging parents into moving into a condo, but she must have called in sick the day they covered that. Or been too busy planning out her life with Mason.
The worst part was she kept thinking maybe she had done something wrong. Made an idiot of herself without realizing it. She should have stuck with her plan to keep her personal life separate from the office. That’s what she’d told herself about why she had rejected Steve, so what was different with Dax?
Dax turned her insides to goo, that’s what was different.
And when she pulled up out outside his parents’ tidy bungalow that evening, she was immediately goo-ified. Because there he was, dressed for the office in a gray summer suit, his lavender tie loosened, long limbs sprawling as he sat on the top step of the porch.
She grinned. She couldn’t help it. Tried, in absence of the “how to behave” handbook, to temper it, but failed spectacularly. How could any woman with a pulse not smile when presented with the prospect of all six foot two of besuited Dax Harris jogging down the stairs to meet her, an answering grin on his stubbled face?
“I’m crashing your little party.”
She flicked his lapel—he didn’t wear suits every day. “You clean up nice. What gives?”
“Raising a round of venture financing for a new app. Met with some potential investors today.”
“Yeah? What are you working on?” Amy realized that other than a couple of their high-profile products, she really had no idea what Cherry Beach Software actually did. More surprising, she was genuinely interested in knowing the answer.
“It’s an app you use at restaurants. When you eat somewhere, you enter what you had, and how you liked it. It learns your preferences, and it scrapes reviews from everywhere on the web. So the idea is when you go to a restaurant you’ve never been to, the algorithm figures out what your ideal order is based on reviews and your tastes.”
“That’s actually kind of cool.”
“Don’t sound so surprised.”
“It’s like an app guaranteed to prevent order envy,” she said. “I hate it when I feel like I haven’t ordered the best thing.”
“Of course you do.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
He didn’t answer because Lin came out then, dressed like she was headed out on safari. A huge sunhat and Yoko One-style wraparound sunglasses totally obscured her face, and without a word she passed them and got into the front seat of Amy’s Fiat.
“You’re never gonna fit in the back,” Amy said to Dax.
He rolled his eyes. “You would have a Fiat.”
She punched his arm before sliding into the driver’s seat. “Hey, at least it’s not the two-door model.” When she glanced in the rearview mirror to back out of the driveway, she burst out laughing. He was sitting sideways with his back to the rear passenger door, his legs extended along the backseat as if reclining on a chaise longue.
He just raised his eyebrows. “Next time, I’ll drive.”
“Oh, and I suppose you drive a Land Rover or something.”
“Mercedes M-Class, actually.”
“What’s that? M for millionaire?”
“Ha ha,” he deadpanned. “It’s an SUV.”
It was her turn to roll her eyes. “So practical. For all the off-roading you do.”
“Said the woman who drives a fire-engine-red Fiat.”
“Hey!” she protested. “This is the perfect urban car! I can park it anywhere.”
“Well, I transport surfboards sometimes. Can’t do that in a Fiat.”
Lin cleared her throat. Oh, crap. Amy had forgotten about the part where they had an audience. And so had Dax, apparently, because he suddenly sat up straighter. God knew what his mother was making of their flirtatious/prickly banter thing. She shifted in her seat, suddenly feeling like it was going to be a very long, uncomfortable evening.
Well, she’d wanted to see Dax again. She was getting her wish.
…
“All right, Mrs. Harris,” Amy said, slowing down to enter the parking ramp at the Shops at Don Mills. “Pretend this is actually a ramp in a condo building you live in. How would you feel about it? What features would be important?”
“My mom doesn’t drive,” Dax called from the backseat. He wasn’t trying to be pushy, just to prevent his mother from opining all over something she knew nothing about. Not that anything could really stop her from doing that, but still.
Amy glanced at him in the rearview mirror. “I’m sure your mother is capable of imagining a scenario even if she isn’t literally going to be in it.”