“Ah, yes, this is Brody Dalton. Brody, this is Kate. Kate, Brody.”
Asher barely looked at me while he was introducing us, instead pacing about and brushing himself off as if we really had been just rolling around on a dusty mattress. Was that a light blush suffusing his bronze cheeks?
Asher stalked to the door and made a ‘before you’ gesture to the other man. “I’m sure Brody’s very busy, just like we are, so—”
“We’ve actually met before,” Brody said, ignoring Asher’s so-blatant-it-couldn’t-really-be-called-a-hint and sauntering towards me instead. “At the Devlin function…?”
It clicked then. That night out with Lacey at Grant’s last charity event, when Grant had introduced Asher and Brody as his two college buddies. I vaguely remembered something about him being on the polo team, but most of my memories that night had been confiscated by the subsequent hangover.
“Right,” I said. “You three go way back. Maybe you’ve got some inside tips on how to persuade this guy to let go of his wallet?”
Brody laughed easily and shook his head. “Can’t help you there, I’m afraid. But I’m sure it’ll work out fine—Asher’s projects always do, don’t they?” He shot Asher a smile with only slightly fewer teeth than a great white shark. “I just heard about this one, so I thought I’d pop on by and see how it was going.”
The words sounded innocent enough, but something about both his and Asher’s body language was pinging all of my alarms.
Asher clearly shared my suspicions. A smile was pasted on his face, but his arms were folded. “You heard we were going to be here, right now? Jumping the boat on the industrial spying angle, aren’t you, Brody?”
Brody chuckled. “It’s cute how you’re still upset over that.” He turned to me. “I bet him five bucks in college that I couldn’t get a spy into his little gaming club. It only took me a week to find a blonde that would short-circuit his brain.”
“Joke’s on you,” Asher retorted, a more genuine smile, adorable dimple included, playing reluctantly around his lips. “Gaming club met in my room, and it only took another week for her to leave you for Grant.”
“Also, you still didn’t answer the question,” I pointed out to Brody, not liking the way he had redirected Asher’s query. “How did you know we were going to be here?”
Brody shrugged. “Oh, I pick up pieces of gossip here and there. The buzz is really quite promising.” He raised an eyebrow at Asher, a gesture that seemed oddly pointed to me. “Let’s just hope that promise isn’t empty, for your sake.”
Asher ignored the look of confusion I directed at him as if I wasn’t even in the room. His smile was beginning to look pained. “Don’t you have things to do, Brody? I hear that wheat enzyme business of yours is struggling to find its niche.”
“Oh, I solved that problem weeks ago,” Brody said breezily. “Turned out I just needed the endorsement of a local podcast, and the internet grassroots movement picked it up and ran with it. We’ve already gotten pre-orders for fifty percent of the stock, and we’re forecasting a 500% return. What’s your advertising budget for this new venture looking like by the way?”
Asher was looking an unhealthy shade of green, and I began to regret my insistence on buying a product placement spot in an upcoming art film. It had seemed like a good investment at the time…
“Oh, what’s this?” Brody had spotted my lingerie samples, which I had spread out on the velvet chaise longue earlier in an attempt to show Asher how the varying textures set each other off perfectly. He grabbed a bra and pulled at it as if he was testing the strength of the stitching; I flinched as if he’d yanked at my own arm.
“Those are my property—” I started.
“Not bad,” Brody said, looking straight over my head at Asher. What the hell was it with these two? It was like even as they discussed my business, they were having a separate conversation on another subject entirely. “A little flimsy, maybe, but I can definitely see why you’d want to get your hands on her—” he actually looked at me then, and flashed that shark-circling-a-dolphin grin—“assets. You two closed any deals lately?”
I opened my mouth to let him know exactly how I felt about his implications, but Asher jumped in first, imposing himself between the two of us as if he was afraid I might actually physically assault his old college ‘buddy.’
“Well, good to see you, man, but we’ve got to run. We’ve got places to be.” He turned to me, eyebrow raised in a clear signal of this is the polite excuse train, all aboard the polite excuse train, seriously, get your ass on the polite excuse train so we can leave now. “We have to get to the fabric wholesaler’s, right, Kate?”