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It wasn’t a good idea—he damn well knew that. He had enough complications in his life without throwing a woman like Aubry into the mix. But Jules was right. He needed a date, and this woman would do nicely.
If he could convince her to agree.
He met Jules’s gaze over the top of the table and nodded once. She jumped up so fast she almost knocked Adam out of his chair. “I think I left the stove on.”
“Sugar—”
“Come on.” She grabbed his hand and towed him out of the room without a second glance.
This was Quinn’s one chance. If he missed this pitch, he would have to find a different solution. He removed his arm from the back of Aubry’s chair and did his damnedest to adopt a sincere expression. “I know you don’t like me much.”
“That’s the biggest understatement in the history of understatements.”
Yeah, he kind of thought so, too. He took a deep breath and tried again. “You want to go to this convention and play this game—don’t bother to lie and say you don’t.”
Her mouth set in an unforgiving line. “I wasn’t planning on it. Yes, I want to go, though ‘want’ doesn’t even begin to cover it. Obviously you’ve been too busy lifting rocks or wrestling bulls or whatever you cowboy types do to notice, but Deathmatch is kind of my life.”
He’d noticed. She might be as cute as a pit bull about to take a bite out of the mailman, but even he’d noticed that Aubry cared about exactly three things: Jules, whatever work it was that she did on that laptop she always seemed to be carting around, and Deathmatch. He’d only seen her play it a few times in the past year, but the sheer joy that suffused her face when she was murdering people on that damn game was pretty fucking sexy. Not that he’d ever admit as much. But that was the only time he’d allowed himself to think about what it’d be like if he got her out of those tight jeans and T-shirts with a variety of nerd sayings on them. He’d spent one buzzed night imagining exactly how far down her tattoo descended past her collarbone and, fuck, it had been hot as hell.
But the long and short of it was that he just plain didn’t like her any more than she liked him. And Quinn didn’t sleep with women he didn’t like. It was in poor taste, and ultimately unsatisfying.
He tapped his fingers on the table, disturbed by the turn of his thoughts. In an effort to focus, he said, “What do you need in order to actually go to this thing?”
Her long-suffering sigh made him grit his teeth. He knew she thought he was some kind of knuckle-dragging Neanderthal and, to be perfectly honest, he hadn’t done much to disabuse her of the notion, but it got old sometimes.
Aubry started shutting down her computer. “I don’t like people.”
“That I did notice.”
She dropped her gaze, something almost vulnerable in those amber eyes. “No, I mean like I have near-crippling social anxiety. Put me in the middle of a crowd and you’ll find me curled up into a ball trying to remember that I’m not suffocating to death.”
Quinn blinked. He had a hard time envisioning a situation where she wouldn’t be in full control and delivering barbed commentary, but he knew something about panic attacks. His littler sister had them from time to time.
But there weren’t two women more different than Jenny and the woman sitting next to him.
His sister needed a quiet space and calm words to talk her through an anxiety attack, but when he’d read up on it all those years ago, it seemed like each person was different. Some needed a physical link to hold it together, some complete silence, some needed something else altogether. It was purely personal.
In order for him to deal with Aubry’s potential attacks, he needed to know what was required to bring her down. “So, again, what do you need to do this?”
“Nothing you can give me.”
“And what about work? This is kind of last minute to request time off.”
“All I need to keep up on my clients’ websites is right here.” She closed the laptop. “But that’s irrelevant for a number of reasons. The first being that I don’t like you and you don’t like me, and that’s fine. It’s better than fine. But it means I don’t trust you and you can’t do shit for me when it comes to my anxiety if I don’t trust you.”
She had a point, but he couldn’t let it go. When she stood, he stood with her. “Aubry—”
“I’m sorry that your sister’s wedding is presenting you such an awful conundrum, but I’d be even less helpful at a wedding surrounded by strangers than I would be at DeathCon—and that’s with me wanting to go to DeathCon. I sure as hell don’t have any desire to go to this girl’s wedding. Why don’t you ask one of your lady friends?”
