The intern chewed. Swallowed. Said, “I could tell you about my spring break trip to Ibiza instead.”
“Please don’t.”
Fletcher tuned their conversation out the second she felt Waylon’s smoke-warm breath on her ear. He whispered, “Touché. Follow me.”
Dyer Cartwright owned more wine than France.
The basement’s wine cellar doubled as a tasting room, with damask wallpaper and several refinished oak tables surrounded by high-backed chairs. It was bigger than Fletcher’s apartment in every dimension. She had half a mind to barricade the door and wait the week out down here, drunk on pinot.
If she thought for even a second that Jackie would forgive her cowardice and still hand her a promotion rather than killing her on the way to the rescue boat, she totally would have.
Instead, she plucked a hundred-year-old red off the shelf and uncorked it next to their growing stack of more reasonable hikingsnacks—cured meats and salted nuts and dried fruit—just for good measure.
Anytime she thought working with Waylon could be congenial, he’d do something stupid, like wield a jar of olives like a medieval torture device. Or, when her head started to spin and she dreadfully admitted that she hadn’t eaten anything since dinner last night, hand-feed her grapes. Ifhand-feedwas code forstarted bombarding her with green grapes like tiny fruit missiles. Two hit her in the shoulder, and a third bounced off her pith helmet.
“Would you knock it off?” she barked.
His smile hooked at the corners.
Oh no.
Rapid-fire grapes shot at her, his wrist a semiautomatic rifle. They pelted her.Bang, bang, bangbangbang. That one definitely had the stems still attached.
Fletcher smacked her hands against the table, cheeks flaming so hot it could put Cheetos out of business. “What’s the matter with you? Were you bullied at Stuyvesant or something?”
Waylon poked a grape in her open mouth. She froze in protest. The tips of his calloused fingers touched beneath her chin, lingering only enough that her jaw snapped shut.
When she was done chewing, she said, “You incense me.”
He nudged a bunch of grapes across the table. “You’ll get over it.”
Had grapes always been this good? The only thing that would make it better was a side of more wet, old grapes. She poured the red wine into a stemmed glass (Dyer would never eventhinkabout owning stemless glasses) and, when she was done, Waylon drank right from the bottle.
Fletcher sipped. If only to ignore the way Waylon was watching her, a notch forming between his brows. She could see it in herperipheral vision—deepening with an unreadable emotion. (Assuming, of course, Waylon Cartwright had emotions at all.)
They hadn’t spent this much time together, well, ever. And what time they had spent together previously was as enjoyable as a Pap smear. Neither of them knew what to do with the dead air. The only sound in the cellar was grape chomping and wine slurping.
Eventually, Waylon asked, “Did you like it? Working for my dad?”
Did. Past tense. Because she would never work for Dyer again.
Which made her suddenly entirely too aware of her own propensity for emotions.
“You don’t have to do this.”
“Do what?”
“This.Act like being around me doesn’t make you want to donate both kidneys.” At his look, she added: “You’re right. You’d never be that selfless.”
Waylon leaned his elbows onto the table, perched his chin on his knuckles. “Answer the question, Spence.”
“Yeah, mostly,” she said, throat sticky.
Dyer was a good boss and, she’d thought, a good man. At least until the will reading. And the camera smashing. And that wasn’t even touching on the sheer number of glassy-eyed animals he’d been decorating the estate with.
He’d always been calculated but never cruel. Or had she simply neglected to see it?
The surly fuckboy action figure sitting across the table, baby blues searing into her like the hottest flame, certainly had Fletcher questioning if everything she believed to be true actually was.
