A completely new waiter appeared at their tableside, his bowtie was straighter and his suit jacket smarter than the others. “Good evening, ladies. Welcome to Eduardo’s at Rainbow Sands. May I start you with a bottle of wine?”
“Yes, um.” Mack looked helplessly at Kayla. “What would you like…sweetheart?”
She was trying, so Kayla didn’t cringe over the long pause before she added the endearment. “Oh, you know what I like.”
Mack swallowed so hard that Kayla could see the contraction of her throat. She smiled weakly, first at Kayla, then at the waiter, poised with a pencil hovering over his order pad. “Yes, of course. I know what you like. I know that, for instance, Chardonnay…”
Kayla locked her smile in place but gave a shake of her head that she hoped was subtle.
Fortunately for them both, Mack was smarter than most people. “Chardonnay is one you don’t like. Sauvignon Blanc, I think. Is that okay, babe?”
“Perfect.”
The waiter seemed oblivious to their game. “Excellent choice, madame. We have a French or a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. Which would the lady prefer?”
“New Zealand,” Mack said.
“French,” Kayla said simultaneously.
The waiter’s smile was fixed as he split it between them.
“We’ll take a bottle of each, please.” Mack handed the menu back to him with a self-satisfied smile.
“A bottle of…each?” he said. In the face of Mack’s broad grin, he relented and left the table.
“Good thing this place is all-inclusive,” Kayla said. Mack’s grin was charming, but she couldn’t let it make her feel better. Here Mack was trying so hard, and Kayla was the one screwing it up.She couldn’t let that happen. Not when Mack had given up so much to do this for her. She couldn’t let Mack down.
“LaLa.” Mack’s voice was so gentle it was almost lost to the sounds of the night. When she looked up, Mack’s eyes were even gentler. “Stop freaking out. We’ve got this.”
“You’ve got this. I’m a mess.” A voice in her head that sounded very much like her therapist reminded her that negative self-talk was unhelpful and unkind. She took a deep breath. “You’re right. We’ve got this. I just need to work harder.”
“What you need to do is give yourself some grace. Especially because you’re going to be drinking a lot of wine tonight.”
Mack’s soft laughter released some of the tightness in her chest. Just when she wanted to freak out, there was Mack making her smile instead. “Okay, fine. For tonight only, though. We have to really focus on making this work. No way Skye will be fooled unless we really commit.”
Mack refused to let her wallow. “You’re right. We won’t let it happen again.”
Kayla reached out, and this time, Mack slid her palm into hers smoothly. It felt nice to have that moment of physical connection. After all, there was no one in her life that Kayla trusted more than Mack. They could totally pull off these little intimacies.
Looking across the table, she studied Mack in a way she never had in all their years of friendship. She looked at her as a romantic prospect. It wasn’t hard to see why half the world was falling all over themselves to get with Mack. She was tall and muscular, but not in a rugby player way. Her muscles were leaner than that. She had more of a triathlete build. Broad shoulders and a neck just this side of thick. Then there was her jawline, which looked like it had been sculpted by Greek gods. Add to that her easy smile and piercing eyes and she was a heartache just waiting to happen.
More importantly to the mission, she despised Skye, and the feeling was most assuredly mutual. Kayla had never gotten the full story of why, but sometimes two butches butted heads like big-horned sheep for no reason other than they were attracted to the same type of women. Skye was competitive in everything she did—it was one of the things that had drawn Kayla in from the start—but Mack didn’t usually get into pissing contests. The fact that she agreed to this scheme was honestly shocking for multiple reasons, not least of which was the unspoken but obvious truth that Mack had been thrilled when Skye ended things.
“Okay, what do you need me to do?” Mack asked, clearly steeling her spine.
Before Kayla could answer, a whirlwind of activity descended on their table. Two runners arrived with standing ice buckets and wine glasses. They were clearly confused to both be coming to the same table, but their waiter arrived to pour the wine and take their orders. He played off his confusion about the excess alcohol with more finesse.
As soon as they were alone again and Mack was happily sipping away at her glass of wine, Kayla went into coach mode. Snatching a small, leather-bound journal from her bag, she began. “Okay. I’ve mapped out a game plan that I think will give us the highest chance of…what?”
Mack giggled into her wine glass, pointing at the top of the page. “You’re too much, LaLa. You literally wrote Plan of Seduction across the top. Like capitalization and everything.”
“Yeah. And?”
“There are bullet points. And is that a drawing of the resort grounds?”
A tingle of embarrassment shuddered across Kayla’s skin. “Of course. We need to know the places with the highest likelihood of interaction.”
“Is that what the little red x’s are?”
