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“What about lunch? I could meet you in your office.” I swear, I don’t deliberately set out to do it, but even I can hear the suggestive way my voice drops on the word office.
Ethan’s eyes go from bright indigo to midnight in the space of one heartbeat to the next. “I have a meeting scheduled to run until one. But if you’d like to take a late lunch…”
I’d love to, but legal department rules are that interns get lunch from twelve to one. Sometimes people stretch it a little bit in either direction if they’ve got something going on, but those people aren’t me. It’s my first week back. The last thing I want to do is fan rumors about me turning diva after marrying the boss. Any more than I want people to think Ethan and I have sex in his office. I mean, we have before, but no one needs to know that.
“Rain check,” I tell him, pressing one last kiss to his mouth. “But I’ll be by to get you around six. Okay?”
“More than okay. I kind of like the idea of my woman squiring me around.”
I roll my eyes, but he’s already gone, making his way up the aisle with all the grace of a lithe, hungry jungle cat. Is it any wonder everyone in the department is on their best behavior? Ethan is a force to be reckoned with even when he’s exhausted and playing nice.
The rest of the morning passes uneventfully. I mean, the same old stares and whispers follow me when I walk to the fax machine, the copier, the bathroom. But if they’re talking about me—about Ethan—they’re doing it where I can’t hear them. It’s all that I can ask, and, frankly, more than I expected. After all, I went from brand-new intern to wife of the founder and CEO in less than a summer. And not just any CEO, but one who is universally adored by his employees.
By the time twelve o’clock rolls around, I’m famished. I never did eat the apple I picked up from the break room and the few bites of toast I’d managed to choke down this morning had long since worn off. In fact, I’m so hungry that I end up beating my friends to the cafeteria—something that almost never happens. They’re twenty-one- and twenty-two-year-old guys. They can pretty much eat their weight in food and, since it’s free for all Frost Industries employees, like to spend every lunch hour trying to do just that.
I grab a salad and a cup of vegetable soup from the deli line, but the moment I take my first bite of vegetable soup, my stomach rebels, cramping and rolling like I’m suffering from a bad case of seasickness—or food poisoning. Which is ridiculous, considering I haven’t eaten anything but three bites of toast all day.
I push the soup aside, but the fact that it’s still there on my plate—that I can smell it—is more than enough to kill my appetite. It’s ridiculous, but in the end I have to actually get up and throw the soup away before I can take even a bite of my salad. I really hope I’m not coming down with something. With everything else going on, it’s pretty much the last thing I need.
By then, Austin and Zayn have found me. Trays loaded high with everything from Indian food to ice cream, they park themselves across from me and start prattling on about the recent professional football drafts and why Austin thinks most of them are “shite.”
“So you don’t think he’s going to be a good quarterback?” I question, tongue firmly in cheek, after Austin spends five minutes railing about some guy with the last name of Camberley.
He and Zayn both turn to stare at me with open mouths.
“What?” I ask, my latest bite of salad halfway to my mouth. “I can talk football. I know what a quarterback is. I know what a wide receiver does.”
“You’re fucking with me again, right?” Austin demands.
“Is Camberley not a quarterback?” I ask as innocently as I can muster.
“He’s a goalie,” Ro tells me gently. “You know, right, that we’re not talking about American football?”
“Bloody Yanks,” Austin mutters in his very British accent. “Think they’re better than everybody else. Spell words incorrectly, drive on the wrong side of the road, think football is about a bunch of fat guys chasing a pigskin down a field. It’s bloody monstrous, is what it is.”
“I don’t know, Austin. Celsius is awfully confusing.”
“Fahrenheit is confusing!” he tells me, slamming a hand down on the table. “I mean, who ever heard of water boiling at two hundred twelve degrees? It makes so much more sense for it to boil at one hundred degrees. And to freeze at zero degrees! You people just have to make everything so bloody complicated, have to screw everything up!”
Ro comes up in the middle of his diatribe, sets his tray down on the table next to mine. “Is this about soccer again?” he mock whispers to me loud enough for half the cafeteria to hear.
“It’s not bloody soccer. It’s football. You use your feet to kick the ball. Hence the term. Football.”
“To be fair, you kick the ball in regular football, too,” I tell him, somehow managing to keep a straight face as smoke all but comes out of his ears.
“Once per possession! To get it down the field. The rest of the time they use their hands! It should be handball or pigskin ball or something—anything—else but football. Do you know how long football has been around? Do you know how many nations play it? And call it football? Do you know what a physically intense and mentally taxing game it is? You have to constantly stay one step ahead of your opponent. You have to run the ball across the whole field in one play. You have to—”
“You know, Austin, if you didn’t jump at the bait every freaking time, Chloe wouldn’t insist on messing with you.”
“I’m not messing with him,” I say, all wide-eyed innocence. “I think soccer is a great game. And the wide receivers have really nice legs.”
“Damn it, Chloe!” Austin finally cracks up. “You have to stop fucking with me like that. I’m going to end up having a stroke one day and it’s going to be all your fault.”
“Actually, it’s probably going to be Zayn’s fault. He messes with you a hundred times more than I do.”
Zayn nods thoughtfully. “She’s probably right. But in my defense, you’re really easy to rile up.” He reaches onto Ro’s plate and takes a French fry off it. “Here, have a crisp,” he says, right before flinging it—loaded with ketchup—on top of Austin’s pile of white rice.
“Chip,” he says, chomping on the potato thoughtfully. “It’s called a chip.”
