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He’d dismissed her, dismissed the possibility of anything bigger than himself. Judah Pratt knew what he’d been put on this earth to do. He was going to be a singer. A guitar player. A bard. He’d be Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney, Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton.
Instead, he’d become a joke.
Maybe Katie couldn’t help him. Maybe she’d call up People and sell the story and retire to the Bahamas with Sean. Was that really the worst thing that could happen?
He’d thought so once, but he didn’t anymore.
He was at her mercy.
Katie glanced at Sean. His right hand rose a few inches off the arm of his chair and flipped over. Open palm, fingers extended. Go ahead.
“All right,” she said. “We’re in.”
Chapter Sixteen
The conversational ball really got rolling after that.
Judah wanted to know how she’d known he was gay. That was easy enough to explain, though Katie could tell her answer made him uneasy.
She wanted to know more about why he’d gone all Hand of Fate on her, and why he thought fate would choose an uneducated, inexperienced chick from Camelot, Ohio, to help out the Sexiest Man Alive. Judah didn’t have a decent answer. He just mumbled something she couldn’t quite follow about his grandma and trusting his instincts.
As far as she could determine, it once again came down to her being the chosen one because he had a feeling about her. Which she scoffed at, because scoffing was her default mode. And because, well, yeah. Judah was a few eggs short of the full dozen.
She liked that about him.
Sean wanted to know a million different things about Judah’s accounts and passwords and when the messages had come in and whether there were copies and backups and a lot of other technical gobbledygook that neither she nor Judah could make heads or tails of.
They worked it out. Sean got his hands on Judah’s laptop and free rein to pull Ginny in and make her do his bidding, so long as he didn’t tell her anything secret. He parked himself in the far corner of the suite and started doing his clicky-typing thing on Judah’s computer, leaving Katie to talk Judah into spilling the Reader’s Digest version of his life story.
He claimed it would go down better over a drink, so they declared it happy hour and mixed up gin and tonics from the minibar. Katie tossed Sean a beer. He caught it one-handed without looking up from the screen, which was for some reason the single sexiest thing she’d ever seen anyone do in her life.
She’d developed a geek fetish. Next thing she knew, he’d pull out a graphing calculator, and she’d faint from lust.
When she finished up with the besotted staring, Judah was watching her and smiling like the Cheshire Cat.
“What?” she asked, bristling at being so obvious.
“I knew there was something going on with you two.”
“Nuh-uh.” It was, Scout’s honor, the most intelligent thing she could think of to say.
Judah made a grandmotherly tsk-ing noise and said, “Two men at once, Miss Clark. It’s scandalous.”
“Omigod, whisper, please, if you’re going to humiliate me. I wasn’t with Sean in Louisville.”
“He kissed you right in front of me,” Judah pointed out, lowering his voice to something at least approaching a whisper.
“That was for your benefit. I believe the idea was to mark me as taken.”
“I believe you squeaked.”
“I didn’t squeak.”
“You did.”
She had. She’d totally squeaked. It had been an accident, but the truth was that Sean was just that great a kisser. He’d compelled her to squeak, and he hadn’t even used his tongue. Now if only she could get him to do it again …
“We’re supposed to be talking about you,” she said.
