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“Hey,” I say, touching his sleeve just before he can leave the room.
Andrew glances down, first at my fingers, then at my face. “What?”
I nearly smile at the irritability he manages to stuff into that one word.
“You’re not planning to come back down, are you? After you ‘put your bag down’?”
He looks away and I know I’m right.
“Marley will be disappointed,” I say.
He blinks. “Who’s Marley?”
Oh boy.
I tilt my head back toward the group. “Pretty blonde? The one who found you in the elevator, dragged you up here?”
“Oh. Right. Ms. Hamlen.”
I can’t stop the little laugh. “Where are you from? I’m pretty sure Buckingham Palace has less formality than you.”
He stares down at me. “I’m merely polite. Try it sometime.”
“Hey!” I say, stung. “I have plenty of flaws, but impoliteness isn’t one of them. I invited you to stay!”
“After you pretended not to know me.”
“That was just payback!” I say, raising my voice and then quickly lowering it. “For the restaurant last week, when you pretended not to know me.”
He takes a small step forward, his eyes flashing. “Not the same thing. I was working. I needed to retain a certain level of anonymity. I can’t have a would-be client thinking I’d go gabbing about her case with the annoying girl who lives in my building.”
I can’t help the smile. “Have you ever gabbed in your life? I’d kill to see it.”
He sighs and runs a hand over the back of his neck.
I smile wider. “Okay, I forgive you for the dinner snub the other night. So you can forgive me for the snub just now.”
Andrew looks at me out of the corner of his eye. “It doesn’t work like that. You don’t get to just exchange one apology for another.”
“You do when they’re the same offense.”
“Yes, but mine was done out of professional necessity, yours was just petty—”
“I ate a banana,” I interrupt.
He opens his mouth, then shuts it, at a loss for words. “What?”
“Yesterday. I was hungover, as you probably expected, and I didn’t have a banana, but I ordered one for dinner.”
He’s silent for a full thirty seconds. “You ordered a banana for dinner.”
“I did.”
Andrew closes his eyes for a moment. “You really are ridiculous, Georgiana.”
“So does that mean you’ll stay for dinner?”
“What? No. I swear, the lack of logic in your thought process never fails to astound—”
