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Cole picked up the baseball Jake had caught at his first Yankees game. Everyone had insisted that it was the luck of a lifetime—first Yankees game and he catches a home run ball.
But it hadn’t felt like luck to Jake. It had felt like a warning.
And so he’d kept it—kept it as a reminder that he was not the settling-down, home-ballpark kind of guy.
Although one wouldn’t know it was any kind of memento from the way Cole was tossing it around like a hacky sack.
“I just heard through that ridiculous website
of yours that you’d gotten her flowers. That’s all.”
“You do know that there wouldn’t be a ridiculous website if you hadn’t betrayed your own magazine—your own gender—and helped her out when she came in here with that whipped-cream coffee drink? It was supposed to be just a little one-time back and forth before we moved on to write the actual articles.”
And soon we’ll be moving on entirely. He pushed the thought away.
“I know that,” Cole said as he assumed a pitcher’s position and pretended to do some ridiculous wind-up. “Just like I know that you know what kind of flowers she likes.”
Big deal.
He knew lots of things about Grace. He knew her favorite flower (white roses), favorite color (green), favorite season (spring), and favorite ice cream flavor (pralines and cream).
He also knew that she talked to her parents every single Sunday at seven o’clock, knew that she would hold up rush-hour sidewalk traffic to give money to a homeless vet. He knew what she looked like when she was wearing nothing but a post-orgasmic glow, knew what she sounded like when—
Enough.
“I’m supposed to know that stuff,” Jake said, growing more irritated with Cole’s baseball antics by the minute. “That’s what this whole charade has been about. Getting to know the other person before they know you. Showing the women of the world that we men aren’t the oblivious one-track-mind heathens they think we are.”
“So then you haven’t slept with her.”
“Nope,” Jake lied easily. He knew there was all sorts of speculation all over that damned blog, but he’d rot in hell before he’d share one detail about his nights with Grace.
Even if he wanted to write about them, he had no idea what he’d say. None.
Because he didn’t have the faintest clue what was going on between them—really going on between them—and he didn’t think she did either.
On one hand, they were both completely invested in the little game they were playing. They were completely at ease spending lunches and coffees and random office visits together to let themselves to be analyzed.
She didn’t even seem to mind when he’d written a blog post of his own on the website noting how Grace, like so many women, was a big fan of the “I don’t care, whatever you want” routine about food and movies, only to sniff in disdain when what he wanted was clearly the wrong choice.
He’d ripped that little female wile wide open.
But had she taken offense? Taken him to the woodshed about exploiting their Thai-no-actually-I-want-Chinese lunch argument?
No. She’d been unfazed.
Just like he hadn’t flinched when she’d blown the whistle on the way he’d noted a hostess’s rather overly ample breasts. He’d meant to be discreet. He thought he had been discreet. He was, after all, a gentleman. But Grace had busted him, and he hadn’t minded in the least.
That’s what they were doing—dating for public consumption. It was like reality TV without the reality. Not quite scripted, but not quite real either.
Except when it was real.
And unfortunately for him, it seemed to be feeling real a lot more often. And for her … well as far as he knew, she was still on her all-men-can-go-to-hell rampage. He wasn’t an idiot. He’d known precisely what that date last weekend had been about.
Grace Brighton spent all day writing about sex, and talking with women who wrote about sex, and yet she’d only ever been with one guy.
So of course she’d want to experiment.
And of course she’d choose no-relationship Jake Malone to experiment with. After all, he’d offered.
