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“What a snake,” she muttered, hardly paying him any attention, even though he was holding her cold, shaking hand. “I’ll get you for this, Georgie.”
“Georgie?” Joe’s concern immediately dropped a notch. With a name like Georgie, how much competition could the ex be?
“As if it wasn’t bad enough the time he broke a window playing baseball in the backyard, then leaned my pogo stick against the sill so Dad would think it was me.”
Pogo stick? He somehow had a hard time picturing a grown woman on a pogo stick, particularly a woman as, uh, blessed as Meg. The sudden mental image was enough to make him shift in his seat as a rush of pure male heat dropped from his brain to his lap. Meg. Jumping on a pogo stick. Dressed in the pink push-up bra and tap pants.
He reached for his coffee, wishing he’d asked for ice water instead.
“Or the time he snitched one of my training bras out of my drawer and took it to school, selling peeks of it to the boys in the pew in the back of the church during mass.”
He sucked in his bottom lip to prevent a grin. She probably wouldn’t appreciate his amusement. Finally, he ventured, “I take it Georgie’s not an ex-boyfriend?”
“I wouldn’t even categorize him as a human being.” She sighed heavily. “He’s my low-life, scum-sucking cousin, known throughout the neighborhood we grew up in as Georgie the Goat.”
A cousin? With naughty pictures? Kinky. “Um, your cousin took pictures of you in lingerie without you knowing it?”
She sighed. “Oh, I knew it. I posed for them.” As his brow rose, she rushed to explain. “But I was not in lingerie. I was wearing a perfectly respectable one-piece bathing suit. Green to match the green screen behind me. He said the suit wouldn’t show up in the actual program. I didn’t think he meant literally.”
“If Georgie’s such a scum-sucking lowlife, why’d you pose for him?”
Instead of answering, she bit her lip and moved her hand up to tug on her long, thick ponytail, which rested on her shoulder, then trailed down her body until it ended near the tabletop. She ran her fingers through the ends of her hair, staring at it, looking deep in thought. “I have the worst hair in the world.”
The subject change came outta nowhere. “It’s beautiful.”
She shook her head and frowned. “It’s straight, flat, never holds a curl. Completely boring. But I can’t bring myself to cut it off.” She pushed the hair behind her back, looking him in the eye. “My grandmother had really long hair and she used to love to brush mine. We’d talk for hours, me sitting on the floor in front of her while she brushed and braided and fussed. And she’d tell me how much I was like her. She’d laugh and whisper about how everyone saw the sweet-faced girl on the outside, but deep down there was a wicked Irish temper and a hint of stubbornness in both of us.” She reached for her cup. “She died four years ago, right after I finished college.”
“I’m sorry,” he murmured, wondering how on earth they’d gone from her in lingerie, to her hair, to her late grandmother. “My grandparents were a big part of our lives growing up. It was hard losing both my grandfathers.”
“It’s sad, isn’t it? With people waiting until later in life to marry and have children these days, many kids have lost out on that special bond. Some of my students never even knew their grandparents.”
He hadn’t thought of it before, but he agreed with her. Joe suddenly found himself wondering if maybe his mother was a little justified in pushing her children for marriage and grandchildren. After all, Joe was thirty and still nowhere near settling down. “Yeah, I guess you might be right.”
They fell into a companionable silence for a full minute, each sipping their drinks. Then she said, “You must wonder why I started talking about my ponytail. You see, Georgie hit me in my most vulnerable spot—my Achilles’ hair, you might say.”
The light dawned. “He said he was photographing your hair?”
She nodded. “You got it. He is something of a whiz with computers.” Sipping again, she muttered into her cup, “Probably because cyber people can’t discover what a goat he is.”
One day, he’d like to meet her cousin Georgie. He’d like to say hello by introducing his fist to the bleating bastard’s jaw.
“Anyway, the family’s really happy he’s doing well for himself. When he came to me and told me he’d been hired by a store to develop an interactive computer program to model different looks, I thought he meant a hair salon. I thought it was Shear Delights, with an e-a, not an e-e. I pictured cutting shears, not barely there, take-me-big-guy, sheer clothing!”
Joe couldn’t stop a chuckle. She didn’t take offense, her full lips breaking into a grin herself at her own foolishness.
“So, uh, your weaselly cousin appealed to your vanity, let you think you were modeling for a hair salon.”
“And I was so flattered someone would think this long, boring mess was good enough for a salon, I said yes.”
Unable to help it anymore, he reached out and pushed a long wisp of shiny brown hair off the side of her face. “If this conversation continues, it goes on without the negative comments. You have beautiful hair.”
Her cheeks grew pink and she glanced away, obviously embarrassed. “Thank you. You really are a nice guy, aren’t you?”
Not too nice. A nice guy would probably have found a way to admit he’d been ogling her on a computer screen for weeks.
But he sensed she wasn’t ready to deal with that just yet.
Neither was he. Sitting here, getting to know her, getting caught up in her smile and the flashes of saucy wit, he found himself regretting ever looking at her on the computer. He felt dirty, like a teenage kid caught sneaking peeks into the girls’ locker room.
