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“I’ll teach you everything I know.”
Amelia snorted. “Fine. I have to go buy cat food for my neighbor.” She pushed against his stomach and stepped back, then lowered her sunglasses to her eyes, shading them from view. But her lips were expressive enough that he knew her eyes were shooting daggers at him. Then she whirled around and walked away, and Leo watched her until she disappeared around the corner.
The doorto apartment 303 opened to a very suspicious-looking Mrs. Gordon. Amelia lifted her reusable bag full of vacuum-packed, grain-free cat food and gave the elderly woman a closed-lipped smile. “Hi, Mrs. Gordon. I have Her Majesty’s food and your change.”
Mrs. Gordon glanced over her shoulder before opening the door a smidge wider. “Thank you, Amelia,” she said, reaching for the bag with one hand and holding her palm out for the change with the other. “I’ll put these in the fridge and give this bag right back.”
Amelia kept her foot on the door to prop it open and leaned against the jamb. She watched the older lady hobble away, her cane safely tucked against the console table by the front door. The table held a variety of items, including porcelain figurines, carved coasters, a blown glass bowl, and two hefty silver candlesticks.
“These are nice,” Amelia said, picking one of the candlesticks up as Mrs. Gordon came back into the room with Amelia’s empty cloth bag. “Are they new? I don’t remember seeing them before.”
“Hmph.” Mrs. Gordon thrust the bag into Amelia’s chest and grabbed the candlestick. She placed it back down exactly where it belonged. “They’re not new. I just took them out of storage.”
“They’re lovely,” Amelia said, just as a door opened somewhere deeper in the apartment.
Brows rising, she glanced behind the older woman’s shoulder. In the four years she’d been Mrs. Gordon’s neighbor, she’d never heard any guests come in and out of the old lady’s apartment, other than her grandson. She knew the old lady had a sister, but she was pretty sure the rest of Mrs. Gordon’s relatives lived across the country and never visited. She’d never see anyone come in or out of here, in any case. The rowdiest resident of the apartment was Her Majesty the cat.
“Okay,” Mrs. Gordon said. “Bye-bye now.” She shoved Amelia out and slammed the door.
Standing on her neighbor’s welcome mat, Amelia’s lips curled into a smile. She glanced across the hall at number 306, wondering if Mrs. Gordon’s guest was a certain grouchy cat owner. Tiptoeing across the hall, she listened at Mr. Petrovski’s door. No sounds reached her ears.
“Two-bit hussy, indeed,” she mumbled, grinning, then headed back to her apartment. She sat down at her desk, wiggled her fingers, and got back to work. It was only hours later, when the clock told her it was nearly midnight, that Amelia leaned back and checked her phone.
Leo had sent her a message with an attachment detailing the schedule for the company retreat. There were cocktail-attire dinners, a scavenger hunt, and a thousand other activities she’d have to attend while pretending to be the lead singer of The Nymphomaniacs.
Was all that hassle worth probing Leo’s brain for a few days? Was she making a huge mistake?
…or was it worth the short-term pain to finally get over her insecurities and find a life partner? Leo had succeeded in getting Ben to ask for her contact information with a single sentence. Surely that kind of knowledge was worth the risk?
EIGHT
On Tuesday evening,Amelia pushed away from her computer and rubbed the heels of her hands into her eyes. She’d finished her work, but she’d barely left her desk all day. Her body was sore and creaky, and she spent a few minutes stretching out the kinks that had knotted her muscles over the past two days. She’d missed a family dinner at her parents’ place to see Maggie and Emory off on their honeymoon and had to beg off hanging out with Camilla and Lucy this morning. She knew she wouldn’t make it to bootcamp tomorrow morning, either.
This was the downside of being an ambitious small business owner: there was no one else to pick up the slack. She had to rely on herself to get the job done; otherwise, she wouldn’t get paid.
Sighing, she bent over at the waist to stretch her hamstrings, only coming up when her buzzer rang. Walking across the room, Amelia frowned when she looked into the small, grainy screen that showed her a view of the front door. Leo stood on the stoop, leaning against the wall with one hand.
She stared at him for a beat, then pressed the button to speak. “Yeah?”
“It’s me,” he said, like it was completely normal for him to show up at her building. He lifted a white plastic bag. “I brought Chinese for dinner.”
At some point over the last twenty-four hours, Amelia must have slipped through a crack and fallen into an alternate universe. What was happening? “How do you know where I live?”
His lips curled, and he looked so attractive Amelia wobbled on her feet. “I have my ways.”
“It was Camilla, wasn’t it?”
He laughed. “Let me in, Amelia. I brought food.”
“You can’t just bribe me with food to get your way, Leo,” she grumbled, but she buzzed him up and flicked the lock on the door. Then there were a few panicked seconds where she gathered a dirty pair of socks and three mugs out of the living room, then scanned the space to make sure she hadn’t forgotten a bra on the lampshade or a thong on the sofa cushions.
Then the door opened. He didn’t even knock.
“You should lock your door,” he said.
She planted her hands on her hips. “I unlocked it for you, you doorknob.”
He grinned his beautiful, heart-stopping grin and crossed the space to deposit his offering of Chinese food onto the kitchen table.
