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“Hold on—why did you move that one?” Ari leaned over her shoulder and tried to reverse her last move. “It’s going to—”
“This is what I do, Ari,” Amelia barked, smacking her hand away. “Logic and analysis is my full-time job.”
Amelia loved to win. Her competitiveness had helped her build a successful business. She loved to succeed. Unfortunately, that hadn’t been so great for her dating life, because apparently the men she’d interacted with had brittle, fragile egos, and they found her drive intimidating. She’d learned that the hard way, but it wasn’t something she could just flick off like a switch.
She wasn’t giving up a new smartwatch or a trip to Europe just to save Ari Ashfield’s ego. Not after he’d looked so smug when he opened the closet door on them.
“Boom!” She slid the red car out, thrust it into Leo’s hands, and Leo took off at a dead sprint. Past the finish line, there was another table holding a buzzer. He slammed his palm down on it, and Amelia threw her hands up with a cheer.
Ari laughed, hooking his arm around her shoulders. His partner—she hadn’t caught the guy’s name, as focused as she was on the puzzle—gave her a high five. As Fred and Percival came to inspect their game board to make sure the win was legal, Leo jogged back and lifted Amelia in his arms.
Setting her down on her feet, he smiled at her with soft eyes. “Smart woman.”
She beamed. Unlike some of her worst dating attempts, when Leo said it, it actually sounded like a compliment.
“What did you mean when you said logic and analysis is your full-time job?” Ari asked as Percival checked the pieces on their board against the diagram printed on a piece of paper.
Fred’s gaze lifted, eyes narrowing on Amelia.
“Yeah,” their fourth team member said, and she should really learn his name, but now it was too awkward to ask. “I thought you were a singer in a band. The Sex Maniacs or something?”
The urge to throttle Leo was strong, but the panic that gripped Amelia’s chest was stronger. “I, um.” She cleared a blockage from her throat. “Well, music is mostly math, you see.”
Fred tilted his head. “Is it?”
“Sure,” Amelia said, brazenly talking out of her ass. “Half-notes, quarter-notes, etcetera. Harmonies, octaves.” Now she was just listing all the musical nomenclature she could remember from playing the recorder in elementary school. “It’s all logical sequences. That’s why there’s music theory.” Or something. She hoped.
“That’s true.” The lifeline, surprisingly, came from Ari. As the rest of the group turned to him, he shrugged. “I’ve been learning how to play the guitar.”
Fred grunted, and Percival said, “The puzzle is correct. We have a winning team!”
Pride glowed in Amelia’s chest. She looked at Leo and found him smiling at her, his hand reaching out to tug her close. His hug felt like heaven, strong arms encasing her in warmth and safety.
It was strange, to be this comfortable with a man. Leo’s green eyes twinkled in the sunlight, and he leaned down to press a soft kiss to the tip of her nose. “You’re incredible, Amelia.”
“I think what you meant was, ‘incredibly nerdy,’” she corrected in a whisper.
He chuckled. “Same thing to me.”
The warm glow in her chest spread through her body.
“Now it’s time for the face-off!” Fred clapped his hands. “Gather round, everyone. Ari and Hank”—Hank!Amelia thought—“are about to go head-to-head with Leo and Amelia.”
An army of staff cleared the puzzles from the tables and set up a new one on only two tables. One for Leo and Amelia, one for their rivals.
It was a giant Sudoku, where instead of writing numbers down on a piece of paper, they had to place numbered tiles down on a board.
“Nine numbers,” Fred announced. “Each row, column, and box must contain numbers one to nine. No duplicates. You know the drill.”
Freakingeasy. Amelia could already see how to place every single number three on the board.
“The twist,” Fred intoned, “Is that one of you will be the eyes, and the other will be the hands.”
“I’ll be the eyes,” Amelia said immediately.
Ari, standing at the table next to them, grinned. “Same here.”
“Okay, Eyes, put your hands behind your back. Your partner will slip their arms beneath your armpits, but first we need to blindfold them.”
