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“I am pretty sure they put ranch on it.”
“You come here a lot, then,” she grumbled.
“I do. And the Legend Burger is good. Do you even know what it is?”
She frowned. “No.”
“It’s named after Gideon Payne. You remember Gideon.”
“Who doesn’t? He set every football record for the county back in high school. I don’t even care about football, or Mapleton High, and even I know that. They gave him a whole parade when he left to join the military. Plus, he’s my sister Rory’s best friend’s older brother.”
“Lord. That’s a mouthful.”
“It kind of is. But what is the burger, other than named after Gideon?”
“It has barbecue sauce and onion straws and it’s excellent. The stew is also good. The pie is damned good. Don’t get fancy. There are some things on that menu that shouldn’t be there. It’s to suggest variety. Don’t mess with variety at a small-town roadside diner. Unless it’s for some reason a weird special that is much lauded by the locals.”
“I actually do live here,” she said.
“But you don’t eat here.”
“No. But it’s because we all do a lot of cooking. So we don’t really have occasion to.” She put her little nose in the air when she said that and he wondered if she had any idea how snooty she looked. He shouldn’t be remotely charmed by it.
Much like the socks.
Those damned socks.
“So don’t presume to be an expert,” he said. “You think you’re an expert on just about everything, don’t you?”
“And you are pretty much bound and determined to twist everything to suit your narrative. The fact that I believe I’m an expert on what I want to eat is not arrogance, Levi Granger.”
“The fact that you think you’re a better expert on the menu than I am is, though.”
She scrunched her nose and bit her lip, and her cheeks turned pink. Like she was trying to hold back words with all her might.
And he could see the moment she lost the battle.
“You are a hardheaded pig,” she said.
He’d done it. He’d broken her.
“Wow,” he said, drawing the word out. “So this is where our business partnership is going to go.”
“We don’t have a business partnership. Because you’re asking me to jump through all these hoops for you and you’ve offered me nothing in return.”
“You’re pretty feisty.”
“I am when I have to be.”
She was fascinating. Feral and a bit mean, but she sure as hell tried to cover it. She inherently thought she was better than him, and she tried to cover that, too.
She reminded him of...
Not of him. Not totally. Except she seemed wounded. That was the truth of it. A feral animal tended to be yet more feral when it was injured.
He knew that well.
He should hate her, and he found himself more interested in poking at her than getting rid of her altogether, and maybe that was a side effect of having not had this kind of experience before.
