Page 125 of Temple of Swoon
Rafa laughed. “I don’t think that means what you think it does.”
But she didn’t care. She smiled from ear to ear anyway, proud of her joke.
“Well, I’d do anything for you, too. I’d even give you a job,” she said. “You can write the copy and design the marketing brochures for the Institute.”
He shook his head. “No, Pringles. I’m done taking handouts. Even if it’s for a good cause.”
Her mouth turned down. “Even if it’s for me?” she asked, batting her eyelashes.
Rafa wrapped his arm around her and stared at her.
“This isn’t fair. You know I have a soft spot for Pringles.” He smiled, and she smiled back at him.
“Oh yeah? What kind?” she said with a waggle of the brow and a shimmy of the shoulders.
“Hmm…” he said, looking up as if he were debating. “Probablysour cream and onion.”
She teasingly elbowed him in the stomach. But as he went to play-wrestle her, she jumped off his lap, laughing as he chased her around the hotel room. He finally cornered her, both of them huffing and puffing.
“You’ve got nowhere you can go,” Rafa said. Her back was to the wall with no way around him. She scanned her surroundings, assessing her options. Curtains draped over the tall, wrought iron canopy bed frame. Beside it sat a nightstand and a chair.
“Lâche pas la patate!” she called out, sprinting toward the chair and running over it and the side table. She then grabbed the curtain hanging from the bed frame and launched herself into the air, swinging above the mattress like she’d mastered onthose vines—and ripping the curtain from its iron rod and landing on the bedspread flat on her back with a crash.
They both burst out laughing, and Rafa crawled across the king-size bed, moving the curtains covering her face and hovering over her.
Her eyes watered from all the laughter, and God, he loved this woman.
“You know we’re going to have to pay for that,” he said, unable to stop smiling.
“Yeah, but it was pretty badass, wasn’t it?” She looked proud of herself. And, honestly, Rafa was proud whenever he got to say that she’d picked him.
They deserved each other.
“No, Pringles. But itwaspretty fuckingrad.”
