Page 37 of Hottie on Her Shelf
“Your vast vocabulary, and all you come up with is ‘yummy’? Yowza.”
Okay. This was apparently painful honesty night. Grudgingly, Hallie allowed, “He’s also nice.”
“He’s also the enemy.”
“Right.”
Squinting suspiciously, Megan asked, “Do you want this to be a real date? Is that what’s going on?”
Hallie knew she shouldn’t want that. It would be easier to keep focus if she locked Fitz into a single mental corner—opponent. Genghis Khan, Napoleon—two of the greatest battle strategists of all time. They probably never got distracted by date nights.
Who was she kidding? Napoleon was a big-time skirt-chaser, but just because he pulled off brilliant strategy interspersed with hot and heavy interludes didn’t mean Hallie was ready to try that. She was still strictly an amateur.
“No. Of course not. Mayor Montgomery is the enemy.”
“Correct. So why do you want to borrow my sexy tops?”
“Reminding myself that Fitz is the enemy gives me the motivation to go out there guns a-blazing.” She whipped her shirt over her head, caught sight of the plain white bra in the faux Baroque gilt mirror, and winced. “I’ll use my assets to befuddle him, dazzle him with my decolletage. Get the intel I need without giving him an inch.”
Megan frowned. “Don’t joke about inches. You’re not ready for that.”
“I can flirt. I’ve flirted successfully. I enjoy it.”
“You flirt with safe men. The guy who changes your oil. Everyone with a Y chromosome at your librarian conferences. Fitz is nothing like those men.”
Thank goodness. The thought whisked through Hallie’s brain. Staying focused, flirty, but uninterested and unaroused? Hallie wasn’t sure she was up to the challenge.
…
Fitz was used to the unending boredom of budget meetings. Of how the two-minute wait for the microwave to heat leftovers felt like two hours.
None of that compared to the tedium of peeling the slimy, limp shrimp in his hand. “How many of these do I need to do?”
“All of ’em.” Everett glanced over his shoulder from the stove. “Don’t leave a speck of shell. They need to be clean as a whistle.”
The bowl was mounded with the glistening, gray, comma-shaped shellfish corpses. No. No way. “C’mon, man,” Fitz wheedled. “You said you’d help me cook dinner.”
“I am. I’m doing ninety percent of it.” Everett used a wooden spoon to point at the food spread out on the island. “I cut up all the veggies for the shrimp Cobb salad. Toasted the bread. Made the balsamic tomato topping for the bruschetta. Baked a blueberry crisp. The one, single thing you’re doing is taking the shells off the damn shrimp.”
Fitz pulled off the tail, and thought about how chicken came without feathers in a sterile plastic package. Perfectly clean and ready to cook. Why couldn’t Ev have planned for chicken? “It’s the most boring thing. It should count for more. More than all the stuff you did put together.”
“How about the fact I lied to my boss to cut out early, shopped for all this, and came to save your ass by cooking it all? What does that count for?”
“Everything.” Shit. He’d been whining, which was ungrateful and unacceptable. Fitz wouldn’t treat his worst enemy that way, let alone his best friend. “Sorry. You’re saving my ass. Thanks.”
Ev shrugged it off. They didn’t hold grudges. They’d been friends long enough they knew there were times one of them would say something idiotic…and it’d invariably be balanced out by the other one doing the same down the road. “When are you going to learn how to cook?”
“When did you?”
“Grad school. Didn’t want to be that nerd cliché living on pizza and Chinese takeout.”
“That’s not a cliché for nerds. It’s for everyone in their early twenties.” Fitz held his breath and plowed through four more shrimp. If he just went by feel instead of looking at them, it was marginally less disgusting.
“Plus, my brain needed fuel. My study group figured if we were smart enough to be brilliant biochemists, we could learn to follow a damn recipe.”
“You couldn’t have had that realization in undergrad, with me?”
“In Los Angeles?” Everett shoved at the bridge of his glasses. “I don’t regret a single one of our many, many trips to In-N-Out. You shouldn’t either.”
