Page 26 of Matched By Mistake
He hung back as everyone filed out. The tables had been cleaned up by participants, but Jericho noticed some brushes and spilled water so took a moment to tidy things up. He knew that it probably seemed like he was looking for an excuse to stick around and he acknowledged to himself he was. After all, this was one of their official dates.
His phone started vibrating in his pocket and he took it out to see a flurry of messages from Trey and his sisters about him and Maggie.
There was a photo someone from the class had shared that showed the two of them when they’d almost kissed with the captionk!smet magic??? Looks like one rivalry might fall prey to cupid’s arrow.
Trey: Nice work. I just got a high-level report that record traffic is being driven to the k!smet site.
Jericho thumbs-upped the message.
“Did you see this?” he asked as Maggie said goodbye to the last participant.
He wasn’t sure how close he could safely get to her without breaking his vow not to touch her first. He was on the edge and each time he tried to turn the tables on her it backfired. There were no two ways about that. He wanted her and it seemed that he needed a twenty-foot or more distance to keep his body from forgetting what his mind had already dictated.
He held his phone out to her and she seemed to hesitate as she leaned in but kept her body a good distance from him. Seemed he wasn’t the only one leery of getting too close. He wondered if they were both just torturing themselves by putting off the inevitable.
“No. I hadn’t. That’s great. Send that to me. I want to make sure Misha sees it,” Maggie said.
He texted it to her, and as she walked by him a subtly scented cloud of jasmine followed her and he realized he need to get the fuck out of there. Now.
“Great. I guess I should go.”
He turned on his heel, heading for the door, and his fingers brushed the door handle when she called his name.
He looked over his shoulder and saw her coming toward him with his canvas in her hands. “Don’t forget this.”
He nodded, taking it from her. “Thanks.”
“No problem. For our date at Sheen tomorrow night, I guess I’ll see you there?”
“I assume you still don’t want me to pick you up,” he said.
“It’s not that I don’t want you...to,” she said.
Inwardly he groaned as he turned fully and leaned back against the door. “So I’ll pick you up? I think after the kind of publicity we generated tonight, we should probably arrive together.”
She chewed her lower lip, something she only did when they were alone and she wasn’t feeling confident, he suspected. Because when she’d been trying to seduce him into touching her, she hadn’t done it once.
Why was the thought of him bringing her out to dinner making her unsure?
“Mags?”
“Hmm...?”
He sighed. “Why is that the thing that bothers you?”
“Randall broke up with me at Sheen,” she said at last. “I mean no one probably remembers it but me. I haven’t been back since.”
“Why didn’t you say something? We don’t have to go there,” he said.
“We do, everyone eats there.”
Everyone did. What an ass Randall was. Why break up with her in such a public place? “You won’t be alone tomorrow night and I think if nothing else we are becoming friends.”
She gave him the sweetest, most vulnerable smile and his gut clenched. He realized that despite her sexy moves and seduction techniques, Maggie Del Rio was very real. That realness appealed to him almost more than her teasing.
“Thank you, Jericho,” she said. “I’m glad that I’m going back there with a friend.”
“Me, too,” he said. As much as he’d wanted to escape from her presence so he could get some relief from the sexual tension she had ratcheted up in his body, now he felt like a grade-A douchebag for leaving first. “I’ll wait while you lock up and walk you to your car.”
