Page 30 of Matched By Mistake
“I can see that. So what’s been your biggest challenge so far?” he asked.
She tipped her head to the side, clearly giving his question some thought, and then shrugged. “I don’t think I’ve had one. I mean every client has something that I have to overcome but it’s not really a challenge.”
“In what way?”
“I have to figure out what they want. For example, if a client says ‘I want something classy and sophisticated,’ that could literally mean several things, so I have to push them a little bit to get them to defineclassyto me. No lie, I had one client who said anything without neon lights is classy. That immediately told me what she didn’t want.”
He leaned back as he finished his meal. “That would do it.”
“What about you—biggest challenge?”
That was easy. “All of them. I think that the challenge is making the design I have in my head work in a real-world scenario. It’s one thing to want solar to power a building and another to find a way to hide the panels so that the building doesn’t look like a big field of black panels. So those kinds of things. And each job seems to have a different challenge like that.”
She smiled at him. “Have you ever not been able to make something work?”
“I did a job in the UK where I wanted to use the wastewater to heat a home, but I couldn’t get the right pump system in place. I tried a number of different designs but eventually we had to go with something already on the market.”
“And that was bad why?”
He shrugged, realizing he was telling her a little too much about himself. But maybe she wouldn’t’ notice. “It used more energy than I wanted it to consume. I was trying for a net-zero house. Meaning that it would produce the exact amount of energy it needed to consume.”
“That’s fascinating. The planet is really important to you isn’t it?”
“It’s the only one we have,” he said. “I’m not like an eco-warrior or anything but if I can make a change and it helps, then I will do it. But full disclosure, I do love travel and probably take more flights than I should.”
“That’s fine. I don’t take many so it probably evens out,” she said with a wink.
He knew that wasn’t the way it worked but he liked her logic. He liked thinking of them as a pair who balanced each other out. And he wasn’t entirely sure when that had happened.
But he knew it had to be last night. When she’d been bent on seducing him without touching him. No other woman had ever made him so hot so fast. And tonight when he’d seen her struggle to enter the restaurant but not back down.
Damn.
Maggie was his kind of woman.
Fiercely feminine and not afraid of a challenge. He skimmed his eyes down from her face to the delicate curve of her neck and then lower to her breasts.
“You’re staring at me and I’m not breathing heavy.”
Immediately an image of her in his arms as he ravished her with kisses sprang to mind. “I’m thinking about another way to make you breath heavy.”
“Oh, are we going that far with our touching moratorium?” she asked.
He wanted everything she had to give but she’d been the one to say they should take things slow. Maybe not even allow themselves to give in to the chemistry between them.
“We can go as far as you want,” he said. “This is your night, Maggie.”
“My night. I’d rather it be ours,” she said.
He shifted his legs under the table. He wanted to say something clever but instead the truth was all he had. “I’d like that, too.”
But the truth was he knew that “us” wasn’t going to be easy for them. No matter how strong they both were in the face of their families.
Maggie forgot where they were and the fishbowl they were in for most of the meal. Jericho had that kind of power over her. She relaxed her guard and for a moment it felt like she didn’t have any baggage. She knew it was still there. But right now it wasn’t hanging off both of her shoulders.
Jericho suggested they split dessert, which made her give him a hard glare. “Uh, what?”
“Usually on dates dessert is a thing, but I have a sweet tooth... Why?”
