Page 41 of Kiss the Girl
Brooke:No. Learned my lesson. I promise.
Grace:Miss Lily is a bad influence on you.
Brooke:No tricks! I promise! Just Monopoly or something.
Grace:Monopoly is stupid.
Brooke:Trivial Pursuit?
Grace:Fine.
For someone who should be avoiding Noah, I was scheduled to spend more time with him than ever. Game night on Thursday now, on top of the first official team booth-building day coming up on Saturday morning.
I couldn’t bring myself to object to any of it.
Whatever. It was fine. All friendly stuff.
Thursday night, I headed over to Brooke’s after I closed the store, which meant beating Noah there by a half-hour. As if to prove she wasn’t in the matchmaking business anymore, she didn’t bring his name up once, instead catching me up on Ian’s training at Quantico.
“He gets to come for Thanksgiving for two days,” she said. “I can’t wait. Gran does an amazing Thanksgiving. You should come this year.”
“Gran” was Miss Lily, who I adored. Everyone did, really. But I smiled and shook my head. “We’re having a family thing. Tabitha’s coming from New York, and I can’t wait. My dad feels so much better than last year, and it should feel like normal Thanksgiving again.”
Last year he’d been too ill from chemo to want to eat. This year, he was coming into the store a couple of hours a day to help Gary while I took lunch and caught up on ordering. Every week, I saw signs of my dad returning to his old self. In fact, I’d finally posted my resume online this past Monday. Getting back to real life wasn’t a hope anymore; it was a given.
Noah’s name didn’t come up until the man himself knocked on the door promptly at seven. A second armchair had magically reappeared since our last game night here, and I’d claimed it so she couldn’t try to maneuver us into a cozy couch situation again.
“Hey, Noah. Come on in,” Brooke said from her foyer. “Did you think about what we discussed at lunch?”
My ears perked up. This sounded code-like.
“Um, is Grace here?”
“Yeah, but she won’t care. I’ve accepted you guys don’t want to be set up with each other, but that doesn’t mean I can’t try to fix you up with someone else.”
What was it with newly married people that they were always convinced all their single friends secretly wanted was to be married too? Ugh. But I leaned forward, like that was somehow going to let me hear the conversation at the front door better. I wanted to know what Noah thought about this.
“Sure,” he said. “Give me your friend’s number. What’s her name again?”
“It’s my hairdresser, Nikki. You’ll love her.” Then Brooke interrupted herself with a laugh. “Or at least like her. She’s cute and fun.”
I frowned. I was cute and fun.
I sat back and barely refrained from giving myself a face palm. I was also not at all on the market.
Brooke walked into the living room with Noah behind her. “Hey, Grace,” he said with his usual easy smile. “I hear I’m about to deliver a trivia beatdown.”
“You wish,” I said. “When are you going to learn there’s nothing I’m not good at?”
“I wish I had a comeback for that, but so far, that’s been true.”
My stomach did a flip at the words.Good luck, Hairdresser Nikki. You’re going to have to be good at everything if you want to beat me.
Except it wasn’t a competition. I gritted my teeth for a moment to remind myself that I didn’t care who Noah went out with or how good she might be at anything. Noah looked slightly startled, and I realized I must look mad at his compliment. I forced myself to smile. “I’m bad at doing makeup. Does that make you feel better?”
“It would except, you don’t need it. And it’s not like I’m good at it. So, no. So far, you’re still better at way more things.”
Another compliment. I felt the beginnings of something, a feeling in my stomach or my head—I couldn’t even tell—that was…what was that? An impending swoon?
