Page 32 of Grinch Girl

Clearly, I’d never find out.

I sniffed at him in greeting and slammed my car door.

“Rough day?” he asked, taking his full attention from the stars and turning it on me.

“Irritating at best,” I said shortly. And the key cause of that irritation was standing right in front of me.

He raised his eyebrows, inviting me to continue. But what was the point? I didn’t want to get used to having someone to vent to or commiserate with. Not someone who was only temporary anyway. I didn’t want to watch his eyes glaze with boredom as I tried to explain my financial predicament with Greta’s shop or any part of my complicated relationship with Bella. How I was worried about Michael’s feelings too.

Speaking of… “You know, we haven’t been very successful at ‘hatching schemes,’” I said.

His eyebrows lowered into a frown. “I suppose not.”

“I’ve seen Bella’s car here in the mornings.” I waved my arms around the parking lot. “So I suppose trying to alter the date pairings doesn’t matter to you anymore if you and Bella have been able to establish a morning work schedule.”

His frown lines grew deeper. “Does it matter to you?”

The air between us was changing, and I didn’t understand how or why. It was like my clear irritation had sparked some of his own, and now there was a sort of electric current between us. A kind of unstable energy that wasn’t quite safe.

I’d also sort of lost the thread of what we were discussing. Oh right—our initial scheme to make mischief between the sweethearts. “Yes,” I said on principle. “I mean, my feelings haven’t changed.”

He snorted at me and took a half step closer. “Feelings? J-Bird, you have no feelings for Michael. Not really. I suspect that keeping Bella and Michael apart was a spiteful way of getting back at Bella for something, and that it had nothing really to do with the man himself. I’ve seen no evidence that you particularly care for him. Or even that you fancy him.”

His words stung, like a strong antiseptic pad being pressed to a reopened wound. How the hell would he know what I did or didn’t “fancy” anyway? “You’ve seen no evidence?” I mocked in a half-baked British accent. “What great investigative tool have you been using to compile this evidence, might I ask?”

“My own eyes,” he said drily.

Why had we both just taken a step closer to one another? I could hear him just fine from where he was.

“Let’s talk about those eyes,” I said, wild and breathless. “I watched the second episode. The footage of you from The Satin Lady.” There was a lot of Nate in that episode, but I was guessing he knew exactly the ten seconds I was referring to.

Nate abruptly dropped his gaze from my face to the ground. Mumbled something I couldn’t understand. Squeezed his hands into fists before relaxing them.

“What did you say?” I demanded.

He rolled his eyes back to the stars. “I didn’t know I was being recorded. At that moment.”

It’s not that I didn’t trust Sean, but… “Were you looking atmelike that?” Suddenly my voice was quiet too.

Nate’s eyes lowered from the heavens to my face. His expression shifted away from embarrassment as his eyelids lowered a centimeter and his jaw shifted.

Why was my breathing so shallow? Why was I focusing so much on the bottom half of his face?

“Are you familiar with the termcompetence porn, Jane?” he asked.

I was so distracted by his use of my actual name and how his night-quiet voice had gotten all roughed up and gravelly that it took me a moment to grasp his actual question. Before I realized I didn’t grasp it at all. “Huh?”

“Competence porn—” he paused to cock his jaw in the opposite direction and take a half step closer to me “—is when a viewer takes great enjoyment in watching someone do something well. Marveling at someone who is insanely good at something.”

I blinked a few times, confused and mesmerized. My lips formed into the shape they needed to make a W sound, but I couldn’t think of the right question to ask him.What does this have to do with me? When did you get so close?

“You fix things and make things and solve situations,” Nate all but whispered. “You order people around, and they do what you say.” He shook his head, as if in bewilderment. “There hasn’t been a problem you couldn’t solve.”

He might have looked frustrated if he didn’t look so…intent. “I’ve always been a bit of a sucker for competence porn, but I’ve never seen it embodied so much in one individual.” Those intense dark eyes became fixated on my parted lips. “So I didn’t know how apt the term actually was.”

“Let me get this straight.” I took a shuddering breath, so warm in my thin coat that I wondered how I could have felt cold earlier. “You’re turned on because I’m so competent?” This might have been the oddest conversation I’d ever had with a man. A very odd, veryhotconversation.

His lips quirked up at the corners. “It surprises me too.”

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