Double Dare
was lunch?”
    “Trying, but I’ll have the papers to you by tomorrow.” She clasped her hands together. “Crap, I forgot your jacket.”
    “Told you that was fine. Why trying?” He disappeared behind the refrigerator and came back with an apron that stated Men don’t cook, they grill .
    “But you did cook,” she said.
    “Nope. Foil is truly man’s best friend.”
    Tobias moved with comfort around the kitchen. Before long he poured the wine in two glasses and brought her one. Back in the kitchen area, he filled a shallow pot with water. He went to the refrigerator and steadily took out all he needed and closed it with a swift kick.
    “Trying?” he asked again.
    Emma pursed her lips considering how much to say about her lunch date. No, there wasn’t anything more between them than a comforting friendship. Yeah, he sometimes looked at her like she should be dessert, but talking about another man wouldn’t be too much of a faux pas.
    “I wanted to get those papers looked over. You got them to me quickly and I wanted to return the favor. I know one attorney I trust to give it to me straight. We dated before I found out he was an ass, but he’s a great attorney.”
    “He hit on you.”
    “That’s an assumption.” She laughed at the irritated look he gave her. “I made it clear we wouldn’t go anywhere.”
    “But you agreed to a lunch.” He continued to spread out bowls and food on the counter. “That says to him you’re still open.”
    “It could mean I’d like to eat lunch while he took thirty minutes to go over the contract.”
    “Men don’t think like that, especially not with attractive women. Matter of fact, men don’t think at all when an attractive woman is involved. If there is a give or angle, they will do their damndest to get in anyway they can.”
    “You tried to angle with me?”
    “I had myself convinced I would do the right thing and keep our relationship professional. Sex and money rarely mix well between friends, but that third button had a gravitational pull that sucked me in.”
    Her hands trembled slightly, and she balled them into fists. For a man so solid and steady, he kept her on edge. “Are you regretting asking me to dinner?”
    “Only if you think this attorney guy still has a chance.”
    “God, no.”
    “No further explanation needed for why the lunch was trying.” He pulled out unbaked pasta from a container. “What did he do?”
    She straightened. “It could be simple incompatibility.”
    “Your mallow is showing.”
    She took a sip from her wine. The red would go well with the roast. “It is, but your being able to read a situation before hearing all the details is off-putting.”
    “My job was to people watch, in essence, and pick up subtle clues,” Tobias said. “Though, ‘God, no’ is a pretty clear indicator you’d chew your arm off if it meant getting away from the man.”
    “Practically had to. I wanted to pay him. He declined. Then I suggested that I at least pay for lunch. Again, he declined, angling for a date. I can’t blame him too much, because I say I don’t want anything to do with him, but then something comes up and I think maybe he wasn’t as bad as I remembered. We go out. I come to the conclusion, no, he wasn’t as bad as I remembered. He’s worse. He thinks women were born to be babysat by the men folk.”
    “Simple solution.” He turned to put the pasta in the boiling water. “Scroll to his name on your phone and give it to me.”
    Curious to see what he’d do, Emma got up, took him her phone. She sipped the wine as he frowned at Roger’s entry. There was a lot of the backspace button. She assumed he deleted the number, but then he started to type. When finished he handed her back the phone and went to drain the pasta in the sink. Roger had been replaced with U Remember, Worse Than and the email address was filled now with [email protected].
    “Hand me that bowl,” he said.
    When Tobias wrote it he

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