Cookie noticed where I was looking. She patted my hand to draw me back.

“Do you think I have redeeming qualities?”

She curled my fingers into hers. “You’re totally redeemable. You’re like a thirty percent–off coupon. No! A forty percent–off coupon. And I don’t say that lightly.”

“Thanks.”

Again, I felt Reyes’s heat before I saw him. He brought out our food personally, a service Jessica and her friends didn’t receive. Neither did the silver foxes, though they didn’t seem to mind. They kept winking at him, and one licked her lips suggestively. It was so wrong.

“Oh,” I said after he set our plates down, “I forgot to ask you. If you were a utensil, what would you be?”

He straightened. “Excuse me?”

“A utensil. What would you be?”

He crossed his arms over his chest, then asked suspiciously, “Why do you want to know?”

“It’s for a quiz. It’s guaranteed to let us know if we are compatible. You know, for the long haul.”

“Really?” he asked. He pulled out a chair, turned it around, and straddled it to sit with us. “You have to take a quiz to see if we’re compatible?”

“Yes,” I said, trying to recover from that last move. He was just too sexy, straddling that chair, crossing his sinewy arms over the back of it. “Yes. This stuff is important, and they have a ninety-nine percent success rate. It said so.” I dragged out my phone, brought up the online quiz, and held it out to him. “Right here. See?”

He didn’t even spare it a glance. Cookie was busy cutting into her Santa Fe chicken and fending off an inappropriate smirk.

“You can’t trust anything on the Internet.”

“Can, too,” I said, completely offended.

“So, if I posted a comment saying I was an Arabian prince from Milwaukee?”

“Yeah, but you’re a big fat liar. You don’t count. I mean, look at your dad. Pathological liar

numeral uno

. Lying is in your genes.”

He leaned forward. “There’s only one thing in my jeans right now.”

“Are you going to take my question seriously or not? This could be the key to our futures.”

“I have a key in my jeans pocket. You could search.”

He was completely blowing off our chance at happiness. “What are you, twelve?”

“Centuries, maybe.”

“You’re twelve centuries old?”

He winced. “You know how older women say they are twenty-nine?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I’m kind of doing that.”

“No, really, how old are you? Wait!” A thought hit me. Hard. Like a baseball thrown from the pitcher’s plate at Wrigley Field. “How old am I?” I hadn’t really thought of it in those terms. I was supposedly from an ancient race of beings from another universe, another plane of existence. How old was I?

“A machete,” he said, getting up and righting the chair.

“What?”

“If I were a utensil.”

“Does that count as a utensil?”

He winked at me. “It does in my world.”

“Okay, fine. I’d be a … a spork! Wait, what does that mean? I’m not sure a machete and a spork are very compatible.”

He took hold of my chin and lifted my face to his. “I have a feeling a machete and a spork can work very well together.”

Before I could argue, he bent and pressed his mouth to mine. The heat scorched at first, then penetrated my skin and spread through me like warm honey. The kiss, barely a peck, ended too soon as he rose, surprised Cookie with a quick kiss on her cheek, and went back to the kitchen, giving me a spectacular view of his ass.

Cookie gasped and touched the spot where Reyes’s lips had brushed, stars bursting from her eyes. “I want that,” she said, suddenly determined.

I looked back toward the door Reyes had disappeared through. “Well, you can’t have it. It’s mine.”

“No, not that. Not him.” She shook out of her stupor and said, “I mean, yeah, I’d take him in a heartbeat, but I want that. I want what you two have, damn it.” She set her jaw. “Let’s do this. Let’s set up that stubborn, rascally uncle of yours until he begs me to be his girl.”

“Yeah, Cookie,” I said, raising my hand for a high five, but she floundered. “Don’t leave me hangin’.”

“But what if he doesn’t ask me out?”

After waving toward a couple I didn’t know who’d just stepped in the front door to save my dignity, I lowered my hand and said, “I think the more important question is, do you think a machete and a spork are very compatible?”

“Charley, you have to quit taking those ridiculous quizzes.”

“No way. I have to know.”

“Fine, but why a spork?”

“Because I’m versatile. I can multitask like nobody’s business. And I like the way it sounds. It’s so … sporky.”

3

Coffee doesn’t ask silly questions.

Coffee understands.

—BUMPER STICKER

We weren’t back in the office ten minutes before the door to the front entrance opened. I’d expected Mr. Joyce, the agitated man with the issues. Instead I got Denise. My evil stepmother. Thankfully, Mr. Joyce was right behind her. He afforded me the perfect excuse not to talk to her.

Her pallor had a grayish tint to it, and her eyes were lined with the bright red only the shedding of tears could evoke. I honestly didn’t know she had the ability to cry.

“Can I talk to you?” she asked.

“I have a client.” I pointed to the man behind her to emphasize that fact.

Giving her chin a determined upward thrust, she said, “You’ve had clients for two weeks now. I just need a minute.” When I started to argue again, she pleaded with me. “Please, Charlotte.”

Mr. Joyce was holding a baseball cap, wringing it in his hands. He seemed to be growing more agitated by the second. “I really need to talk to you, Ms. Davidson.”

“See?” I pinned Denise with a chastising scowl. “Client.”

She turned on the man, her face as cold and hard as marble. It was an expression I knew all too well. “We just need a minute,” she said to him, her tone razor sharp. “Then she’s all yours.”

He backed off, raising a hand in surrender as he stepped to a chair and took a seat.

My temper flared to life, and I had to force myself to stay calm. I was twenty-seven. I no longer had to put up with my stepmother’s insults. Her revulsion. Her petty snubs. And I damned sure didn’t have to put up with her invading my business and bullying my clients. “That was not necessary,” I said to her when she turned back to me.

“I apologize,” she said, doing a one-eighty. She turned back to Mr. Joyce. “I’m sorry. I’m in a very desperate situation.”

“Tell me about it,” he said, dismissing her with a wave. He clearly had problems of his own.

With all the enthusiasm of a prisoner walking up to the hangman’s noose, I led Denise into my office and closed the door. My temper flaring must have summoned Reyes. He was in my office, waiting, incorporeally.

Then I remembered. He didn’t like Denise any more than I did. Blamed her for most of my heartache as a child. Of course, she’d caused most of it, but Reyes could be … testy when it came to my happiness or lack thereof.

“Want me to sever her spine?” he asked as I sat behind my desk.

“Can I think about it and get back to you?” I asked, teasing. Kind of.

Denise looked toward the wall he was leaning against, the one I was looking at, and naturally saw nothing. But where her usual response would be to purse her lips in disapproval, she wiped at her lapel and sat down instead.

“What do you want?” I asked her, my tone as cold as her heart.

“I’m sure you know that your father has left me.”

“At last.”

She flinched like I’d slapped her. “Why would you say such a thing?”

“Are you really asking me that?”

“I love your father.” She almost came up out of her chair. “I’ve always loved your father.”