Walk of Shame
Page 12

“Oh. Right. Ms. Hamlen.”
I can’t stop the little laugh. “Where are you from? I’m pretty sure Buckingham Palace has less formality than you.”
He stares down at me. “I’m merely polite. Try it sometime.”
“Hey!” I say, stung. “I have plenty of flaws, but impoliteness isn’t one of them. I invited you to stay!”
“After you pretended not to know me.”
“That was just payback!” I say, raising my voice and then quickly lowering it. “For the restaurant last week, when you pretended not to know me.”
He takes a small step forward, his eyes flashing. “Not the same thing. I was working. I needed to retain a certain level of anonymity. I can’t have a would-be client thinking I’d go gabbing about her case with the annoying girl who lives in my building.”
I can’t help the smile. “Have you ever gabbed in your life? I’d kill to see it.”
He sighs and runs a hand over the back of his neck.
I smile wider. “Okay, I forgive you for the dinner snub the other night. So you can forgive me for the snub just now.”
Andrew looks at me out of the corner of his eye. “It doesn’t work like that. You don’t get to just exchange one apology for another.”
“You do when they’re the same offense.”
“Yes, but mine was done out of professional necessity, yours was just petty—”
“I ate a banana,” I interrupt.
He opens his mouth, then shuts it, at a loss for words. “What?”
“Yesterday. I was hungover, as you probably expected, and I didn’t have a banana, but I ordered one for dinner.”
He’s silent for a full thirty seconds. “You ordered a banana for dinner.”
“I did.”
Andrew closes his eyes for a moment. “You really are ridiculous, Georgiana.”
“So does that mean you’ll stay for dinner?”
“What? No. I swear, the lack of logic in your thought process never fails to astound—”
I reach out, snatch the briefcase from his hand, and take a step back.
His face is menacing. “Georgiana . . .”
I hold it up. “I’m holding it hostage. Until after dinner.”
He takes a step nearer. “Stop acting like a child.”
“Stop acting like an asshole,” I fire back. “Have a drink. Eat some food. Make some friends.”
Like me.
He glares. “They’re your friends, and—”
“Well, lucky for you, I’m good at sharing,” I interrupt before he can make some disparaging comment about the types of people that would lower themselves to hanging out with the likes of me.
Brody comes up behind me and, for the first time in months, I’m semi-glad to see him, because now Andrew won’t tackle me to get the briefcase back.
Although would that be such a bad thing? He does work out a lot, all that lean, sculpted weight on top of me . . .
“Babe, I refilled your wine.”
I look up at Brody and smile in thanks as I accept the glass. “Perfect. Now we need to get something for Andrew here.”
“Sure,” Brody says with an easy smile. “What are you having?”
I watch as Andrew swallows, his gaze flicking briefly from the briefcase in my hand to the crowd of people behind us and finally back to Brody. Clearly he realizes he’s trapped. “Red wine’s fine.”
“There are already a bunch of bottles open—come take your pick,” Brody says, gesturing in the direction of the drinks table someone’s set up.
Andrew follows Brady, pausing as he passes me and reaching for the briefcase.
I step back before he can reach it. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t trust you not to run away without some incentive to stay.”
“Yeah, well, that’s my problem,” he mutters, more to himself than to me. “It would seem that my incentive to leave and my incentive to stay are one and the same.”
Wait, what? What does that mean?
“Hey, Mulroney. Barolo or Bordeaux?” Brody calls.
Andrew walks away to inspect his wine choices, leaving me to stare after him, a little uncomfortable with just how glad I am that he’s staying.
Georgie

TUESDAY NIGHT, LATER I made an error in judgment.
Not my first, to be sure, but annoying all the same. See, when I asked Andrew to stick around for dinner, I hadn’t anticipated that people might, well . . . like him.
And by people, I mean my female friends.
I shove a big mouthful of tiramisu in my mouth, pretending to be interested in the delicious dessert, but out of the corner of my eye, I watch as Hailey Miller laughs hysterically at something Andrew’s just told her.
Really? Because I know for a fact that the man’s not even the slightest bit funny.
Hailey apparently disagrees. As did Lynlee, Susannah, and Jen when they had their turns throwing themselves at him earlier.
Marley comes up beside me, draping an arm around my neck and giving me a smacking kiss on the side of my head. “You should have told me, but I’ll forgive you if you give me a bite of that. Calories don’t count when they come from someone else’s plate.”
“Forgive me for what?” I ask as I hold up a forkful of tiramisu to her mouth.
She cleans the fork. “For not telling me,” she says around the dessert.
“Telling you . . .?”
Marley rolls her eyes. “That you like the lawyer. Heck, you didn’t even tell me that you knew him. Gimme another bite, and I’ll forgive you for that too.”
I give her another bite since watching Hailey and Andrew flirting made me lose my appetite anyway.
“You’re not playing dumb, so that’s good,” she says, turning and mimicking my posture, leaning back against the counter and facing out into the room where a few remaining friends linger, finishing their last drink.
I shrug. “Okay, so I do know him, but like him . . . I’m not really sure about that. It’s more like . . .”
“Delicious sexual tension.”
I snort. “I’m not sure the man has hormones. He’s sort of an ice king.”
“How’d you guys meet?”
“Move-in day,” I say, setting the plate aside and grabbing my water bottle. “The building double-booked the loading dock, and neither of us handled it particularly well.”