little going on in the pants of the Logan Schmidt model?”
He blinked and gaped at the wall.
“Uh, they ran out of android-making materials trying to generate a life-sized rendition of my love hammer,” he said.
Toni managed not to snort at his ridiculous euphemism, but just barely. “That’s not what I heard.”
“What did you hear? If you’ve forgotten the size of my pool noodle, I’d be happy to offer it up for your journalistic inspection.”
At this rate, she’d never keep her composure. But she was going to try.
She stared into his eyes and said, “I heard engineers feared that life as we know it would come to a standstill as all under-sexed women on the planet became addicted to your life-sized mechanical beaver cleaver—”
His bark of laughter startled her to silence. “Did you seriously just call it a beaver cleaver?”
“I’m sorry. Do you prefer yogurt cannon?” She tilted her head to peer at him over the top of the rim of her glasses. “Got it. Logan’s . . . yogurt . . . cannon,” she said as she wrote the words in the margin.
She waited until he stopped laughing before she continued.
“I also heard somewhere that you were the original lead singer for Exodus End; care to sing me a few lines?” She stared at him hopefully, her heart fluttering in her chest with romantic anticipation. She was dying to hear his singing voice.
“And who told you that? Was it Max? Because he seems to think understating his vocal talent earns him more compliments or something. I can’t sing. Never could. I have the harmonics of a drunken crow.”
“Prove it.”
He squawked out a few lines of their first-ever hit, “Rebel in You,” and he did indeed sound like a drunken crow. She was pretty sure he was singing horribly on purpose, but that didn’t stop her from cringing and covering her ears with both hands.
“So you see,” Logan said, “we needed Max whether I liked it or not.”
She blinked at him. “You didn’t want Max in the band?”
“I thought we were just fine with three members. I was fortunately outvoted by the other two, and we sought an additional band member.”
“Fortunately outvoted?”
“I was devastated at the time, but you’ve heard me sing. Do you think we would have been at all successful with me as a front man?”
She shrugged. There was no way to know for sure.
“There are those occasional instances in your life when you’re glad you’re proven wrong. I was wrong. We needed Max to make us a better band. But never tell him I said that.” He winked at her, and she smiled before glancing down at her notes. It was time for her to get a little silly just for fun.
“Are you ready for more questions?”
He recrossed his legs so his ankle rested on the opposite knee and leaned back against the cushions to get comfortable. “Shoot.”
“What’s your favorite color?”
He lifted an eyebrow at her. “Seriously?”
She nodded, feigning extreme interest in his answer by holding her pen at the ready and staring at him as if on the edge of her seat.
“Pink,” he said.
She dropped her pen. “Pink?”
“It’s the color of your nipples.”
“Are you thinking about my boobs again?”
“I’m always thinking about your boobs.”
She slipped her hand under the sofa and pulled out what she expected to be her dropped pen, but what she'd grabbed was a lot longer, made of some flexible purple material, and slightly enlarged at one end.
“What is this?” She drew it toward her face for closer inspection.
Logan chuckled. “It’s a magic wand. I’m pretty sure it’s been in someone’s ass, so you might not want to put it too close to your nose.”
With a shriek, she tossed it. It skittered across the gleaming white coffee table and landed on the carpet on the opposite side.
“We’ll add toys to your lessons at the hotel,” Logan said, not looking the least bit concerned that she’d touched that thing. “We should be there in a couple hours.”
That bit of knowledge made her squirm with desire and feel a bit queasy with nerves at the same time. She was pretty sure her lessons up to this point had been relatively tame, and she wasn’t sure if she was ready to step it up to the next level. She wiped her hand on her skirt—as if that would sanitize her skin after touching a used ass wand.
“Was that yours?” she asked, eyeing the end of the “magic wand” just visible on the other side of the table.