Sandcastle Beach (Matchmaker Bay #3) - Jenny Holiday Page 0,132
of the real her, and he approved.
He walked farther in and stopped in front of the sofa. “Hold on, though. Is this a beige sofa?” The appearance of those crow’s-feet said he was teasing.
She bit back a smirk and picked up one of the brightly colored pillows from the sofa. “The judicious use of beige has its place. You couldn’t have all these crazy pillows on top of a sofa that was already a bonkers color.”
“I don’t know,” he teased. “I thought I signed up for Operation: Abandon Beige, and now I find out that the largest piece of furniture in my designer’s house is actually…” He made a show of sitting down on the sofa and sort of comically manspreading over it. “Beige?”
She threw the pillow at him.
And immediately regretted it. In addition to stroking clients, throwing things at them was not a great idea.
But it was okay, because he cracked up and threw it back at her.
She caught it, suddenly breathless like she was catching some kind of…sports thing instead of a pillow. She wasn’t sporty enough to finish that metaphor properly. “You want something, some water before we get started? Or coffee?”
“Nah, I’m done for the day—done for the week. I decided to make you my last meeting.”
She wasn’t sure what that had to do with declining coffee. “Wine?” She jokingly looked at her watch. “It is after noon.”
He looked at her for what felt like a beat too long—yet also not long enough—before saying, “I’d love a glass of wine.”
There was no reason for Jay to still be at Elise’s house three hours later. He’d loved everything she’d shown him and had approved it all. She clearly had enough creativity and talent in her little finger to create the best damn lobby in Toronto. If this had been any other designer, he would have given her carte blanche to do what she wanted. And that would have been a big item off his to-do list. Would have let him get back to his job. To micromanaging things he was actually qualified to micromanage.
But damn, he wasn’t going to do that. Because watching Elise Maxwell work was such an enormous turn-on, it was ridiculous. She was clearly passionate about design. She had a vision for his office, and she was willing to fight for it. He liked that. A lot.
So he kept asking questions. Sometimes he took issue with some detail, just so he could watch her defend said detail even as she quite sincerely took what he was saying into account.
“I’m going to have to veto that one.” He sipped his third glass of wine as she showed him a wallpaper sample she was suggesting for the small lavatory inside his office. “Way too crazy.”
He was lying. It was not too crazy. The pattern of dark-green horizontal stripes was, in reality, just the right amount of crazy. She’d somehow picked up on his penchant for green without his having said anything.
Her brow furrowed slightly as she tilted her head and stared at the sample like she was seeing it for the first time. There was something about the wrinkling of the usually smooth skin on her forehead that made him shift in his seat.
“This”—she pulled out another sample, this one covered with tiny palm trees—“is too crazy. The stripes, by contrast, are classic with a little twist. Masculine yet fun.”
“Masculine isn’t usually fun?” he teased. But damn, he needed to cut this shit out. He’d hired her to do a job. He couldn’t be getting all suggestive. He was not that kind of man.
He suddenly had a flash of his brother Cameron’s dad “flirting” with the receptionist at the used car dealership he’d worked at. That’s what Angus had called it—flirting. Even though Jay had only been nine or ten at the time, he had been pretty sure the receptionist, who always responded to Angus’s overtures with pained, tight-lipped smiles, wouldn’t have called it that. And he knew his mother wouldn’t have, either, based on the fights he’d overheard over the years.
So he could like Elise from afar—honestly, there was no way to make himself not do that—but anything more was a bad idea. He set down his wine. Time for cooler heads to prevail.
“Oh no,” Elise said. “I misspoke. Masculine is fun.” The way she said fun, all low and sort of stretched out, suggested that maybe he wasn’t the only one having trouble keeping things strictly professional.