DANIKA: I can’t leave my strategic library position to come and get a protein bar. My seat by the window will be stolen. The risk isn’t worth the tasteless but protein-rich reward.
ZAF: Are you telling me you don’t like my protein bars?
DANIKA: They taste like cardboard.
DANIKA: Keep giving them to me, though.
As if he had any intention of stopping.
ZAF: For food emergencies?
DANIKA: You ask so many questions. I’m working now, I have to go.
And she really did go. There were no more texts during her breaks—not a single one—and she didn’t show up to lunch, either. Zaf leaned against a lamppost by the food court, staring longingly at the noodle van and the library in turn, like a man with a desperate craving for chili bean sprouts and books. Or chili bean sprouts and a bookish woman. Whatever. Clearly, he was delirious with hunger, since he’d finished his store of snacks around 10 A.M. as always. Hours ago now.
He checked his phone again, but there was no response from Dani to his latest nudge. Since his brain was his brain, his first thought was that she’d died. She’d taken the stairs and fallen, or she’d been crushed between those fancy moving bookshelves—the ones with signs on them saying to shout before you pulled the levers, only no one ever did.
Lucky for Zaf, he was used to shoving unreasonable worries away, so he drop-kicked those ideas into the sun and moved on.
In reality, he’d probably been stood up by his fake girlfriend. Ouch. Of course, knowing Dani, it was equally likely that she’d just gotten distracted—that she was lost in a book or a journal, her phone at the bottom of her bag, time a distant concept she preferred not to play with. Which would be fine, if it weren’t for the fact that they had social media stalkers to manipulate into free publicity.
And, wow, it all sounded incredibly mercenary when he phrased it like that. But still.
Zaf needed to be seen with Dani before this flash in the pan . . . un-flashed. He wasn’t about to let a single fake-lunch-date opportunity slip through his hands. So, for the good of Tackle It—obviously—he had no choice but to hunt down his girlfriend.
His fake girlfriend.
Obviously.
The low murmur was a familiar fixture in her dreams. “Hey. Danika.”
Danika, said with those soft, round consonants. Dani smiled, squeezing her eyes tight against the light. If she could fall asleep properly and sink fully into this dream, she might see Zaf as well as hear him. And seeing him was always a thrill.
Unfortunately, her inner eye remained stubbornly blank. She might have sulked over that, if it weren’t for the feel of a large, warm hand stroking her hair.
“Dani.” The whisper was quieter and closer, now. She felt the warmth of a body beside hers, caught the scent of coffee beans and spiced citrus—a scent she usually tried not to enjoy, because sniffing people was . . . just . . . odd. But it was okay to sniff people in dreams. Or to fantasize about taking the whole of them, making them yours, popping them into your mouth like a glossy, round grape, seeds and all, and trusting they wouldn’t choke you. For example.
“Sweetheart. Wake up.”
She’d really rather not. Even though her position was a little uncomfortable and her pendants were digging into her chest, this dream or half dream or whatever was too heartbreakingly lovely to abandon.
“You’re drooling on a book.”
“Shit,” Dani blurted, and jolted upright in her seat. At which point, a few things became immediately obvious: first, that she had fallen asleep in the library. Second, that she had not drooled on a book, but if the ache in her cheekbone was anything to go by, she had used a book as a pillow. And third, that Zaf was here.
Why was Zaf here?
Not that she minded, exactly. He was quite nice to have around, she supposed.
He was sitting beside her at one of the long library desks, and he appeared to have forgotten the meaning of personal space—again, not that she minded. Zaf was close enough that she could count his sinfully long eyelashes, and if she wasn’t mistaken, the delicious weight at the back of her neck was his hand. A wave of pleasure thrummed through her stomach.
He was holding her neck. He was holding her neck. His palm cradled the line of her spine and his thumb stroked the side