face as if she was going to pass out. “Oh my God,” she breathed. “You were going to spend a thousand dollars on a cupcake?”
“Everyone I’ve talked to said it’s worth it.”
“No cupcake is worth a thousand dollars!”
He cracked a smile and tried to ignore the glances of other diners. “I guess it’s a good thing we didn’t have to pay for it, then, right?”
Oops. He’d found a mine. Gretchen gathered her purse, and there was a finality to her movements that made him sweat.
He stood with her. “I’m sorry if it was too much. I just wanted everything to be perfect tonight.”
She shook her head. “I need to go.”
He trailed after her as she walked away from the table in the opposite direction. This time she was most definitely leaving.
“Gretchen, wait.” He caught up with her on the stairs. “Do you want to go home and change?”
She smiled but shook her head. “I think I’ll call an Uber.”
Mack marched ahead to open the door for her. Then he followed her outside. “Let me drive you home. I don’t want tonight to end like this.”
She turned around and placed a hand on his arm. “I’m going to be honest with you.”
Yikes. That didn’t sound good. It sounded like the sort of thing someone said before they dumped you. He wouldn’t know, though, because he’d never been dumped.
“I’ve had a lot of fun.”
“So have I.”
“But I feel like I don’t really know you very well,” she finished.
That threw him for a loop. He opened and closed his mouth twice before responding. “Me? No way. I’m Mack. I’m an open book.”
“You’re not, actually.”
“What do you want to know?”
Gretchen shrugged. “I mean, I know about your businesses, your cars, but I don’t know anything about you. We spend so much time talking about me, but when I ask anything about your life other than the surface stuff, you clam up.”
“No, I don’t. I just want to learn more about you.”
“You had more meaningful interaction with Liv in the five minutes she stood there with that cupcake than you and I have had in three months.”
He was busy processing that statement when she glanced down at her phone. “My driver is almost here.”
“I read romance novels,” he blurted.
Gretchen’s looked up. She blinked twice. “You . . . you read romance novels.”
“I do. I’m part of a book club with other men who all secretly read romance novels.”
“Um, okay.”
“You said you wanted to know something about me. That’s something.”
She lifted her eyebrows. “It certainly is. And it also explains a few things.”
“What do you mean?”
“The fancy dinners, the expensive wines, the nonstop flower deliveries.” She tucked her purse under her arm.
“What about them?”
“They’re perfect.”
“And perfect is bad?” Jesus, why was everyone so opposed to perfect all of a sudden?
“It is if it doesn’t mean anything.” She looked at the street in search of her car.
“Gretchen, wait. What makes you think they don’t mean anything?”
She turned. “Look, it all makes sense now. The sex was amazing, and I’ll be honest, it’s one of the reasons I stuck around. Because, wow, every time. I felt like you must have read a textbook on female pleasure.”
He did. Everything he knew about sex, about how to please a woman, he’d learned from reading. No one had ever complained before. He prided himself on making sure no woman ever left his arms unsatisfied. “How the hell is that bad?”
The car pulled up and she opened the back door and turned around. “Because no woman wants to feel like she’s just been sexed up according to an instruction manual. Eventually she wants it to feel real.”
Mack planted his hands on his head. This was not happening.
“You know how to romance a woman, Mack. But I’m not sure you know how to be with a woman.”
She slid into the car without giving him a chance to respond. As if he could respond. Because she’d basically said exactly the same thing Gavin had said yesterday.
Mack watched the taillights of the car merge with traffic.
What the hell had just happened?
Del just made five hundred fucking dollars. That’s what just happened.
CHAPTER THREE
“If I don’t come out alive, I want you to have this.”
Liv handed Riya her favorite whisk. Her friend accepted it without all the bullshit platitudes someone might be tempted to offer in a situation like this, and Liv loved her for it. Everyone knew what it meant when Royce summoned you to his office. Even if she came out with her job intact,