quietly dying. “I’m sorry I was late getting back to the truck,” I say in a blatant plea for attention. “My appointment ran late.”
Her gaze returns to the present moment. “Appointment? I thought you had class.”
Well, shit. There’s nothing like outing yourself as a mental patient to the woman you’re crushing on. “I do have class. But after class, I see my therapist.”
“Oh.” She shrugs. “Actually, being late may have helped me. I was just sitting there with a dead phone, and it made me realize something.”
“Did it make you realize you want to see me naked?”
She frowns. “It made me realize something about the US Postal Service.”
“Okay. I’m down for licking your stamps.”
Her tongue meets the creamy cone again. “You might need to workshop that joke. It isn’t quite there yet.”
“Noted. Now tell me about this postal thing.”
“Today at work we opened a whole bunch of surveys—just like my old job. And they explained the whole procedure to me, even though I already knew what to do. Just as a formality, right? Hearing it all again gave me an idea.”
“For what?”
“Revenge,” she says slowly.
Oh, Daphne. Can’t she see that we’re soulmates? I drop my voice. “Tell me this revenge fantasy. I’m listening.”
“It’s not sexy.” Her brown eyes dance.
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
“Okay. So if you want people to return surveys, you pay for their postage.”
“Sure.”
“But you don't buy a stamp for all 70,000 envelopes, because only half of them are going to be returned.”
“And your poor little research budget can't handle it?”
“Exactly. So return mail is a thing where the USPS charges you only for the ones that come back.”
“I see where this is going. It’s a way to prove the discrepancy. You paid for a number of stamps that should be greater than the data you entered into the system.”
“Right. It should prove my theory. Nobody looks at those bills too closely, because nobody would bother to embezzle postage. But there’s one post office login for the whole study.”
“Do you have the login?” I ask hopefully.
“No, but I know where it is. I can picture the sticky note that’s taped inside the procedure folder, in the filing cabinet at Harkness.”
“Okay.” I chuckle. “How are you going to get it?”
In answer, she gets up and crosses to her brother’s truck, while I try not to stare at her ass in that slim little skirt she wore to work today. When she returns, she hands me a party invitation. The event is seven or eight weeks away, in September.
“Oh baby,” I whisper. “You’re going to do this James Bond style? Drink a martini and then sneak into the office for espionage?”
“It’s academia, Rickie.”
“Ah. Cheap white wine and cheese cubes. Got it.”
She leans forward across the narrow table, giving me a giant smile. “You do understand.”
“So much,” I whisper. And I lean forward, too, drawn in by the magnetic pull of her brown eyes. She looks so happy for once.
And now we’re close enough that if I lean a little further over the table, I could take her mouth in a kiss. She knows it, too. And that bright spark in her eyes tells me she likes this idea.
Or maybe not. Because before I can seal the deal, she suddenly swings her legs over the bench and gets up. “We should get home,” she says.
Right.
Maybe next time.
That evening after dinner—and after I wash dishes like a good houseguest—we go outside to horse around. Dylan is trying to teach Jacquie, one of his goats, to jump through a hoop.
I’m holding the hoop, while Dylan does all the coaxing. “Come on, cutie,” he says, clicking his tongue. But she keeps trying to go around the hoop to reach the treats in his hand. “No, baby. This way.” He makes a kissy sound with his lips.
“You have such a way with the ladies,” I tease.
“She just needs a minute to get used to the hoop. Then she’ll bend to my will.”
“Why are we doing this again?” I ask. “I bought some beer for us. And I was hoping to drink one in a rocking chair on your front porch.”
“Ooh, beer,” Dylan says, instead of teasing me about being as tired as his grandpa. My shoulders still ache from tossing bales of hay up into the loft all day yesterday.
“The good stuff, too. Sip O’ Sunshine,” I say, hoping to move things along.
“Five more minutes,” he presses. Dylan has to feed his goat a metric ton of the treats in his pocket, but Jacquie