What's Life Without the Sprinkles - By Misty Simon Page 0,13

sane.

If only the cute guy would be Nate. Thoughts of what exactly that would entail made her blood pressure spike a few degrees. She fanned herself and blew out a breath.

“Who are you thinking about now, hussy?” Zoe wasn’t stupid enough to give up her pillows, so she tapped Claudia on the head with her balled fist. “Jensen Ackles, again?”

“Ha! No, not someone so unattainable.” And now she’d just opened a can of worms, because Zoe would eventually find out who was more attainable. And then discuss in detail how Claudia could go about attaining him.

Her sister didn’t disappoint. “Who? Who? Who!”

“You sound like an owl.”

“You are not going to distract me.”

Claudia propped herself up on an elbow, facing Zoe. “I wasn’t thinking of anyone in particular.”

“Liar.” Zoe also turned and propped her hand under her head. “Please tell me you’ve finally decided to bag the very yummy Nate.”

Um. “What?”

“The very yummy Nate. Tell me you’ve finally decided to look beyond the whole ‘he’s my best friend’ thing and finally jump him like he’s never been jumped before.”

Now what could she say to that? She had hoped to secretly seduce him and have a kind of friends-with-benefits relationship. Just the cake, please. Would she be able to do that with Zoe hawking over her shoulder?

Definitive answer: No.

“Hmmm,” Claudia said to give herself a moment. “No, I wasn’t thinking of Nate. I was thinking of Hank, down at the soda shop.”

“I’m not that gullible.” Zoe smirked. “Hank hasn’t moved from his stool with his newspaper and his root beer float since 1985. And he was old then.” She tapped her lips with one painted fingernail. “No, I think you definitely get that heat-flash look in your eyes when it comes to Nate.”

“A lot you know.” Maybe she could get Zoe to play devil’s advocate to her lustful thoughts without giving herself away. “Think what it would do to our friendship and to Justin’s buddy nights.”

“You mean enhance them?”

“No, ruin them if something happened.”

“Ah, ha! So you have thought about it.” Zoe’s lips quirked up in another smug smile.

Claudia grabbed a pillow from under her elbow and threatened her with it. “I have not.” Not more than twenty times today, anyway.

“I think you have, and it’s coming to the front now, after twenty years, because he’s working on the shop and you have to stare at him with his tool belt on every day.”

Claudia sputtered. “I have not stared at him in his short-sleeved white T-shirt and thought about his biceps. Looked at his jeans and wanted to be in them. Or glanced at his supple brown leather tool belt with its wrenches and drills and been turned on like a light switch. I’m not going there.”

Zoe collapsed back into her pillows, clutching her stomach while she laughed loud and long. “You have to go there and pick up Justin. And, dear sister, since that’s not at all what I said, I think you are also on the verge of protesting too much. So I’ll leave you to go pick up your son at the guy’s house who you don’t think of his yummy biceps or his tools. Have fun. Do everything I would.”

Zoe jumped off the bed and ran from the bedroom before Claudia could say anything else.

Great. Now she’d have to go face Nate knowing her lust wasn’t as carefully hidden as she’d thought it was.

Chapter Three

Nate West groaned on the floor, attacked and quite possibly maimed by the figure looming over him. He’d just been stabbed in the heart with a spatula and was down for the count. “No, Master Zofo, do not deal the death blow, please, I beg of you.”

“Bwahahahaha! I can do no less. You have committed treason, and for that you must pay!”

Raising his hand in the air, Nate cowered away from the ten-year-old boy with the apron hanging around his neck and down his back, an old Scooby Doo tie wrapped around his waist to hold his weapons. The boy stood spread-legged, brandishing the deadly spatula.

“There will be no mercy.” Justin Bradley, aka Master Zofo—Claudia had always been a big Led Zeppelin fan—jabbed out with the spatula, and Nate thanked God it was made of rubber.

“Hey man, watch the goods.”

Justin broke character and started giggling. “Sorry, Nate, I didn’t mean to get you in the gonads.”

Another giggle. Nate took the opportunity to wrestle the boy to the floor and start his very own torture.

“No, no, no,” Justin screamed, laughing the whole time. “Not the