Charlotte nodded, the two of them not speaking for the next couple of minutes. It was odd to be quiet with him when her skin thrummed in shivering awareness of his presence, but funnily enough, it wasn’t difficult.
“Here, try this.”
Looking up, she saw he was offering her a scoop of his ice cream. “No.” She blushed despite herself. “Mine’s good.”
“Be wild, Ms. Baird.” The spoon brushed her lips, and when she parted them to reply, he slipped it in, the sweetly tart flavor bursting on her tongue. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
Heart in her throat, Charlotte shook her head. It had to be her imagination, but she could almost believe he was flirting with her. Idiot. A man like Gabriel Bishop didn’t flirt with mice like her, even if her best friend, Molly, was convinced otherwise. Molly, however, had been sure something was up from the start and nearly three months later, Charlotte was still single and Gabriel Bishop was still spending a fortune on red roses.
No, what he was doing was amusing himself by driving her insane. Every time she tried to see Ernest for dinner, he suddenly needed her to stay late—she swore he had radar when it came to her seeing Ernest. It was as well that Ernest was so sweet about the way she had to keep canceling or postponing their plans.
Too sweet.
Molly had been right all those weeks back when she’d pointed out that while Ernest might be someone Charlotte wanted to see as a man she could be in a relationship with, theirs was more of a friendship, nothing else. And she did occasionally want to see her friend, especially now that Ernest was actually dating a woman—and he wanted her advice on how to propose.
Charlotte was the least qualified person on the planet to offer relationship advice, but poor Ernest didn’t know any other women except his girlfriend, so Charlotte was it. That in mind, she girded her loins against the battle about to come. “I can’t work late on the fourteenth.”
Gabriel raised an eyebrow. “Ervin?”
“Ernest. And yes.” When he snorted, she’d had it. Slamming down her tub of ice cream, she glared at him. “He’s a very good friend, and since you know nothing about him, I’d appreciate it if you kept your opinions to yourself!”
Gabriel’s eyes—that steely gray that could almost be silver when he laughed—glinted. “You’re dating him and you still call him a friend?”
So maybe it was a teensy bit her fault he thought she was still dating Ernest. Blame her pride. Ridiculous as it was, she hadn’t been able to bear for him to think no one wanted her, especially when he was out with a different glamorous woman every time she turned around.
It would, however, be a little difficult to explain why she would soon be attending the wedding of the man she was “dating.”
“Ernest is my friend,” she muttered, stabbing her spoon into her ice cream. “It’s his birthday on the fourteenth.”
She should’ve known Gabriel wouldn’t let the subject drop.
“So you’re not dating?”
He didn’t have to rub it in. “No,” she admitted, then said something she wouldn’t even have thought about saying before a certain T-Rex entered her life. “Unlike you, I don’t change partners on a daily basis.”
“I don’t change partners,” Gabriel said, leaning back in his chair and eating a scoop of ice cream. “I’ve never had one of those.”
“Probably because that would require more than an endless series of one-night flings.” Charlotte froze as the words left her mouth—that had been a singularly discourteous thing to say to her boss.
“Don’t stop now, Ms. Baird,” he drawled, scooping up another spoonful of ice cream and holding it out to her lips.
She pursed those lips. He smiled, knowing she’d have to part them to speak. “I—”
He slipped the spoon into her mouth, the creamy dessert cold, the spoon warm from his own lips.
The intimacy of it made her stomach flutter. “That’s very improper behavior.”
“No argument,” he said, eating a spoonful. “Does it make you uncomfortable?” A serious question.
Charlotte wanted to say yes, and back when she’d first begun working for him, it would have unnerved her. But he hadn’t talked like this with her then—no, he’d been T-Rex. Now, though she tried to think of him as T-Rex, she saw Gabriel instead. “I can handle it,” she murmured, and when he smiled, added, “Don’t take that as support for further inappropriateness.”
His smile was slow, creasing his cheeks and bringing the silver into his eyes. “I’m afraid it’s too late.”
Charlotte looked down at her ice cream, her confidence running out all at once, as if a tap had been opened and leached it all out onto the floor. She didn’t play games with men, didn’t know how to; she wasn’t even sure if Gabriel was playing with her or if he was just passing the time.
A quiet buzz of sound that had become intimately familiar over the months she’d worked for him.
Pulling out his cell phone, he glanced at the screen and said, “Other side’s calling early.”
As she listened, he completed a complex international deal over the phone, pulling things from memory she’d have thought would be impossible if she hadn’t seen him do the same thing multiple times. The man’s mind was a steel trap—and he expected the same from her.
Since her laptop was formed of a large tablet and keyboard clipped together, she’d already removed the tablet section and pulled up the file with the buyout terms he was discussing. He glanced at it when she turned it to him, nodded, and made a finger movement that, from the context of the conversation, she translated to mean he needed to glance at another particular section. She found it, turned the tablet his way again.