Page 61 of Failure to Match

And oh. My. Fucking. God.

He looked up at the same time I did andsmiledat me. It was glorious. Heart-throbbinglyglorious. I beamed back, waving at him?—

“Hey!” My grin died when Jackson tugged my arm, pulling me back the way we’d come. “Where are we going?”

“Leaving,” he bit out, shoving at the elevator button.

Disappointment weighed on my shoulders, making them sink an inch. My heart dropped. “What? Why? We just got here.”

He adjusted his bow tie, a muscle ticking across his jaw. “I miscalculated.”

What? I glanced down at my phone. “No, you didn’t. We still have over a half-hour left like you said.”

For the life of me, I couldn’t decipher the look that response earned me. Jackson held my gaze as the elevator doors slid open… and closed again. The allergies were back.

As were the tingles.

I slipped my arm out of his grip. “Okay,” I relented, smoothing my palms over my dress again. “Where would you like to go instead?”

He didn’t answer right away. Then, “Not sure yet.”

Was he serious?

“What’s wrong with this place?” I asked. “You very clearly went through a lot of trouble. It couldn’t have been easy to get Daniel Omori here on such short notice.”

I’d agreed to the evaluation less than eight hours ago. Daniel was a famous chef who lived on the other side of the world. Pulling this off seemed more than a little impossible to me.

“How the hell did you manage to even get him here on time?” I asked. Wasn’t the flight from here to Japan like fourteen hours or something? “How did you get him toagree?”

“Money,” Jackson said simply. “Most people are willing to do anything if you offer them enough of the stuff. And he flew in from New York, it’s not a big deal.”

That made even less sense. Why was he trying to downplay it?

I crossed my arms. “So, you spent all that money on a celebrity chef, and you want to leave before you even get to taste the food?” I was missing something. What was I missing?

He rolled his lips. “Like I said, I miscalculated.”

And since he very clearly wasn’t talking about the time, I had no idea what?—

“Hey, you guys ready to eat?”

Judging by the way both our heads snapped toward the new voice, Jackson hadn’t heard Daniel sneak up on us either. My pulse jumped, my mouth going dry as I struggled to recall the proper cultural protocols for greeting someone you were meeting for the first time.

Becauseoh my god, his accent! It was even more deliciously Australian in person.

Daniel’s friendly smile widened as he met my star-struck gaze, the adorable little dimple on his chin digging deeper. I returned his smile, the connection between my brain and my mouth mending as my hand shot out.

“Hi!” Was that my voice? That didn’t sound like my voice. It was four pitches higher than I remembered it being. “I’m Jamie?”

Nope.

That was meant to be a statement. Not a question.

“Danny,” he said humbly. As if he wasn’t Daniel frickin’ Omori, internet sensation of my heart. As if his chin dimple didn’t have its own Instagram fan account with half a million followers.

“It’s nice to meet you, Danny.” And it was. It really, really was?—

I inhaled sharply, my grin faltering when a large hand slid gently over my lower back. It wasn’t the gesture that made me gasp (though that was also rather surprising), but the electric current that shot up my spine in response to the deceptively possessive touch.

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