Page 29 of Perfect Praise

I give him a look likeare we friends?as I cross the room and plop down next to him. He just stares.

“It’s nice to meet you,” I smile. “What are we coloring?”

Sarah flips her pages back and forth. “Rapunzel or Belle?”

“I’m in a Rapunzel mood today.”

Sarah furrows her eyebrows. “But your hair is brown.”

“And it’s not seventy feet long,” I joke, “but I think we share a heart.”

She rips the page out slowly and hands it over while she inspects my entire physique, sizing me up to see if I’m deserving of a preciousTangledsheet. “You’re pretty though.”

“Thank you,” I beam, even though eight-year-olds call everyone pretty. “So are you. I wish I had red hair.”

“I’m like Ariel.” She holds up her coloring book to show me herUnder the Seapicture.

Locke’s coloring his prince’s hair yellow. “John Smith? Fitting.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll color his eyes black,” he says without looking up.

I sit cross-legged on the bed, which causes Locke to break his concentration briefly to inspect my legs, and possibly more. There are shorts underneath my golf dress, but it seems to bother him anyway.

I pluck a golden crayon out of the cup and ignore my stomach curling into itself.

As mortified as I am for drunkenly telling Locke his eyes scare me, I’m equally as mortified that I’m turned on by them—and he knows it.

His voice, or maybe his choice of words, does something to me, and for a split second the other night at the bar, I thought from the way he was looking at me that he was going to kiss me. Or at least dosomething. And to top it off, I felt disappointed that we were interrupted by Graham telling us our dessert was at the table.

Especially now that he’s back to wanting nothing to do with me.

I guess Russ isn’t around to mess with his head and challenge him into vengeance.

Sarah’s voice reminds me to stop looking at Locke’s forearm tensing as he drags the crayon back and forth. “Do you color with your niece?”

I open my mouth before I realize she’s talking to Locke.

“You have a niece?” I ask, raising my face to his.

“I thought he was your friend?” Sarah questions me like she’s somehow caught me in a lie.

“Ididn’t say he was my friend,” I tease.

Locke shrugs, head in his book, when Sarah shoots him an exasperated sigh. “We’re co-worker friends. And no, she’s only four months old. I mainly watch her while she sleeps so her parents can go on dates.”

“I can start babysitting when I’m twelve,” she says proudly. “And go on dates when I’m thirteen.”

Locke laughs. “Don’t rush it. Just stay a kid for as long as you can.”

“That’s no fun,” Sarah insists, hard at work outlining her mermaid tail a dark teal.

A knock at the door has us all looking up to see a nurse in blue scrubs enter and smile at Sarah. “Let’s get you unhooked,” she says.

I try not to watch as the nurse dismantles everything and takes the tubes out of Sarah’s arm.

“I need to pee,” Sarah announces when she’s free from the machine, and they both leave me and Locke alone. In this room. Together.

It’s become unusually quiet. The kind that you listen to.

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