Page 47 of Some Like It Hott

I beat him there by about thirty seconds, but it’s enough that when he walks in, he draws up, startled—before he hides his surprise.

“Thank you for being prompt.” His voice is a morning-rough baritone. Between the gruffness and the formality, something tightens in my low belly.

We’re going to pretend nothing happened. Not in the hot tub. Not on either side of the wall afterward.

I hate it, and I like it.

Also, I like the suit. It’s linen again, and so help me, I want to rub myself all over it.

All over him.

We sit down a healthy distance from each other—the hot spring having established that anything less is unsafe.

“What’s next?” he says.

For a split second, my mind goes somewhere else, and then I realize he’s talking about The Plan. Our Plan.

“Let’s map out what we have.”

Keeping our safe distance, we do it. He prints a blank week schedule, and we copy onto it everything we’ve come up with so far. It’s more than I thought, and it’s satisfying to see.

Some of the vendors have already reached out to suggest additional offerings, so we add those in. And I’ve thought of a few new things—there’s a pottery painting shop in Bend that also does Wine and Paint nights.

“And we could do Bingo and darts,” I say.

“You made fun of Bingo,” he says, eyebrows raised, the corner of his mouth turned up.

I kind of wish he wouldn’t do that. It reads differently now. Like a tease. Like an invitation. Which I know it isn’t.

Unless it is.

“I needed to give you a hard time,” I say.

The smile deepens, the dimple showing.

Gah.

I try again to convince him about axe throwing.

“No,” he says. “Find something else.”

“We can make it safe.”

“No,” he says, expression so stern it dissolves something in my nether regions.

I cross my arms. “Okay, smarty pants, then what? We need”—I count—“at least ten more programs that are compact enough to test at a summer festival but ongoing and popular enough to flesh this out.” I point to the calendar.

“You’re in charge of bringing the fun,” he says. “I’m the spreadsheets guy, remember?”

“You can do this. Come on—it’ll be good for you. Let’s brainstorm. Throw some stuff out. You liked the Jell-O wrestling.”

He rolls his eyes, scowling. “I didn’t.”

“It’s not so hard,” I coax. “When you need a break from work, what do you do?”

His mouth opens. Closes. Opens and closes again, before his jaw hardens, enough to tell me what I should have already guessed, a moment before he says it: “I work out.”

“That’s tragic, Preston.”

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