Page 64 of Some Like It Hott

“Did you pull the blinds?” she asks, looking around.

“Nah,” I say. “They were like that. Someone must have pulled them this morning. Maybe the sun was at an awkward angle.”

“Huh,” she says. “Anyway. I had a couple of questions for you…”

Over her head, Natalie gives me a wicked, wicked grin, right before she slides past me and disappears out the door.

32

Natalie

“Gotcha!” someone cries, before something tags me behind my right shoulder blade, a sharp but not unpleasant pinch.

It’s Lucy, one of Hanna’s many sisters-in-law, lowering her Nerf blaster and aiming a significant glance at the two flags hanging from my waistband. I pull the second-to-last flag and aim back at her, firing—but I miss. She dashes back into the woods.

Preston’s test run for the Nerf tag idea is absurdly successful. He sent an email to all the Hotts and all the Wilders asking if anyone could help us out by mocking up a small Nerf tag game. We were hoping to get at least six players, probably mostly kids.

Instead, the response was overwhelming. Five Wilder brothers, their wives and girlfriends, their sister Amanda and her husband, everyone’s kids, Quinn and his wife Sonya, Shane and his fiancée Ivy, all of Sonya’s coworkers, Ivy’s sister and her girlfriend—even the Wilder siblings’ mom Barb and her wife Geneva (who, yelling battle cries, silver hair flying, turned out to be the most badass competitor of all) played. Lucy’s mom, also a grand dame, played distance-tagger from an upstairs window of Hanna’s house, because her Achilles was hurting her and she didn’t think running was a good idea.

She tagged Preston down to one flag about ten minutes ago.

A flash of blue behind some nearby trees draws my attention.

It’s Preston.

“I see you,” I call, loading, taking aim, unleashing. Missing.

I haven’t landed a tag yet. Darts are apparently not my strong suit.

A dart flies from behind the trees, narrowly missing me. I’m in the open and he’s in the shadow of the woods. I’m a sitting duck. I make a run for it across a patch of grass, throwing myself into a small grove of bushes. Another dart whizzes by as I take cover.

And as I do? I see the flag. The big prize. The one I’m supposed to bring back to headquarters for my team.

I reach for it.

A dart comes from a totally unexpected direction and pings off my upper arm.

“Damn!”

Preston’s laughter comes from the same direction as the dart. He joins me, lifting the victory flag from where it’s dangling from a shrub. He pumps his fist victoriously, grinning ear to ear, one blue flag still hanging from his belt. His joy is little-boyish, contagious. It makes me absurdly happy. This is the same guy who dryly wished me luck when I told him we’d figure out how he could have fun again.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hey,” he says back.

“Your game is a big success.”

He grins like I’ve told him he won the Nobel Prize in Economics. “I was nervous,” he admits. “That it wouldn’t work. That it wouldn’t be fun. I’m new to this.”

The admission, and the blushing pride in his success, is so freaking cute. Preston Hott isadorable. I think of the guy I met my first day, the one who refastened his cuff links so my undignified behavior wouldn’t rub off on him. Or—that’s what I’d thought then. Maybe no one had given him permission to have fun in so long, he’d forgotten that he could.

“Preston,” I say. “That first day. When you walked in on me dancing?—”

“Oh, God,” he says, rubbing his forehead. “You broke my brain, Natalie. I was so tightly wound, and you were?—”

I don’t know how he’s going to finish that sentence.Too much?So over the top?

“So fucking hot. And then you grabbed my tie and—I had to get out of there before you saw how hard you made me.”

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