Page 20 of Four Steps to the Perfect Fake Date

She smelled floral and feminine, and the urge to shake her gave way completely to the urge to wrap her up and make sure she was okay. Calvin resisted. How he could be at war with himself around this woman was a mystery. It’d been the same all those years ago. She’d been so smart, so determined to make her way in the world, and he’d been the loser who had to repeat his senior year. He was nothing compared to her—and she reminded him of it at every chance. Her nickname for him, Einstein, wasn’t a compliment.

But she’d taken a punch and a tackle that should’ve been aimed at him. She hid behind her books and her spreadsheets, then went and acted like a reckless lunatic, and Calvin couldn’t help his desire to find out which version of her was the real one.

He took a deep breath, and in a softer voice, he asked, “Are you hurt, Daphne?”

She blinked, as if startled by his tone. “No. No, I’m fine. I hit the ground and rolled. I’ve ruined another shirt, but I’m okay.” She nodded to the gash in the side of her shirt, where a sliver of skin was exposed.

Calvin stared at the curve of her waist through the rip while his mouth went dry; then he nodded. “Good,” he said, and stalked away.

Scanning the gathered crowd, Calvin noted that Jenna Deacon seemed to have left at some point during the ruckus. He hoped that was the last he’d see of her. One nightmare of a woman was more than enough, and if he had to choose between Jenna’s flirting and Daphne’s animosity, he’d choose Daphne every time. Whatever that said about him, he didn’t want to look at it too closely.

It took a few hours to get everything sorted out. By the time a tow truck had removed the pickup and the shopkeeper had begun boarding up the corner store window, statements had been taken and security footage had been acquired from every camera in the area. The mystery of who was at fault had been solved. The truck had run a red light and swerved into the old ladies’ lane when he turned. Bobby Troy was lucky that Greta, the driver, had reflexes that belied her age.

The culprit had been checked over and cleared by the paramedics, and he was cooling his temper in one of the holding cells.

Calvin headed back to the station to start on the paperwork.

He paused at his office door and swerved to keep walking toward the back of the main room. Through the narrow window in the interview room door, he saw that Daphne was back at work, squinting at her computer with papers stacked in neat piles all around her.

The other side of her. Studious, intelligent Daphne Davis, who fooled everyone into thinking she was boring.

He knocked and opened the door when she glanced up.

“How’s your grandmother?”

Daphne gave him a flat look. “Over the moon. She hasn’t had anything this exciting happen to her for years, she says. She’s fielding phone calls from half the island. Apparently someone convinced the shopkeeper to share his video footage, and it’s all over social media.”

Of course it was. “I’m glad no one was hurt.”

“Me too.”

He leaned against the doorjamb and nodded to her paperwork. “How’s it going?”

Eyes narrowing slightly, Daphne studied him for a beat. He wondered what it would take to get that suspicion out of her gaze. “Do you actually care, or are your eyes going to glaze over as soon as I start talking?”

He came around her desk to peek at her computer screen. It was covered in the tiny boxes of a spreadsheet, many of them filled in with colors and numbers that immediately made his head hurt. “My eyes’ll glaze over,” he admitted, and was rewarded with a sparkle in Daphne’s gaze as she tried to hide her smile.

It was a rush to glimpse that hidden expression on her face, a shot of adrenaline to his veins. Did she really think he hated her? Sure, they hadn’t gotten along in high school, but that was because Calvin was an angry kid who blamed everyone for his pain. She had everything he’d craved. Daphne had come from a loving family. She was smart and pretty and calm. She had college dreams and scholarships and afuture. In his teenage urges to destroy everything around him, he’d wanted to knock her off her high horse. It had been petty and wrong of him, he knew.

But he hadn’thatedher. He’d never hated her.

“Looks like you’re making progress,” he said, just to break the silence.

“It’s slow, but it’s going well,” she finally told him. “Nothing’s jumping out at me so far, other than your usual mismanagement of funds. I’m about to go through all the invoices for that extension that only got half-built out back. I walked through it this afternoon, and it looks like the contractor just picked up his tools in the middle of the job and walked off.”

“From what I hear, that’s exactly what happened, but you know how it is around here. Hard to get a straight answer through all the gossip.”

She put her hand on a stack of invoices and drummed her fingers, then narrowed her gaze at him. “Speaking of gossip. What was that about earlier?”

Calvin leaned on the edge of her desk, one foot on the ground, the other hiked up so his knee angled toward her. He crossed his arms. “What was what about?”

Daphne’s voice dropped to a breathy, seductive register as she fluttered her eyelashes at him. “‘Maybe I like a man in uniform’?”

The shot of lust that ran through Calvin’s body made him jerk back and drop his dangling foot to the floor. He cleared his throat and tried to hide his reaction with a glare. “Don’t, Cupcake.”

She laughed, and it was such a bright, pure sound that it did nothing to quell the heat in his blood. She leaned back in her chair and arched a brow at him. “I didn’t know you and Jenna Deacon had a thing.”

“We don’t. You know her?”

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