Page 41 of Not That Complicated

I gave her a look.

“Dunno why you can’t see it,” she said. “You being an artist and all.”

“Graphic designer,” I corrected. She was as bad as Giselle.

“Whatever. You work with colour, don’tcha?” Amalie shoved up and off the counter, and went to slap the machine, which was gagging dramatically on an ice cube. “Why d’you ask? You looking for compliments? You’ve got a nice arse, too.”

I blushed. She’d bellowed it over the death rattle of the ice machine. Behind me, a couple of people laughed.

“Oh,” she said, voice unnecessarily loud now that she’d turned the machine off. She’d spotted the phone. She banged the frappe down in front of me. “Dating profile, is it?” She winked, gave the whipped cream canister a showy shake and squirted an obscene amount through the hole in my frappe cup.

I felt eyes boring into the back of my head. “Um. Yes.”

“Want anything else?” Amalie said. “Biscuit? A blondie brownie? Got some fresh out of the oven.”

“Nope. Blondie brownies are spawned from the same hell as white chocolate and I would rather eat sand. Besides, I have to go. I have a meeting.”

“Right. That’ll be three pound seventy-five. And if you need any help with the profile, you let me know. I’m great at that shit. Marketing degree,” she said with a sigh.

“I don’t—”

“Bring your dates here,” she said. “Support your local coffee shop. Fuck Starbucks.”

“Absolutely,” I said, ignoring the cranked-up intensity of attention on the back of my neck.

“Eyes and arse,” she reminded me, tapping the counter with an authoritative forefinger. I was released from my humiliation when she waved me along and said to the person in the queue behind, “What d’you want?”

I knew better than to look at Adam, but I did it anyway.

Oh. He wasn’t paying me any attention after all. He was too busy soul-gazing with his muscular buddy to notice anyone else.

Mrs Hughes was sitting at a table behind Adam. Dougal was tucked under her chair, up to the whiskers in his weekly puppuccino (warm frothy milk). She gave me two thumbs up.

I returned it, and headed home.

Eyes and arse were listed as my best features, and I was officially doing this.

Two days later, I had a date.

With Detective Nash.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“Is this legal, Detective Nash?” I asked, flipping a hand between us. We were at The Lion. He’d taken my order and come back with a glass of wine for me and a Guinness for him.

“Call me Liam,” he said. “And is what legal?” He slid onto the chair opposite me, kicked out his long legs, and drank damn near half his pint in one long pull.

I felt my eyes go wide.

He winked over the rim of his glass.

Was I...was I into it?

Nash licked the foam off his upper lip.

I flashed back to Adam, sitting at my kitchen table at one a.m. with a stupid milk moustache, telling me to come over there and kiss it off.

I was into it, I told myself firmly.Itbeing Liam Nash, the thirtysomething, rugby-playing, mountain-biking, rugged man who asked me on a date.

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