Page 23 of Sleeping with Her Enemy (49th Floor 2)

“Well, okay, if neither of you is going to budge, I’ll resort to Dax. Dax, you want to go to a Blue Jays game with me?”

Somewhere in his brain, he knew that Amy was a Toronto Blue Jays fan, and she was wearing a tank top branded with their logo to prove it. He squinted at her. And little blue jay earrings. Damn. “Excuse me?” was all he could manage.

“Jack’s making me take two weeks off, so I’ve been forced to be a lady of leisure, and it’s driving me bonkers. I’m going to a game today, and I’m trying to rustle up a date.”

“Hey, that’s not true!” Jack protested. “I just said you could come back Monday.”

Amy smirked. “Right. One week off. Jack needs me for a new deal we have in the works, otherwise he wouldn’t have even let me in the door today.” Then she grinned at Jack. “You only love me for my crack real estate negotiating skills.”

“Damn straight!” Jack said. “And you’d better thank your lucky stars, because if we didn’t have this deal with McQuade going down, I would be making you take another week off.”

“McQuade the golf course guy?” Dax asked.

Jack nodded. “You know that crappy old course in Scarborough? He’s closing it. We’re trying to get him to sell us the land.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

Jack shrugged. “I don’t know. Something. It’s not out in the boonies like it was when it opened. It’s surrounded by city now, so it’s prime for developing.”

“Anyway,” Amy said, pitching her voice over them. “I am, at this moment, on forced vacation, and I have two tickets to the 2:05 Jays versus Yankees game, and I can’t convince either of these two workaholics to come with me.”

“You all forget that I don’t actually work here,” Cassie said. “I’m just here having lunch. I have another job.” It was true. She was an analyst at a nearby bank.

“I know, I know.” Amy mock-scowled at Jack. “And you’re too busy plotting to pave over the world.” She sat up straight and pointed melodramatically at Dax with both hands. “Sometimes a girl has to settle for her third choice. What do you say?”

“I can’t,” he started, casting around for a reason that didn’t sound lame. “Even if I wasn’t slammed with work, I don’t really do third-choice duty.” He could feel himself falling into that old sparring pattern with her, which, after all that had happened, was both strange and familiar.

“Oh, right,” she said, “I forget that you have women lining up for the honor of your company. Silly me.”

“Welcome to the Amy and Dax show,” Jack said. “You guys should start charging for tickets.”

“You’re right,” she said to Jack as she popped up from the sofa. “This is stupid. I’ll go hit up the Boy Geniuses, see if one of them will come.”

“No.” He must have spoken a little too vehemently because all eyes swung to him. It was just that he was imagining the lust-addled programmers falling all over themselves when she arrived seeking company. They would probably devise some sort of mock medieval tournament to decide who got the honor of taking her to the game. “I can’t spare any of them right now,” he lied. “We’ve got a huge project under way.”

“So that’s why I just saw Spencer in the kitchen building a Lego Death Star?” Cassie teased.

Caught out, Dax sighed. “I’ll go. Just give me a sec to go back to the office and close down.”

“Because you’re not needed for this huge project,” Cassie said.

He shot her an irritated look. She was usually so good-natured. Why was she busting his ass today?

Amy leaped to her feet, saving him from having to respond to Cassie’s barb. “Okay! But hurry. I don’t want to miss the national anthem.”

…

“So what’s with the national anthem?” Dax asked an hour later, when they slid into their seats just in time for the opening strains of O Canada.

Amy shushed him and paid attention as a middle school choir sang. Oh, it got her every time, the start of a ball game. The anthem, the anticipation, the sense that anything was possible—even if the Jays were playing the dreaded Yankees and would almost certainly get their asses handed to them.

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