Page 45 of Fangirl Down

Very briefly, his attention dropped to her thighs. “Do you?”

A bead of sweat trickled down her spine. “Good thing you’re not mic’d up right now.”

He hummed in his throat. “What do you want in exchange for me taking par on this hole? The suggestion has to come from you.”

“For decorum’s sake? I’m not sure that word means what you think it means.”

Wells let a beat pass. “I think I like flirting with you. I think you want to flirt back.” His expression was serious when he looked down at her. “And as long as you know your job is safe and I would literally cut off my own legs before wielding my power over you, maybe we need to just fuckingflirt, belle.”

How did he manage to make the word “flirt” sound like an epithet? “That isn’t what you said on Wednesday night.”

“Now I’m qualifying what I said. As long as you’re the one initiating...”

“The flirting?”

“And you know there’s no pressure at all—”

“I do. I know that.”

“Then we fucking flirt.” He squinted out at the fairway. “Name the terms of your bet.”

What washappeninghere? They were in the middle of a golf tournament laying down ground rules forflirting? How could she be having so much fun while being completely and totally caught off guard? Truthfully, though, she believed Wells when he said there was no pressure, because she felt none. He would never use his position to do anything that made her uncomfortable. Was her intuition enough of an excuse to take a tiny step forward? Safe enough to pose the mother of all bets?

His eyes challenged her to do just that, but there was reassurance there, too.

Josephine filled her lungs for courage. “If you par this hole...” She craned her neck to give his booty the tiniest peek, but couldn’t bring herself to say the words. “Um.”

Slowly, Wells’s mouth edged up into a grin. “You want a picture of me dropping trou?”

And to think, she’d woken up this morning believing she led a mostly normal life. “I’m not sure there is any point in denying that I like your butt after you overheard my phone call last night.”

“Juicy.” He winked at her. “You called it juicy.”

Josephine closed her eyes and released a withering sound. “Just play the shot, you clown.”

Wells laughed.

Helaughed.

Josephine’s legs almost gave out. Her eyes shot open, hoping to catch the tail end of his laughing face, but he was already back to concentrating on the shot he was about to take, stepping right to left and examining the angle, feeling the wind.

His swing followed through, without the hesitancy he’d developed over the last two years, and the ball dropped down on the left side of the fairway. A smattering of applause rippled through the crowd assembled behind them.

Wells handed her the driver. “Good call, belle.”

Josephine might have spent the rest of the morning driven to distraction by the fact that she’d just won a bet that guaranteed her a personal snapshot of Wells’srear end, but she was too transfixed by the glimpse she was getting of the old Wells. He consulted with her before every shot, both of them poring over yardage books and hunkering down side by side to compare notes on the angle of the green. He almost seemed to be having... fun.

But all that progress came to a screeching halt on the eighth hole.

Josephine and Wells were shoulder to shoulder, waiting for Tagaloa to take his putt, when Buck Lee appeared on the sidelines. He was just one face among the crowd, but his arrival was like a bucket of cold water tossed on Wells. His expression slowly grew shuttered, his movements less natural.

In no time, he’d dropped two spots on the leaderboard.

“Hey. It was a tricky slope. Shake it off.”

When he didn’t bother to respond, Josephine’s stomach sank.

The next hole went worse.

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