Madly (New York 2)

This might be the third time.

When he didn’t reply right away, she tugged at his sleeve. “Come on. What have you got to lose?”

He glanced at the phone still in his hand, thumbed it to sleep, and said, “Nothing, actually.”

Then he lowered himself into the chair next to her, slid his phone into his pocket, and stuck out his hand. “Winston Chamberlain.”

Allie glanced behind him. Her mother was fifteen feet away, six sheets to the wind, fumbling in her purse.

She extended her own hand. “I’m Allie Fredericks, and I need your help.”

He blinked. A real spy might have leaned forward and given her a conspiratorial smile, which would have conveniently removed the social discomfort of convincing a strange man to cover her while she extracted her mother from a bar and kidnapped her back to Wisconsin so she could make daisy-shaped butter mints for her anniversary party and pretend none of this had ever happened.

Allie didn’t have the luxury of caring that this man did not have the face of Harrison Ford wryly accepting a caper. Her mom had finished with her purse, taken three steps, and stopped to ask the bartender something.

“Listen, I know this is going to sound kind of crazy, but if you can just kind of bear with me, I think you’ll eventually decide it’s the good kind of crazy.”

“There’s a good kind of crazy?”

“If there’s not, people have been lying to me all my life.”

He leaned back, arms crossed. “I assume you have a proposal for me.”

She didn’t have a proposal. Why was he being so British and ridiculous? She had, like, twelve seconds to save her own ass.

“Sure. Are you ready to hear it?”

He waved his hand, a businessman’s conference room gesture. Oh my God. Dork. “Proceed.”

“Okay. So the thing is, there are two people down there at the end of the bar, and I followed them here. Any second now the woman is going to walk past this table to the bathroom. You have to make sure she doesn’t see me.”

Allie waited a beat. He lifted one eyebrow.

That was it.

Possibly he had some tiny bit of Harrison Ford in there.

“No questions so far?”

He spun his hand at her again. “Carry on.”

“Cool. So what I’m going to need you to do is lean in real close so I’m concealed behind your, um—like, so I’m sort of underneath you? And then if you could pretend to kiss me.”

One downside to letting her mouth run the show was that it said the most insane things, and then her brain had to hear them.

“Or, you know, whatever. If you don’t want to.”

She glanced at the bar. Her mother was coming. Allie grabbed Winston by his wet lapels and pulled him into her body. “I’ll owe you big-time.”

And then things got real weird.

He shifted, braced a hand on the table beside her, and suddenly he was right there—his dark eyes and his damp face and his warm breath, his body blocking out the light, the edge of the table pressing hard into her body.

“Like this?” He pitched his voice low. Three inches hummed between his lips and hers.

Maybe less than three inches.

“A little closer.” She couldn’t help it. Her mouth was too interested, and it had to know if he would do this, too.