His eyes flickered in confusion before they dropped to their joined hands, as though surprised to see that he was still touching her. But he recovered quickly. “My turn to guess. This is going to be the one time out of ten that I fail, isn’t it?”
“Oh, I’ll go out with you again,” she said with a sassy little smile. “For work. The boss is insisting that we do at least five dates for this little charade.”
“Gee, I’m having a hard time containing my enthusiasm. You seem so enamored with me.”
Grace took a sip of her cocktail to avoid admitting that she just might be well on her way to being enamored. “So, Jake Malone. Tell me about yourself.”
“Thought you’d have it all figured out by now.”
“Oh, I do,” she replied. “But we’re supposed to be mimicking the real deal, remember? Your rules. Just pretend you’re interviewing me for the role of your bedmate or girlfriend.”
“The dress alone would have landed you the first one,” he said, taking a sip of his drink. “But your personality is making it a little hard to envision the second …”
“Gosh, I can’t wait to get that in writing. You know, after I write this article, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if women are lining up around the block to get a date with you so they can be constantly insulted.”
“And my male readers will be leaving twenties on the dresser when they hear about that dress.”
“Twenties, Malone? Really? Surely this is more of a triple-digit kind of dress.”
He smiled at that and rolled his shoulders, as though prepping to get his head in the game. “Okay, so you want real first-date chatter, is that it? Here we go … I was born and raised in Green Bay, Wisconsin, the only boy among four sisters, and you know what that means—”
“Gay?”
“Packers fan,” he continued, unperturbed. “And I suppose I was one of those pretentious, driven kids who knew what he wanted, even from a young age—”
“Herpes?”
Again he continued as though she hadn’t spoken. “My eighth-grade teacher is really the one to blame. A couple buddies and I broke into the school one Saturday with the intention of stealing the third-grade class’s hamster. We got caught, naturally, but instead of standard detention, we were assigned to random extracurriculars, which was the newspaper for me. I got hooked.”
S
he couldn’t keep herself from smiling. The story was kind of … cute. She could totally picture a mini Jake Malone, all messy black hair and curious eyes, running around with one of those old-school reporters’ spiral notebooks. “What was it exactly that hooked you?” Grace asked. “The student council elections? Science fair coverage?”
Jake smiled back. “Nah, I was banned from the science fairs after sixth grade when I took that exploding volcano trick a little too seriously. My writing beat back then was mostly sports. Although my junior year in high school I did get to interview the mayor. After that, I kind of branched out. The sky was the limit and all that.”
“Mmm-hmm, and at what point did you start researching for your riveting article in last month’s Oxford? ‘Five Little Words That Get Any Woman into Bed’?”
Jake gave an unrepentant grin. “I’ll have you know, I had four of those words figured out by the time I graduated from University of Florida with a journalism degree. The girls there made excellent research subjects. The fifth one is a more recent discovery, though.”
“Do tell.”
“You didn’t read the article?”
She lifted her brows. “Have you ever read one of my articles?”
“I should have. Maybe then I’d have known who you were,” he muttered.
“What’s the fifth word?” she prompted.
Jake leaned forward just slightly, not enough to touch her, but enough so that she was leaning in to hear whatever he was going to say. Really, the man was good at this. Good at women.
“Cheese plate,” he said.
Grace blinked. “Cheese plate?”
“I know, I know … technically, that’s two words. But ‘Six Little Words That Get Any Woman into Bed’ didn’t have quite the same ring for the headline, and since ‘cheese plate’ really just refers to one concept, I gave myself a free pass.”
Grace stared at him. “That’s your secret word? ‘Cheese plate’? Good Lord, no wonder your readers are writing angry letters.”