“Book not any good?” Evie asked.
“Excuse me?” She tore her eyes from Will’s abs and tried to focus. Both of them were merely damp, meaning they’d been out of the pool for a while.
“You’re not reading it. You’re staring at it.”
“You seemed to be pretty far away,” Will added.
She looked at the book in her hands. “Oh. Yeah. Um…” She fumbled. “I was dozing a bit there. I didn’t sleep well last night.”
Will’s eyebrow cocked up and she realized where he’d gone with her statement. Ugh.
Evie, though, accepted her statement at face value. “Are you hungry, then? We’re going to order some take-out.”
“Sure.”
Evie went for the elevator while Gwen packed up her things, very aware Will was watching her.
“You were thinking pretty hard there. Come to any conclusions?”
Good Lord, was she that easy to read? Or maybe he wasn’t talking about that. She could have easily been thinking about a number of different problems in her life. Even the strictest tenets of etiquette didn’t require her to give him a complete answer, so she settled for one that would give him something to think about.
If he’d been thinking in that direction.
“Maybe I did.”
Since the day he’d brought Evie home, he’d never wished her gone. Not once. He may have briefly considered boarding school for her, but that was because he didn’t feel like a suitable person to raise a teenager, not because of her. She had her moments when he could cheerfully strangle her, but he wasn’t too proud to admit he adored the kid.
So he freely embraced the guilt that prodded at him when he wished Evie somewhere else tonight. Not gone, just not here in the room with him and Gwen. Her room would work just fine, but at nine on a Saturday night, he had no good reason to suggest she go there.
Even if he could come up with a good reason, he was hesitant to do so. Evie was having such a good time. So was he. Even Gwen had eventually relaxed and seemed to be enjoying herself. Take-out sandwiches and DVD movies, followed by Chinese take-out and now a game of Monopoly with no end in sight. He hadn’t been near his BlackBerry all day, and the upcoming meeting with the Japanese seemed a long way away. It had easily been the best Saturday he’d had in ages, and as soon as Evie went to bed, it was going to get a lot better. That much he was sure of.
Gwen might try to hide behind that Miss Behavior wall of appropriate politeness, but he knew it was starting to crumble. Last night’s kiss, the way her eyes had caressed him all day, the way he’d felt her shiver with desire against him in the pool today…the next step was inevitable. He knew it, and he was damn sure she knew it too.
So as much as he’d like to investigate that inevitability right this second, he could be patient and bide his time. He was content for the moment to relax against the sofa and nurse his beer while his sister beat them soundly at Monopoly.
Gwen sat across the game board from him, also on the floor, her bare feet with their bright red toes tucked underneath her. After her shower, she’d dressed in a pair of cutoffs and a white T-shirt, and her hair fell loose around her face. Without makeup, she looked even younger, and as she paid Evie for landing on Boardwalk, he wondered how old she was. At that moment, he realized he didn’t know all that much about her.
Evie, of course, probably knew Gwen’s entire life story by now; too bad he couldn’t ask her. He settled for something simple and innocuous.
“So, Gwen, how did you come to be Miss Behavior?”
Gwen cocked her head, seemingly surprised at the question. “Well, that’s kind of a long story.”
He looked over at Evie, who was busy counting her piles of money with glee. “I think we have time while Miss Moneybags plays in her ill-gotten gains.”
Evie stuck her tongue out at him. “You’re just a sore loser. I’m going for another soda. Anyone want anything?”
Gwen shook her head, then settled back against a chair. “Well, I moved to Dallas five years ago after Sarah got her job at Neiman Marcus. I’d finished protocol training in D.C., done an internship and needed to land somewhere. I don’t really have a hometown because we moved so much, and since my folks mentioned eventually retiring in Texas, this seemed like a good choice.”
“I knew you didn’t sound native.”
“Nope. But my dad grew up in Houston, does that count?”
He nodded. “So how’d you end up on a Web site?”
She chuckled. “Accidentally, I assure you. I never planned to do anything with teenagers. But when I got to Dallas, I needed a job. I started working with a friend of mine who did some deb training on the side, and it worked out pretty well. I made a name for myself doing that without really meaning to. ‘Miss Behavior’ was a nickname my deb class gave me a few years ago, and when one of those debs started the TeenSpace site, she called and asked if I wanted to be one of the columnists. The rest is history.”
“Sounds like you fell into the right job, though.”
“Maybe. But I can’t be Miss Behavior forever.”
“Sarah says Gwen wants to ditch the debs and go back to working with grown-ups.” Evie sat back in her place and eye-balled the stacks of money.
“Grown-ups?”
“Sarah needs to keep her mouth shut,” Gwen muttered.
“Sarah says Gwen’s going to bigger and better things one day, but she needs the debs right now because that’s who’s paying her rent,” Evie continued.
That reminded him. Her check was still in his briefcase.
“Thank you, Evie. That’s quite enough.”
Gwen’s carefully clipped tone made him laugh silently. He loved to watch Gwen wrap herself in politeness. Too bad he couldn’t prod her more often.
“Gwen speaks Japanese, you know.”
“Ev-ie!” Gwen looked ill at ease, but he didn’t know why.
“Well, you do. I didn’t know it was some kind of secret,” Evie grumbled.
“You’re right. It’s not a secret.” Gwen turned to him. “I’m not completely fluent, but I get by. I also speak German and a little French. No,” she added as Evie perked up and opened her mouth to say something. “I won’t conjugate those verbs for you. Madame Louise expects you to know them by Monday. Have you finished yet?”
Someone else might not have noticed the way Gwen subtly moved the topic away from herself, but Will did. And though he was more curious than ever to know more about her, he respected her desire for privacy—for the moment at least. Maybe it was some kind of lesson meant to teach Evie about polite conversation, and he shouldn’t undermine Gwen’s work to appease his own interest.
