The thought, however, was surprisingly comfortable. Even a little bit exciting. His thoughts were interrupted when Alice shifted and her eyes fluttered open. She blinked at him a few times. “Adam? What are you doing here?”
Had she forgotten their date? She must still be half asleep. Adam leaned against the railing and tried to hide his marriage-induced nervousness.
“Oh.” She didn’t move.
“Are you ready to go downstairs?” This love business was for the birds. He’d never felt nearly this pathetic when picking up a girl before. Of course, they’d never looked at him the way Alice was staring at him now, either. “I’m here to collect you for dinner.”
Alice uncurled herself from her seat and stood up, shaking her legs to get the sleep out of them. “Um… yeah. Hold on. I wasn’t entirely expecting…” She wandered into the house, leaving a confused Adam to wait for her.
He was still trying to figure out what she wasn’t expecting when she came back out, her hair pulled back into a low ponytail. He smiled a little more confidently and gestured to the steps. “Dinner awaits, milady.” She didn’t look at him before descending.
Dinner was… strange. Alice was politeness personified. She remarked on the flowers, and ate everything with painstaking care. He half wondered if she was counting the number of times she chewed each bite. She had even said it was one of the best chicken dishes she’d ever eaten. When she’d politely asked for the recipe he’d said something vague, and entirely truthful, about not having permission to give it out.
But when she politely placed her napkin on the table and politely thanked him for a lovely dinner, he’d had enough. “All right, Miss Riverton,” he said crisply, thinking that he could play the nice game just as well as she could. “Would you like to tell me what’s going on?”
Alice’s eyes narrowed. “Nothing’s going on, Mr. Wentworth. I was just trying to be–”
“Polite. I know. You could win awards for your current level of polite.” Man, he was getting sick of that word. He considered the legality of banning if from public speech in the mall.
Alice’s expression turned frosty. “Maybe I should just go upstairs. Thank you again, Mr. Wentworth.”
That last ‘Mr. Wentworth’ was all it took to make Adam explode. “What’s wrong with you?” he snapped, rising to his feet when she did. “Just five days ago we were speaking like civilized, rational human beings, and now, without warning, you’ve turned into a Stepford!”
“You should have ‘stepford’ down pat,” she cried. “And just five days ago we were not speaking like rational human beings. You were trying to kiss me! And then you went and bought all those women lunch!”
“What?” Adam didn’t mean to yell that out but he was so exasperated he couldn’t help it. “So I bought a bunch of women lunch. It’s not like I’m going to marry all of them!”
Alice stared at him disbelievingly. Adam stared back until the conversation he’d had with Kyle, about this very subject, made his eyes lose focus. What had Kyle said again? Every time you purchase a woman a meal, she feels justified in calling it a date.
Crap. Crap, crap, crap. Wait a minute… Is she jealous?
A grin crept across his face no matter how hard he tried to stop it. When she saw it, Alice let out an infuriated noise and pushed her chair back so hard it fell on the floor.
“Hey, calm down,” Adam said, almost tripping over his own feet to get to her side before she could escape. “I wasn’t dating those girls. It wasn’t what it looked like. At all.”
Alice leaned over and picked up her chair. When she straightened up again her face was calm. “You know, Adam, I don’t care what you do. But I have not been placed on Earth to be your–”
“Lunch is the easiest time to interview people,” Adam blurted out.
Her mouth was still open, but she blinked a few times before any sound came out. “Excuse me?”
Adam took a deep breath. “One of my assignments for work is to talk to an employee from each of the stores,” he told her, hoping she wouldn’t ask him questions he couldn’t answer. “It seems that most shop owners are sending me their daughters. Or nieces. Or single second cousins once removed.” And in some cases wives, but that thought made him so fearful that he couldn’t voice it.
“And I supposed male shop owners are too busy to come and talk to you themselves.”
He had nothing to say to that.
“So when are you going to interview someone from The Glass Slipper?”
“I already did, last week.”
Adam cursed himself as soon as the words were out of his mouth. They floated in the air between them and he watched in resignation as Alice’s eyes widened and then narrowed.
“Last week,” she said slowly. “You were interviewing me during our soup dinner, weren’t you.” It wasn’t a question.
Wincing, Adam sat down hard in Alice’s chair. “I didn’t mean to at first,” he said, and rubbed his face. “I wanted to find out more about you and the logical place to start was work. Before I knew it the questions I’d compiled for my interviews were coming out. And it was much more pleasant to talk to you than to have to take Mimi or Brittany out to lunch.” He grimaced.
Alice looked at a spot on the wall over his shoulder. “So how’d I do?”
Adam rested his elbows on his knees and buried his face in his hands. “Brilliantly.”
The room was quiet for so long that Adam began to think Alice had left. But when he raised his face, she was still standing there, staring at him with a quizzical look.
“Why–” She stopped and shook her head.
“I can’t tell you,” he said wearily. “I promised my firstborn child that no one would know before my dad had a chance to make his grand announcement.”
All the fight seemed to drain out of Alice. “Please tell me you don’t actually have a firstborn child hidden away somewhere.”
He laughed weakly. “No. And for the record, I’m not dating any of those girls you saw me with in the food court. I’m too busy chasing you to have time for anyone else.”
Alice blushed. “Flattery will not make me kiss you, Adam.”
Well, there went that idea. “How about flowers and chocolates?”
She shook her head, but she smiled her first genuine smile of the evening. “Nice try.” She gathered up her dirty dishes before Adam could stop her and went into the kitchen. When she re-emerged, her face was composed, but her eyes were laughing at him. “Your kitchen is remarkably clean for a man who’s just cooked a gourmet meal,” she said, and leaned down to brush her finger along his cheekbone. “The flour is a nice touch, by the way. You’ll have to tell your chef that I appreciated all her hard work.”
Adam couldn’t find it in himself to pretend he’d cooked. Not with her finger still touching his skin. “I will,” he promised, and tried to get his wits together when her hand dropped to her side. “Shall we go into the family room? I think we need a change of scenery.”
They sat on the couch, and Alice only raised her eyebrows at him when he reached over and placed her feet on his legs. He smiled rakishly at her and shrugged. “I don’t have a whole lot of experience in chasing girls,” he confided, running a finger up the inside of her foot and laughing to himself when it twitched. “You’ll have to tell me when I mess up.”
“I’m not sure which part of that statement to respond to first,” she said drily, but rested her head against the pillows of the couch and smiled faintly.
So far, so good, Adam thought. He’d have to phrase his next question very carefully. “How are things going at the shop? I haven’t seen you around in a few days.”
As soon as Alice tensed, he knew he’d said something wrong. “Everything’s fine,” she said calmly. If he hadn’t been holding her foot, he would never have guessed that she was upset. “I’ve just been a little busy, that’s all.”
“Anything I can do to help?”
Her eyes opened, and for a second Adam was sure she w
as going to tell him what was bothering her. “Nope. But thanks for asking.”
They gazed at each other for a long second before Adam dropped his eyes in defeat. “No problem. But you know I’m here if you need anything. Anything at all.”
Alice smiled at him. “Are you sure you have no practice in chasing girls?”
As he was walking down her stairs later that evening, Adam couldn’t help but feel a little encouraged. Alice had given him all sorts of signals tonight, and he was very, very good at reading girls’ signals. She hadn’t told him that he was in over his head, she hadn’t told him to get lost, and she definitely hadn’t told him to take his lovesick heart and feed it to the seagulls.
Instead, she’d been jealous.
Now, jealousy was not the sort of emotion he wanted Alice to feel. After all, there was no contest between Alice and any woman in existence. But it did occur to him that behind every instance of jealousy lurked another emotion.
He wasn’t going to call it love. At least, not until he could convince Alice Riverton that falling in love with him was the best thing that could ever happen to him… to her. And he had a whopping seven weeks to do it in.
It was time to get serious.
Chapter Eleven
Alice stared out the front window of the Glass Slipper at nothing in particular and twirled a pen around in her fingers. It was Monday afternoon, Whitney was at lunch, and for once the hordes of women who’d flocked into her shop looking for footwear, had left her mercifully alone.
So, instead of doing something productive from Mimi’s unproductive, hateful list like she should have been doing, Alice sat and let her mind replay her dinner with Adam. Again.
She knew she should stop thinking about it. After all, she was a grown woman, not a lovesick teenager, and therefore should know better. But for some reason she kept hearing him say, “I’m too busy chasing you to have time for anyone else.” The sentence was ridiculously addicting.
“There you are.” Alice flushed guiltily when she heard Adam’s voice. There’s nothing like the object of your daydreams magically appearing in front of you, she thought wryly, especially when you were just thinking about him. He sauntered over to the cash register, both hands clasped behind his back, looking very pleased with himself.
“I’ve been here every day,” she told him tartly, grinning to wipe the sting from her voice. “You can’t have been looking for me all that hard.”
Adam halted in front of the cash register. His expression had turned so intense Alice started to think that maybe she’d said something wrong. “Oh, I’ve been looking all right, Miss Riverton,” he said softly. “I’m just finding that it’s hard to chase someone who refuses to cooperate with the plan.”
“Maybe you should tell me what the plan is and then I’ll decide whether I want to cooperate with it or not.”
Adam stood there for a second and stared at her before a slow smile crossed his face. “I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said finally, a sudden room-lighting smile flashing on his face. “After all, the anticipation of the unknown is almost more enjoyable than knowing what’s coming next.”
With that, he withdrew his hands from behind his back and produced a small bundle of red hand-tied tulips. “To replace the ones I inadvertently murdered.”
And then he was brushing past a wide-eyed Whitney, who was lingering awkwardly in the doorway, and was out of the shop, whistling something that sounded suspiciously like, “A Kiss to Build a Dream On.”
“I had no idea Adam listened to your flavor of music,” Whitney said, her tone not as surprised as Alice might have expected. “What was he doing here?”
For the life of her, Alice couldn’t remember. Had he even said? Then her fingers tightened around the flowers, and she lifted them to her face. She closed her eyes as she drank in their familiar fragrance.
Whitney regarded her with ill-disguised amusement. “I see,” she said slowly. “It would appear that Adam has come a-courtin’.”
A group of shoppers burst through the door with impeccable timing. The next thing Alice knew, elderly women, oohing and aahing over her flowers, surrounded her. “Honey, where did you get those from?” asked a particularly shrewd lady with half-moon spectacles wobbling on the end of her nose.
Alice sighed and gave her flowers to Whitney, who had magically produced a vase that she didn’t know they had. “They’re from a friend, Mrs. Mims,” she said with finality. She ignored the look Whitney gave her as she started straightening a display table. “Are you ladies looking for anything in particular?”
The rest of the afternoon flew by in a blur of shoes, organizational tools, and Whitney’s questioning looks, which Alice tried studiously to avoid. It was almost a relief when Lewis came by to pick Whitney up, leaving Alice alone in the shop to make her way slowly through Mimi’s long list.
It took a long time that night to finish the work she’d set for herself, mostly because she kept glancing at her tulips and losing her place in her alphabetizing. She’d sigh and turn back to her task only to find her eyes drifting once again to the vase that she’d mistakenly perched on the shelf in front of her. She finally gave up in disgust, threw her list under the cash register, and left, not sure if she should be irritated or sickened by her inability to use her brain.
She did, however, grab the flowers on her way out the door. She was bone tired when she trudged up the stairs to her apartment. Whitney was waiting for her outside, swinging slowly back and forth, a mug of hot chocolate in her hands, to ward off the chill.
“I’ve lived here my entire life,” she said wryly as Alice dropped unceremoniously next to her, “and I still think it’s strange that we drink stuff like this to keep us warm in June.” She sipped from her mug and then glanced at Alice speculatively. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on between you and Adam or am I going to have to torture the information out of you?”
Alice kicked off her shoes and leaned even further back into the swing. “It’s kind of late for a heart-to-heart, don’t you think?” she asked, trying not to yawn.
“If you were home earlier I wouldn’t have to resort to this.” Whitney peered at her over the rim of her cup. “What exactly is it that’s keeping you at work so late, anyway?”
Maybe having a roommate wasn’t the best idea she’d ever had, Alice thought. “Just clearing out the storage room,” she said. She wished she were more awake; maybe then her excuses would sound more believable.
Whitney snorted into her hot chocolate. “If that room got any more organized it’d be translated,” she muttered. “What else do you still have to do?”
Shrugging, Alice closed her eyes. “I don’t really know.”
“Oh.” Whitney stared out over the backyard, her expression pensive. “Maybe you could show me what you’re doing. I’d like to help.”
“Sure,” Alice said drowsily. Her mouth was two and a half seconds ahead of her brain, but when she realized what she’d said, she couldn’t find the energy to feel uneasy. “But aren’t you going to be too busy attending school to worry about things in the shop? I don’t want to get in the way of your studies.”
“I want to help.”
Alice shrugged and decided she’d figure it out in the morning. “Okay. Maybe once all the excitement over this festival thing dies down and business goes back to normal.”
Whitney nodded. “Okay.”
They sat there on the dark porch. The only sounds were the creaking of the swing and the muffled singing coming from the downstairs apartment, which sounded like Peggy Lee. Maybe, Alice thought, she was influencing Adam’s music more than she realized. The idea made her smile to herself.
“So, what’s going on with you and Adam?”
That simple statement woke Alice up more than their entire conversation about Mimi’s list had. “Nothing’s going on,” she said as her fingers unknowingly clutched tighter around the vase.
Alice could almost hear Whitney’s eyes roll. “I’m not stupid, you kn
ow,” Whitney told her, sounding exasperated. “He obviously likes you. Why are you being so standoffish?”
“I’m not–”
“Yes, you are!” Whitney cried, surprising Alice with both the interruption and the volume. “Are you blind? The man’s gorgeous, kind, charming, stable, and straight. And he happens to be head over heels for you. What’s not to like? Are you secretly seeing someone that I haven’t noticed?”
“No,” Alice snapped back. “And for your information, I like Adam. A lot. Too much for my own good, probably.”
“Then I don’t get it.”
Sighing, Alice leaned down to place the flowers on the deck. When she sat back up she turned to face Whitney. “Do you know how long he’s going to be here?”
Whitney shook her head slowly.
“Neither do I. That’s why I’m so… How did you put it?… Standoffish.”
By the end of the sentence Alice’s voice was defeated, even to her own ears, and Whitney leaned over to put her arm around Alice’s shoulders. “You’re not too keen on the whole long-distance relationship thing.”
Alice shrugged and rested her head on Whitney’s shoulder. “I can’t leave the shop,” she said quietly. “It’s all I have left of my mother. And I can’t really see Adam settling down here long-term just because he happens to fancy a girl that works at one of his many properties.”
Whitney’s arm tightened around Alice, and she laughed quietly. “I wouldn’t be so sure about that if I were you,” she said. “Adam seems pretty smitten.”
“For now, maybe.”
They were quiet for a long time, and Alice let Whitney propel the swing for a few minutes. “I guess I’m pushing him away because the more time we spend together, the more I realize how easily I could fall in love with him,” she finally said with a sigh.
“That’s a moot point, because I think you already have.”
Alice closed her eyes. Deep down, she knew Whitney was right. “You’re probably right,” she admitted so quietly that she almost couldn’t hear herself.
Alice in Glass Slippers Page 22