He exhaled.
I was jokingly expressing the fact that you’re mind-blowingly hot. “So, lunch. Flirting. Anything else? Adorable selfies, et cetera?”
“Fuck, no. You sound like my niece. Fatima told me social media crazes are a flash in the pan, and if we want to make the most of it we should consider starting a YouTube channel.” His disgust practically dripped from the words.
“And you said?”
“Absolutely fucking not.”
Dani’s lips had been twitching as she asked the question; now she laughed outright. “Of course you did.” If the words sounded a little too fond and familiar, oh, well. It was the middle of the night and he was being unforgivably cute. “Your niece is clearly a smart girl.” And the eucalyptus by Dani’s window, for freedom and prosperity, was looking a little parched. She headed to the kitchenette to get it some water, her feet padding against the floorboards.
“Yeah, Fatima’s smart. You teach her, you know.”
“I do?” Dani frowned as she filled her little watering can, then remembered a new student with huge, dark eyes. “Oh. Fatima Ansari. Of course you’re related. She looks just like you.”
A slight silence as Dani went to water the plant. Then, a moment before it got awkward, Zaf said quietly, “Nah. She looks like her dad.”
“Your brother, is he?”
“Mm-hmm.” Zaf’s tone went from distant and distracted to light and teasing so fast Dani felt slightly whiplashed. “She thinks you’re sophisticated. That’s what she said to me. Everything Dani does is so sophisticated.”
“Poor, deluded girl.”
“Ain’t she just.” Sweet exasperation crept into his tone, a gleaming thread that said, I know what a chaos demon you are, and I think it’s great.
Dani tried not to beam in response. That would be ridiculous. She watered her eucalyptus, put down her can, heard the beep of her five-minute timer, and realized with a jolt that her break had vanished like smoke.
“Oh,” she said, “I have to—it’s—”
“Five minutes. I know.” But there was no irritation in Zaf’s voice, no resentment. He was probably relieved to know she’d get off the phone now and let him sleep.
She, surprisingly, wasn’t relieved at all. In fact, the thought of putting down the phone made her feel slightly sad and deflated. For a moment, something in her leaned toward him like a cooped-up plant growing desperately toward the sun, and—
And good Lord, she must be exhausted. Dani shook her head, frowned, and considered going to bed earlier than planned.
“My lunch break starts at twelve thirty tomorrow,” Zaf said, oblivious to her spiraling thoughts. “That work for you?”
“I think so. I’ll text you if anything changes. Otherwise . . . meet you at the food court?”
“All right,” he said. “Goodnight, Danika.”
“Go to sleep!”
He grunted and hung up.
Only when he was gone did Dani realize she’d barely tried to seduce him at all.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Somehow, in the whirlwind of setting up this fake relationship, Zaf had managed to forget that he was a shitty actor and a truly abysmal liar. That fact came back to him like a concrete boomerang on Thursday afternoon, when he saw Danika walking toward him in the food court and realized he had absolutely no idea how to greet her.
After a second of mental flailing, Zaf cleared his throat, waved awkwardly, and said, “Hi, er, babe.”
Babe? Babe? He was 99 percent sure his lips had never formed that fucking word in his entire fucking life. And was it just him, or was every pair of eyes in this food court suddenly pinned to his blushing face?
Before he could weigh the odds of extreme social media stalkerism versus paranoia, Dani reached him with a laughing smile and dancing eyes. “Hello, handsome.”
He short-circuited, just a little bit.
Then she rose up on her toes, pressed her hands against his chest, and kissed his cheek. Holy fuck, she smelled like honey. He wanted to bite her.
In his ear, she whispered, “Am I wrong, or is everyone watching us?”
“I knew it.”
“Shh. Noodles, conversation, a little light hand-holding. Let’s not make this too difficult.”
“Okay,” he managed, but her hands were still on his chest and he was concentrating on not getting hard, because that would be extremely embarrassing on several thousand levels.
“Zaf?”
“Yeah?”
“Try to look more like yourself and less like seven guilty toddlers standing on each other’s shoulders in a security uniform.”
A few slow blinks, and his brain started processing normally again. “That . . . does not make a lick of sense.”
“Well done for noticing,” she said, and patted him soothingly. “Come on, then. I’m starved.” Apparently, she’d decided to take charge of this whole thing, which he was absolutely okay with. If you had to stumble your way through a fake relationship with a woman you were actually crushing on, that woman being inhumanly calm and scarily smart and a little bit bossy made things a thousand times easier.
But Zaf wasn’t supposed to be listing all of Danika’s excellent qualities. In fact, he was supposed to be ignoring them, and also her smile, and also her arse, which looked excellent in today’s floaty, star-printed dress-robe thingy. Not that he was looking. Behave.
They headed straight toward a Thai food truck, where Dani told the old guy behind the counter, “Good afternoon! Hot tofu box, double veg, please.”
“Size?”
“Large.” To Zaf, she added, “Is there any other size?”
He bit the inside of his cheek to fight a smile. “Not if you’re smart. You like tofu?” Was unnecessary interest in someone’s food preferences a friend thing, or a sneaky crush thing? The lines were already blurring like smudged paint. Zaf was mentally compiling a list of curries he knew how to cook that might work with tofu—not that he’d ever cook for Danika. That would definitely be a crush thing.
“It’s good,” she said. “Try it.” So he ordered the same, because of course he did. Then Dani added, “And some chips, please. Wait, Zaf, do you want chips?”
He shrugged. “I can share yours if you—”
“Nope. Two lots of chips. Thank
