“Well, hey there!” a loud voice said before Rebecca could get out her next words.
Wes scowled at the conversation and the shrill interruption, but automatically turned toward the intruder. A vaguely familiar blonde was a few steps away, smiling wide and making a beeline for him.
What the hell?
She sidled up next to the table, her hand pressed to her chest like she was just so surprised and delighted. “Oh my gosh, I cannot believe you’re here. It’s like fate!”
Wes tried to place her but couldn’t land on anything. “Um…”
“I just put in a call with your boss to see if you were available for another party,” she went on. “She said she’d have to check and gave me some song and dance, but I told her we weren’t doing it unless it was Roman. We wouldn’t settle for anyone else. And now, here you are!”
Rebecca sent him a questioning look as all of Wes’s oh-fuck alarms went off.
It was Penis Hat.
He found his voice. “Excuse me, but I’m having dinner with—”
But the woman wasn’t listening to him. “So I have a friend who just got engaged, and she would love you. I mean who wouldn’t love a hot, shirtless guy cooking for them, right?” She did some sort of nudge-nudge, wink-wink pantomime. “But I was thinking a pool party. Could you do it poolside in a swimsuit? Maybe one of those Michael Phelps numbers. She would adore that.”
Wes closed his eyes, the fuck-my-life thunderstorm raining down upon him and his dignity draining off toward the gutters.
“Excuse me,” Rebecca said, her tone sharp as a meat cleaver. “I don’t know who you are or what exactly you’re going on about, but we’re in a private conversation, and I don’t remember you being invited. Do you mind?”
Penis Hat made a choked sound, and Wes’s eyes popped open.
Rebecca had cocked an eyebrow at the woman and was giving her a look that would make just about anyone get to their knees and apologize.
The woman’s lips puckered. “Well, I’m sorry. I didn’t see you there.”
“No, of course you didn’t because you’re too busy gawking at my friend and announcing his private business in a public place,” Rebecca said, lawyer voice in full effect. “Would you like me to get a bullhorn so you can talk even louder, or are you done falling over yourself and interrupting our dinner?”
Wes bit back a laugh. Well, damn, lawyer girl.
The woman bowed up like she’d accidentally sat on a penis hat, and her face paled. “I didn’t mean to—”
“I’m all booked up,” Wes said, cutting her off and peering at Rebecca. “For the next few months. You’ll have to find someone else.”
He could feel the woman looking at him, but Wes’s attention was still on the lawyer.
“Well, pardon me then,” the woman said tartly. “So sorry to bother you.”
Rebecca nodded as if to say, You should be. Now remove yourself from my line of sight.
Wes looked back to the woman and she stared at him, her eyes pleading for intervention, but he shrugged. She was on her own.
Penis Hat huffed and stalked off, muttering a few choice words as she went, her high heels sinking into the soft grass.
Rebecca finally looked Wes’s way, holding his gaze, ice and fire wrapped up in one prim package. She took a long sip of her drink, her expression as calm as could be. For some reason, that cool, above-it-all demeanor—along with her quick dismissal of the woman—made him a little hard.
She set her cup down. “I’m not sure I even want to know.”
He adjusted the front of his jeans beneath the table, trying to will away that unexpected but potent reaction to Rebecca and her suffer-no-fools attitude. “Excellent. Because I definitely do not want to tell.”
She tore off a piece of pita bread and dragged it through the hummus, her evaluating gaze still on him. He could almost hear the gears turning in her head, and the sound was deafening.
“Okay, I lied,” she said between bites. “I won’t be able to stop wondering what she was talking about, and that means you must tell me right now or you risk me going into full lawyerly interrogation mode. You have no shot against that. Spill, Michael Phelps.”
He cringed, and his unwelcome hard-on died a quick death. “It’s nothing. I did a private chef thing for a friend.”