“Where’s your man?”
She glared at Philipe. “I do not have a man.”
He unleashed his shit-eating face. “Sure you do. Mr. Blond with the shoulders, who asks about you every time I pass the family room.”
Every time? When he wouldn’t glance over his shoulder if she passed? “Be quiet. I happen to know him.”
“Bet you do.”
“Anyway, Wendy knows him better. She’s his landlord.”
“Uh-huh.” Phillips ticked off the boxes on Baby Washington’s CPAP checklist. “But is he the lord of your nether realms?”
She closed her eyes and shook her head. “You are so juvenile.”
“Can’t help it. I’m just a kid, compared to you.”
“Keep it up. See if you ever make it out of your twenties.”
He pointed at her. “Now that, boss, is a threat. You’re not supposed to do that.”
She pointed right back. “Stop calling Gabe my man, or you’ll hear what a real threat sounds like.”
He leaned over Baby Washington’s incubator and whispered, “Don’t you soak up the boss’s negativity, super star. She’s not as good at fighting as you are, so she has to resort to threats to prove her strength. Check how sturdy your heart rate is already. Boss just dreams of being as steady as you.”
Loudest, clearest whisper in the world. That was Philipe’s superpower. That, and his preternatural ability to head off BPD in their IRDS babies. The second superpower outranked the first, no matter how knowing Philipe’s smirk.
She headed in search of coffee, and not because doing so would send her past the room where Gabe had his paints and tarps and pallets and stencils and brushes and all that other paraphernalia spread everywhere. His back would be towards her, anyway, so it’s not like she was hoping to catch his eye and talk.
If he’d wanted her to have his number, he’d have passed it along. If he’d wanted to talk to her, he’d have picked up the phone. She’d considered he could have missed the note she’d left on his kitchen counter, but only as long as it took to blink honesty back into her brain. Whatever his problem with her was—not the sex, she knew they were of like minds about the sex—finding her and sorting it out was nowhere on his priority list.
She’d resisted leaving his loft that night, but it was a case no one else could tend. Wendy dug and dug at her, but she admitted nothing, and days into weeks later, had abandoned the idea of the man as anything but a one-night stand. Fair enough. They’d never claimed otherwise, and Chloe wasn’t inclined to go begging.
When he showed up to start work in the family room, she’d lingered, just the once, to see if they had anything to say. One searing look, the heat all in his eyes and nowhere near his smile, and no words. She got the message, so why he said her name to Philipe, she could not imagine.
The mural looked good. So far. He might make any number of odd choices as he filled in the rough outlines. No business of hers if the end result was off-putting. The committee picked him, fair enough, and she had no qualms about having told them he was more than talented enough to pull it off. He was.
She walked on by. He didn’t need her to tell him she’d supported his bid.