LITMIR.BIZ

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more than get him out of his designer duds and into her bed.

      You can take the girl out of Oklahoma, Shandi, but Oklahoma stays forever in the girl.

      “Yes, Daddy,” she grumbled under her breath. “I hear you loud and clear.”

      “Talking to yourself again?” Evan asked.

      Her head bobbed with the motion of his hands when he kneaded the base of her skull. “Thinking about you and April.”

      “Funny. I could’ve sworn you were calling me Daddy.”

      She couldn’t help but grin. “If I were going to call anyone Daddy, it would be this guy tonight who spent most of my shift sitting at the bar.”

      “Hmm. A sugar daddy with one foot on a banana peel and one foot in the grave?”

      Shandi swung around and swatted Evan’s shoulder. “Hey, that’s so not funny.”

      He shifted to face her, one wrist draped over one raised knee as he sat. “No, but you and I are in the same broke-as-a-beggar boat.” He grinned, his smile bright in the room’s low light. “Why do you think I’m dating April?”

      “If you say for her money, I’m going to hit you again, buddy.” Shandi did her best schoolteacher finger shake. “Besides, you’re not exactly a pauper.”

      “My grandmother’s not a pauper, you mean. I’m poorer than dirt.”

      And Shandi knew that really he was. That his grandmother let him—and by association let her—live rent-free in this, one of several apartments she owned in the city. As long as he paid his own way through school.

      And as long as he didn’t live with April in sin.

      No grandson of Ellen Harcourt’s was going to take up with a girl who’d never had to work for a thing in her life.

      “Do you think it matters?” Shandi asked him. “Being attracted to someone totally out of your league?”

      “Are you talking about me and April? Or you and banana man?” When she glared, he went on. “Being attracted, no. Who can help it?”

      “Those of us not thinking with a penis?”

      “That’s bull, Shandi. A woman’s just as likely to make a move because she wants in a guy’s pants as a guy is. Uh, as a guy is who wants in a woman’s pants. Whatever. You know what I mean.”

      Shandi chuckled. Then sobered, thinking more about her mystery man’s eyes, more about his hungry, burning look, the devastating way she’d found herself wanting to help him get her naked.

      Dear Lord, she was losing her mind. “Is that a bad thing? Wanting in a guy’s pants?”

      Evan blew out a breath heavy with his reluctance to talk. Had she been prying about baseball, he’d be animated and all up in her face yammering on about the Yankees.

      Instead he pulled up his other knee and rolled down to lie on his back, feet flat on the floor, his head pillowed on his wrists, his dark hair sweeping the cherry wood planks.

      “I’m waiting over here,” she finally said, once again sitting cross-legged.

      “It’s still a double standard, Shandi—the women a guy takes to bed and the one he takes home.”

      That particular truth really sucked, yet in this case it was more the reverse of the situation that she couldn’t let go. She shouldn’t be so hung up, but with Evan and April both her very best friends, it was hard to think of either hurting the other. Or either getting hurt.

      Her concern was strictly that of a friend in the middle. A sucky place to be. “So why doesn’t April take you home? She doesn’t want her parents to know she has a lover?”

      He waited a long time before answering, clearing the hesitation from his throat before he did. “April and I aren’t lovers. And if you tell her I told you that, the ass-kicking switches into high gear.”

      What? Speechless. She was absolutely speechless, her mouth as dry as a bone. April hadn’t once hinted that she wasn’t sleeping with Evan. She’d hinted at quite the opposite, in fact.

      “I don’t get it. You’ve spent the night over there—”

      “On the couch.”

      Unbelievable. “Not in her bed?”

      “Nope.”

      “Never?”

      “Never.”

      “Huh.” Shandi didn’t even know what to say. “Has she said why? I mean, I’m assuming you’ve tried or told her you want to.” And then a pause as she thought. “You do want to, right? Or is this more of that double-standard thing?”

      “Do we have to talk about this? I’ve got class in four hours.”

      “Drawing? Skip it.” He wouldn’t, and she ought to let him off the hook, but he was her only window into the male psyche.

      The only one whose brain she could pick about what to do with her crush on tonight’s customer. “I need to know what men think.”

      “Why?” He turned his head sharply. “Are you planning to hit on banana man?”

      She shoved at his closest knee, rocking both of his legs. “Would you stop calling him that?”

      “What’s his name?”

      “Quentin.”

      “And you want to sleep with him.”

      “I don’t know.” She did, of course, hating how these ridiculous double standards men embraced labeled her because of that want. “He intrigues me. That’s all.”

      “Right.” A snort. “It’s not like you want to do him because he’s hot.”

      Okay, yes, there was that. An attitude she’d always shared with April. Or so she’d thought. But if April wasn’t even sleeping with Evan, the man she loved…

      This complicated love and sex and lust business was for the birds. Shandi wanted things plain and simple, to act on her attraction to Quentin without having him think less of her for doing so.

      Because what he thought of her mattered just as much as having him want her. “Okay. I admit it. I’m obviously a hopeless slut.”

      “Sluts are good.”

      She groaned with frustration, then lay back beside Evan. “Good when I’m the slut in question. Just not when it’s April.”

      “Shandi, this conversation is putting me to sleep.”

      She ignored him. “You know I’m going to have to rag on April for not telling me the truth.”

      “What?” Evan perked up. “She told you we were having sex?”

      Good. The reaction she’d wanted. “No, but she let me think so. Heck, you let me think so. I mean, I don’t get it, but if her not sleeping with you makes her a better catch—”

      “It’s not about her being a better catch.” He sighed. “It’s just that by the time we realized we were more than friends, we were such good friends we didn’t want to ruin it by sleeping together. Not until we were sure it was more.”

      “It is more, isn’t it?”

      “Yeah. It’s more.” This time his sigh was pure poetry.

      And hers pure envy. She wanted that same more. She really, truly wanted that very same more. “So this guy at the hotel. Quentin. I shouldn’t sleep with him then.”

      “Depends.”

      “On what?”

      “On whether you’re interested in more than his banana.”

      QUENTIN

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