"You know it."
"And why is that?"
I gave her a long, appreciative look. "Because you've been distracting the hell out of me."
Her lips twitched like she wanted to smile. "When?"
"Always."
"Oh, stop it," she laughed.
"You think I'm lying?"
"Well…" She took another drink, this one longer than the first. When she finished, she said, "If you're not lying, you're at least exaggerating."
"I don't lie," I said. "And it's no exaggeration."
She gave me a dubious look. "Is that so?"
"It is," I said. "You wanna hear a secret?"
"Sure."
"When I'm signing those books and catch sight of you, it makes it hard for me to remember people's names."
And now she was laughing again. "Oh come on."
"No lie." I lowered my voice. "You wanna know what I was thinking today?"
"Sure. If you want to tell me."
"All right. You remember what you were wearing?"
She paused to think. "A black skirt and a pink top?"
"Right," I said. "That top? It had a lot of buttons, little pearl things right down the front."
She took another sip of her wine. "Yeah, I guess it did."
"I was thinking…" I leaned closer. "…how much I'd enjoy popping those buttons, one by one."
Her breath caught. "You were not."
"I was," I said. "In my mind, I was doing it nice and slow, so you could feel every pop, and the cool air creeping in."
"Oh." She gave a hard swallow. "Really?"
I glanced down to her chest. "That book store…it was colder than you liked."
"Yeah." Her chest was rising and falling now with every breath. "A little."
"So tell me," I said. "Were your nipples hard? They looked hard."
She gave another swallow. "Did they?" Her breaths were coming faster now.
Good.I wanted her breathless and quivering. "So…were they?"
"Actually, I don't know. But …" She gave a little shiver. "They're kind of hard now."
