With Love, from Cold World(21)

“Actually—” She was about to point out that she worked there, but the guy didn’t let her get another word out.

“Unless you were trying to cut in?” He gave her an insulting once-over. “I’ll pass.”

His girlfriend tittered, but Lauren could tell it was more a nervous sound than one of genuine mirth. She bet the guy was a real laugh riot to spend time with. Now that they’d pulled apart, she also saw that he was wearing a Confederate flag T-shirt, which, yeah. That checked out.

“Hey,” Asa said from behind her. “You need to move on.”

She’d been wrong about his tone of voice. There was no levity in it at all—only a low authority that made her toes tingle.

The guy spat into the snow, narrowly missing her shoe. “Jesus,” he said. “We were about to. Come on, babe. Let’s go somewhere else that’s not filled with geeks who can’t get laid.”

Lauren flushed, sure that comment was more directed at her. But Asa only gave the couple a sarcastic little smile.

“Try the Ripley’s Believe It or Not!,” he said.

The guy doubled back for a second, as though unsure whether to take that as a sincere recommendation, before he led his girlfriend out of the Snow Globe, muttering the whole time. Eventually, the people who’d been watching to see if things would escalate turned their attention back to playing with the snow, and Lauren glanced up to see Asa frowning at the door.

“Should we let more people in?” she asked.

“No,” he said shortly.

“Okay.” She didn’t know how to read Asa’s mood. Was he pissed at that guy, for being such a jerk? Was he pissed at her for some reason, because she couldn’t handle it? “I could’ve dealt with that guy. I was about to—”

Asa cut her off. “This was a mistake. You should go back to your office, finish up your work there. I’ll cover this shift until the next person comes to relieve me.”

Earlier that morning, Lauren would’ve leapt at the chance to get out of this new Freaky Friday initiative. But now she resented Asa thinking he could make a unilateral decision to kick her out, the same way he’d made a unilateral decision to bring her in in the first place. And she really didn’t like that word mistake.

“We said an hour, and I’m going to stay the hour,” she said, glancing at her watch. It had been barely fifteen minutes.

“You have a busy job,” Asa said. “So go do it. I can do this better without you.”

He wasn’t even looking at her. It was back to the detached-sentry look, except instead of standing with his hands behind his back, he reached down to pick up a candy wrapper that someone had dropped into the snow. And Lauren had no idea what got into her, but something made her bend down to grab another handful of snow. She didn’t bother to mold it into a ball.

Instead, she dumped the whole cold, wet handful straight onto Asa’s exposed neck.





Chapter


Six

This time, when Asa and Lauren were asked to speak to Dolores, they were definitely in trouble.

It felt a lot like being called into the principal’s office. Asa had taken one chair in front of Dolores’ desk, Lauren the other, and Dolores even closed her office door before standing next to it, her arms crossed over her chest like she was waiting for one of them to speak first.

He tried to sneak a look at Lauren, to see how she was handling all of this. Somehow she struck him as someone who’d never been in trouble a day in her life. He bet she freaked out if she got anything less than an A in school.

Her cheeks were pink, whether from the cold or embarrassment, he didn’t know. Under her chair, she kept sliding her feet halfway out of her shoes before sliding them back in again. It was mesmerizing. He kept waiting to see her toes, still covered by the sheer fabric of her tights, but then she would push her feet back in her shoes and start the whole process over again. She still had a damp blotch at the hem of her cardigan from where he’d gotten her with some snow as a retaliation for that first hit.

It had taken him by complete surprise. Not only the shock of the sudden icy pressure on his neck, but the fact that she’d done it at all. It seemed very un-Lauren.

But then, so had a lot of things lately. He was beginning to wonder if maybe he’d just had her pegged wrong from the start.

“I expected better from both of you,” Dolores said finally, seemingly giving up on letting them sweat out the silence. “Asa, when you suggested this work exchange idea, I certainly never expected that it would be used as an excuse to play the goof. If you want to snowfight so badly, you can buy a ticket on your day off and fling snow to your heart’s content.”

Next to him, Lauren frowned. “Well, you’re never supposed to fling the snow.”

Asa leaned back in his chair, looking up at the ceiling. He swore, she made everything harder than it needed to be. “I’m sorry, Dolores,” he said. “It was a lapse in judgment. It won’t happen again.”

The corners of Dolores’ mouth pinched so tightly her smile lines deepened. If he didn’t know any better, he would say she looked more amused than angry. “Well,” she said. “See that it doesn’t.”

“In fact,” Asa said, “I’m thinking it might be better to cancel the experiment altogether. Lauren should do her job, I should do mine, and—”