...Sydney knocked twice on the door, waited thirty seconds, gnawed on her bottom lip, and knocked again. She supposed it was possible that he wasn’t home. Possible, but unlikely. Everybody on their floor always asked Steven to water their plants and feed their cats when they went on vacation because everybody knew Steven never went anywhere. But maybe he had developed some sort of social life while nobody was looking?
Oh, God. Maybe he had a girlfriend? Or a boyfriend?
Sydney was just about to let her thoughts spin off into a series of increasingly frantic scenarios when Steven opened the door.
“Yes?”
The smile she slapped on was completely natural, in spite of her wayward fantasies. It was impossible for her to look at Steven Teller and not smile, in fact. She held up the box. “Another delivery from our favorite dyslexic UPS man.” Well, he was her favorite, anyway. He gave her lots of reasons to visit her gorgeous neighbor.
“Oh.” He offered a small smile and took the box from her. “You’d think UPS would be interested in hiring guys who could count.”
“I’m not sure counting’s his biggest problem.” And thus endeth her reason to stand at his door. A polite neighbor would back away and return to the haven of her own apartment, duty done. After the day she’d had, Sydney decided she’d been polite enough to last her a lifetime. “Someone in Spokane must really love you,” she said, voicing the thought she’d had earlier.
“What? Oh, the address.” Steven grimaced and tossed the box aside like he didn’t particularly care for the contents. “No, it’s for work.”
She tilted her head, frowning as she processed his words. “Is your editor in Spokane?”
“No, it’s where the distributor is located. For the products I review.”
“Oh.” She hadn’t known about the reviews. She’d just known he was a writer and assumed he wrote books, even though she’d never been able to come up with anything he’d ever written on Amazon. But that had just meant he wrote under a pseudonym, trying to protect his privacy, but if he was writing reviews, then it was no wonder Google had been useless. “What kind of products?”
“They’re…well…they’re adult products. For a website I manage.”
Sydney blinked. The object of her lust-filled affection had not really just said… “Adult products? Like…sex stuff?”
“Adult products like…marital aids. Yes.”
A horrible thought filled her head, screaming in protest. “Please tell me it’s not Viagra.” The unfortunate side effect of thinking it so loudly? It came out loudly, too.
Steven arched his brow. “Not that I think it’s any of your business, but no, it’s not Viagra.”
Embarrassment flooded her cheeks with heat. “No, of course not,” she tried to backpedal. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry. I just, I’ve never known anyone who did that kind of thing. It’s…interesting.”
Already, she heard the death knell to this particular attempt at getting his attention. Interesting? She might as well have called him “nice.” Guys hated that, which she had never understood, because there was absolutely nothing wrong with being nice. There was, however, something wrong with the way she kept standing there, like she expected anything positive to come from her foot-in-mouth disease...