Seduce Me by Jo Leigh Page A

and vice versa. She’s not in the market for a relationship, she’s hot and she’s smart. She looks a little like Rihanna. You know, the singer?”
    “Yeah, I know the singer. You’re not messing with me, are you?”
    “Nope. Her name is Gabbie and she’s joining the Trading Card group because she wants someone who won’t turn out to be a whack job. So if you do this thing, you’d better be on your best behavior.”
    “I’m always on my best behavior,” he said.
    Paula’s laughter was kind of insulting, but he let it pass. Because this was the real beginning of the buffet he’d been promised. Rihanna was smokin’ hot, and Paula wasn’t the type to exaggerate.
    “Okay,” she said. “I’ll give her your cell number. She’s set Tuesday night aside, so you’ll just have time to make a reservation. Someplace good.”
    “You want to come over and pick out my clothes, too?”
    “Ha-ha. Just remember, this one’s going to be the last one until the next meeting, which isn’t for almost a month.”
    He smiled at her concern and wondered if she’d mentioned the trading-card business to Mike, or her folks, because yeah, this was the kind of thing that could end up in his aunt Ellen’s Christmas newsletter if they weren’t careful. “I’ll buy you lunch next week. You’ve gone to a lot of trouble for something that wasn’t your fault.”
    “You’re right. Call me.”
    He hung up, figured he’d get moving and go to Spice. Despite the lack of structure in his life, things were going pretty damn well. He’d just received an invitation to a cocktail party at one of the top twenty law firms in the country. Which was a very big deal. Then there’d been the date with Natalie, and that had turned out to be great. Now this.
    He hoped Gabbie turned out to be as advertised, because it might have been an error, but Natalie had set the bar pretty high. At least he knew that his next date wouldn’t want anything he couldn’t provide.

8
    M ONDAYS AT O MNIBUS Film Archives were always busy, but with two back-to-back tours and an afternoon screening of Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or for a class of film students, Natalie would be lucky if she got any kind of a break at all.
    She’d had to fight the urge to daydream about Friday night, but both her coworker Veda, and her boss, Rick, had given her funny looks, so she knew she wasn’t exactly winning the battle. Of course she wouldn’t even give them a hint as to her thoughts. Everyone who was on staff, all dozen of them, knew that she’d been with Oliver for three years, and Natalie hadn’t told anyone they’d split up.
    It was a friendly group, constantly busy because they could have used at least a dozen more full-timers, with a budget that barely paid the ones they had. So they hired interns and part-timers, almost exclusively students from colleges and universities around the city.
    Their days were packed and they traded workdays and hours, especially evenings and weekends when they held screenings, fund-raisers and classes. When the staff socialized, they tended to talk shop. There wasn’t much gossip at Omnibus. This morning’s tour was part of a program offered by the American Association of Retired Persons. There were also a few other people taking part, including Elizabeth Carter, a PhD student who researched there often. Elizabeth loved the tour, but mostly she liked to play Stump the Librarian when Natalie was leading the group, which was fine because Natalie enjoyed the game, as well.
    They were standing outside the basement lab at the moment, crowded around the large window to watch the work going on inside. Once all eleven people on the tour were as well situated as possible, Natalie began her spiel. “Sadly, movies aren’t made to last. Almost all old films were made of perishable plastic, which decays within years if not properly stored. Only twenty percent of U.S. feature films from the 1910s and 1920s survive in their complete form. We make sure