Free Playing Hard by Melanie Scott

delighted she couldn’t help smiling back.
    “Not sure gummy bears are great recuperation food.”
    He shrugged and pointed to the chair nearest him. “Have a seat. I’d get up but I’m meant to be resting my ankle.”
    “I think that’s called changing the subject. That looks worse than just a sprain.” She nodded at the black boot thing on his foot.
    “No, it’s definitely just a sprain. I’ve been scanned and x-rayed six ways from Sunday to make sure. Lucas would’ve preferred me to be on two crutches to keep it immobile for a while but that’s not going to work with this.” He lifted his injured hand. “So it’s a walking boot and a stick for me for a couple of weeks. Which means I deserve gummy bears.”
    She tore the bag open and handed it to him. “There. All the sugar a man could want. One hundred percent nutrition-free.”
    “I assure you my fridge is stashed full of nutritionally balanced food,” he said. “Maggie and Sara—that’s Lucas’s wife, did you meet her at the party?—were here earlier and they stocked me up.”
    “Maggie Winters?” She couldn’t quite keep the hesitation out of her voice.
    “That’s the one.” He stopped, lifted his eyebrows. “Let me guess, your friend Finn told you that Maggie and I used to date.”
    “He may have mentioned something about it.”
    “Did he also mention that it was before she went to college? Or that she’s very happily married to my boss?” He wagged a gummy bear at her. “She’s a very good friend. She’ll always be a good friend. But you have nothing to worry about. Maggie is not interested in me and I got over my yen for her a long time ago.”
    She wanted to believe him. She had no reason not to. Though if tall leggy brunettes were his thing, she wasn’t sure why he was interested in her. She was none of those three. Well, her legs were okay, but she was firmly in the middle height range whereas Maggie had to be about five foot ten. And her hair couldn’t decide what color it was, let alone shape itself into the sleek dark-chocolate waves that Maggie Winters’s did. She’d only met the woman twice but there was no denying she was beautiful. Whereas Amelia was just …
    “Amelia,” Oliver said.
    She blinked. He was watching her with a very smug expression.
    “What?” she said, feeling flustered.
    “You were checking up on my past. That means you like me.”
    “You’re right, you need the gummy bears. You’ve obviously got low blood sugar and it’s making you delusional.”
    He laughed. “I like you, Amelia. And you like me, too.” He offered the gummy bears to her. “Want to share my sugar?”
    “I bet you say that to all the girls,” she said waving him away.
    “Nope, I can honestly say that you’re the first woman who’s tried to seduce me with gummy bears.” He laughed again, and bit the head off the bear he’d been waving around. It was unfair that he managed to look sexy eating a gummy bear.
    “Who says I’m trying to seduce you at all?” The thought of just how many women might have tried to seduce him over the years—and how many he might have said yes to—was a little depressing. Most of them probably had far more lethal weapons in their arsenal than knowing his weakness for weird candy and Scrabble.
    But his past was just that: the past. And given she didn’t believe for a second that he was Mr. Right rather than Mr. Right Now, his past shouldn’t bother her that much. Shouldn’t being the operative word. One she wasn’t ready to confront. Time for a change of subject.
    “I don’t see a Scrabble board,” she said, surveying the gleaming wooden coffee table. Its surface was bare apart from a half-empty coffee mug, a copy of USA Today open to the sports pages, and an orange pill bottle.
    Oliver looked slightly embarrassed. “I forgot to ask Maggie to grab it for me. It’s somewhere in the closet in my spare bedroom. Do you want to look?”
    Playing Scrabble was clearly a safer option