Free One Night Forever (The Cinderella Chronicles) by Lisa Renée Jones

your family is close.”
    “ We are. Or
were. My mother passed away several years ago.”
    Lauren swallowed. “I’m
sorry.”
    He didn’t say anything
for a moment. “What about you? Are you close to your
family?”
    This wasn’t a question
she wanted to answer. She placed her pizza on the plate. “Why are
you here, Matt?”
    He smiled and picked a
piece of pepperoni up. “Great food.” He popped it in his mouth and
swallowed. “You know, I consider myself a connoisseur of good
pizza.”
    “ Oh, I—” Crap.
Lauren started to tell him she considered herself the same. She
knew all the cheap good places. But then, cheap wasn’t an issue to
him and she didn’t need to get personal with her boss and
ex-one-night stand. “Wouldn’t have guessed.”
    One dark brow inched
upward. “No?” he asked. “Well, I am. I’m the single closest thing
to a pizza expert in this city.”
    Okay, that was a
challenge. She had to respond. “I doubt that very seriously,”
Lauren said.
    “ Really?” he
asked a hint of a smile in his voice. “I suppose you can do
better?”
    She nodded and finished
off her first piece of pizza. “Prove it,” he said.
    “ How?” she
asked, only half believing she was having this conversation with
Matt.
    He pulled a pen out of
his jacket pocket and then reached to the napkins and handed her
one. Lauren accepted it but with confusion. “What’s this
for?”
    “ Write down
the top three pizzas in town. I’ll do the same. I want to see if
you know your stuff.”
    “ Didn’t you
just move from LA? How do you know the pizza in New York? And who’s
going to be the judge of which one of us is right?”
    “ I grew up
here.”
    Lauren shook her head.
“That’s not good enough. Things change.” She held out her hand for
the pen. “You’re going to lose.”
    Matt laughed. “Not a
chance. But give it your best shot.”
    She accepted the pen, but
not without a brush of his fingers. Her eyes went to his, and for a
moment, electricity crackled as they stared at one another. Lost in
each other. Lost in what was and what could have been. A glass
broke somewhere, and Lauren jolted back to the present.
    Averting her gaze, she
wrote on the napkin. Satisfied with her answers, she slid the pen
across the table not prepared to risk more hand-to-hand contact.
Needing the distraction, she started on her second slice of pizza.
Matt seemed to ponder his answers.
    “ Tough, huh?”
she challenged because she couldn’t help herself.
    He winked. “Just making
sure I weigh my options.” Then, he started writing. Done with his
task, he slid his pen back in his pocket, and then offered her his
list. “Let’s exchange.”
    Lauren hesitated. Why did
her list of pizza places suddenly feel very exposing? Very
personal? For one thing, she knew hers were all hole-in-the-wall,
cheap places.
    Matt gestured toward her
list. “No holding back. Let me see.”
    Having no option, she
offered him her list, and reached for his. She blinked and read it
again. Then, she sat down the napkin. “New York Pizza is not better
than Johnnies. That alone proves you don’t know your
pizza.”
    Laughing Matt tossed down
her napkin. “Ah, but have you tried their new triple
cheese?”
    “ What are you
talking about?” Lauren asked. She didn’t know about this or she
would have already tried it.
    Matt leaned forward, his
hand covering hers where it rested on the table. “How about after
work I take you to try it?”
    All of a sudden Lauren
couldn’t breathe. How had she gone from avoiding Matt to this? “We
both know that’s not a good idea.”
    “ It’s pizza
and some conversation. We both know we need to talk and not when we
have a lunch hour deadline.”
    Why she didn’t move her
hand, she wasn’t sure. He didn’t hold it in a way that kept her
from extracting it. “There’s nothing to talk about.”
    “ How about
us?”
    “ There is no
‘us’.”
    Matt sank back against
the bench and studied her a long