Hot Toy Read Free

sometime?”
    â€œSure.” Trudy smiled back at him automatically, her mind on the Twinkletoes. Would a gift that was a couple of decades late distract Courtney from her divorce?
    Hell, it couldn’t hurt.
    Reese walked away, and she looked closer at the Twinkletoes box in her hands. It had a crumpled corner and she remembered what Nolan had said. The box should be mint. She put her shopping bag down and began to take the Twinkletoes boxes off the shelf. Courtney was going to get a perfect Twinkletoes, pink box and all.
    Nolan came around the end of the row and sighed when he saw the boxes on the floor.
    â€œGo away.” Trudy took down the next pink box.
    â€œListen, is there anything I can do to make you not so mad?”
    â€œMad? I’m not mad.” Trudy studied the Twinkletoes box. Smudge on the top. She dropped it on Nolan’s foot. “Why would I be mad?”
    He picked it up. “That’s what I asked.”
    She pulled another Twinkletoes box off the shelf and shoved it at him. “Okay, here’s why I’m mad. I didn’t want to go out with you because you were a professor, and I grew up with a professor, and it was no fun because you get forgotten a lot because your dad is thinking about something that happened four millennia ago, so I said no, four times I said no, but you kept at me and I weakened and went out and I really liked you, you bastard, and you were smart and you were funny”—she shoved another box at him—“and I thought, gee, maybe this will work out, maybe this is a professor who won’t forget, but evidently it was just the thrill of the chase or something because you dropped me”—she threw the next box at him and he caught it, balancing it with the first two—“and I never knew why since you never bothered to tell me; you just fell right off the sleigh—”
    â€œSleigh?” Nolan said.
    â€œâ€¦ so I’m a little upset with you. ”
    Nolan sighed. “Look, you changed.”
    â€œOf course I changed,” Trudy snapped. “It’s been three months. I’ve grown. I’ve matured. I’m in a new and better place now. A place without you. Go away.” She went back to the Twinkletoes shelf, pulling boxes off at random and dropping them on the floor, appalled to realize that she was close to tears. He did not matter to her; the fact that she’d thought he was darling was immaterial; the fact that she’d told her sister he might be The One was immaterial; the fact that her father had said, Nolan Mitchell, that’s a little out of your league, isn’t it? was … Well, her father was a jerk, so that didn’t count.
    â€œNo, you changed from the library,” Nolan was saying. “You were funny in the library. You talked fast and made weird jokes and surprised me. I liked that. And then I took you out and you, well, you kind of went dull on me.”
    Trudy stopped dropping boxes on the floor. “You took me to a faculty party. If I hadn’t gone dull on you, you’d have lost points. You’d have been Nolan who brought that weird-ass librarian to the October gin fling. I was helping you. ”
    â€œDid I ask for help?” Nolan said, exasperated.
    â€œAnd you took me to dinner at the department head’s house. You wanted me weird there?”
    â€œI couldn’t get out of that,” Nolan said.
    â€œAnd then the Chinese film festival.” Trudy dropped another box to the floor. “I thought I was going to see Crouching Tiger Two, but it was some horrible depressing thing about people weeping in dark rooms.”
    â€œIt was?” Nolan said, confused.
    â€œNot that you’d know, since you left right after it started, ” Trudy snarled, flinging a box at him. “You got a call and walked out of the theater and I was left with people weeping in Chinese—”
    She stopped to stare at the shelf, the