I swallow. My throat is dry. Somehow, I manage to keep talking. “Math is the foundation of my business, in a lot of ways. Numbers serve as the core, and I build ideas on that. I’ve always taken that approach. That’s what excites me in business—taking patterns and numbers and then marrying them with what people might want next.”

“I know what I want next,” she whispers.

Her sultry tone is like a dart of lust straight to my chest. It stokes the fire in me. “You do?”

“I can’t have it, but I want it.”

She laces her fingers tighter, running her thumb along my skin, triggering a fresh wave of sparks within me.

From her thumb stroking my flesh.

One simple touch and I don’t know if we’re talking about the interview, or business, or math, or what we like. But I don’t care, because talking to her is what I like.

“You,” she whispers, her honeyed voice like a caress. “I probably shouldn’t say this, but it turns me on to no end that you’re this math god and that’s your foundation, and then you layer T.S. Eliot on top of it, or you put Gatsby on top of it, and you think about whether random things are art or ethics.”

I lean closer. “If it’s any consolation, you’re not the only one turned on.”

She draws a breath, then lets it out in a sexy, needy moan.

“Sabrina,” I warn. “This is dangerous.”

She squeezes my hand. “So dangerous,” she says, lowering her face, averting her gaze. “I’m trying not to launch myself at you right now.”

“I suppose I ought to be a gentleman and say I’d resist you . . . but I wouldn’t.”

She looks up and lets go of my hand. “Okay, you’re too tempting. You practically seduced me with a pineapple and the Fibonacci sequence.”

I pump a fist. “Nerds for the win.”

She laughs and turns off the recorder. “Okay, hot nerd. Let’s get out of here before you seduce me with a cauliflower next.”

“Don’t forget the artichoke. It’s willing to offer services for seduction.”

“And the artichoke would probably render me helpless to resist too. Ergo,” she says, pausing to press her hands against the table as she rises, breaking the moment for good, “we should go. I have one more favorite place for us today.”

I don’t say no. I want this next non-date, artichoke or not. “Take me where you want to go.”

“I’m going to take you to the locksmith in the Village.”

It sounds quaint and provincial, but when we arrive I see it’s more than that. The front of the shop in the Village is covered in a replica of Van Gogh’s Starry Night made entirely of keys, forming swirls and spirals like the famous painting.

“The guy who owns this shop recreated Starry Night with twenty thousand keys that he kept over the years,” she explains as I step toward the wall, raising my hand.