“Well,” Nash said as he scarfed down his second one, “don’t forget to fill out your survey card, or Griff will hound you until you do.”

She took another bite, the flavors exploding on her tongue as they stood there on the corner, during what had to be the best date she’d ever been on. A food truck crawl was fucking brilliant. “This place gets all tens.”

“The survey scale only goes up to five,” he said with a chuckle.

“Too bad.” There was no way she was going to adhere to that rule for the best thing she’d ever eaten. Yep, that was her talking. She was a new, more daring Chelle Finch. “All tens.”

Nash shook his head and tucked back the strand of her hair that kept getting stuck to her lip gloss. “I think you’re drunk on empanadas.”

“I’m totally okay with that.” And that little buzz of anticipation his touch set off in her belly.

“You’ll have to be the one to tell Griff.” He flashed the double dimpler at her. “He’s a little rigid in a barely-talks, grumpy, LEGO-collecting scientist kind of way.”

“Sounds like a character.” Really, he’d have to be to agree to this asinine bet that she was totally going to get to the bottom of.

“He is,” Nash said. “You’d like him. He’d definitely be an ogre in one of your books.”

She paused mid-bite, all the warm and fuzzy getting doused with nervous dread, and waited for the passive-aggressive mocking that she’d gotten from her dad when she was younger about her, as he put it, “scribbling in her notebooks.” There’d been the absent-minded questions, the warning her that there was no money in being an author, and the concern trolling that what she needed to be doing was finding a boyfriend (when she was younger) and then a husband (when she’d left for college) because that was the natural order of things. Her dad had told her, with all the condescending bullshittery possible, that was the way things worked for women. They had to find a man to guide them through life.

Fighting to keep her voice neutral as she prepped for the same from Nash, she asked, “So you made it through the first chapter, huh?”

He finished his last bite of the empanada, his body loose and easy. “More like I only have a few chapters left.”