'This Austin Thorne has been acting a little strange lately,' Laura Lowell thought. 'Last time, at the movie theater entrance, he was also spouting some bizarre nonsense, and now he's doing it again.'
Austin Thorne shrugged, his expression dark. "It seems I misunderstood, then."
Aiden Shaw put down his soup spoon. He looked at Austin Thorne, his deep eyes as cold as a thousand-year-old frozen pond. "Mr. Thorne, what is the meaning of this? Are you determined to force some kind of connection with my girlfriend?"
Austin Thorne gave Aiden Shaw a polite, gentlemanly nod. "Dr. Shaw, I'm afraid you've misunderstood."
Then, he glanced at Laura Lowell, his inscrutable eyes holding a complexity others couldn't decipher. "Actually, I think Laura likes you more. When she was with me, she never spoke to me as gently as she does to you. And when she looked at me, her heart wasn't in it."
Austin Thorne was jealous. As he had walked over just now, he'd happened to overhear their conversation.
