Her Rebound Guy
Her Rebound Guy
Jennifer Lohmann
Was she falling for the wrong man again?Caleb Taggert is exactly what recent divorcee Beck Magruder needs—intelligent, handsome, and blissfully uninterested in anything long term. Her first date with Caleb does not disappoint. Yet after a night of passion, Beck realizes she’s looking for more than just a fling. Saying goodbye to an almost perfect man isn't easy.Luckily Caleb offers Beck a deal: no-strings attached fun, plus free advice for online dating. It’s the perfect arrangement, until Beck falls for Caleb. Suddenly, no other man can compete. What started as a fling has the potential to become something more. But is Beck ready to bet her future on it?
Is she falling for the wrong man again?
Caleb Taggert is exactly what recent divorcée Beck Magruder needs—intelligent, handsome and blissfully uninterested in anything long-term. Her first date with Caleb does not disappoint. Yet after a night of passion, Beck realizes she’s looking for more than just a fling. Saying goodbye to an almost perfect man isn’t easy.
Luckily Caleb offers Beck a deal: no-strings-attached fun, plus free advice for online dating. It’s the perfect arrangement, until Beck falls for Caleb. Suddenly, no other man can compete. What started as a fling has the potential to become something more. But is Beck ready to bet her future on it?
JENNIFER LOHMANN is a Rocky Mountain girl at heart, having grown up in southern Idaho and Salt Lake City. When she’s not writing or talking with librarians around the country about reading, she cooks and laughs with her own personal Viking. Together, they wrangle three cats. (The boa constrictor is better behaved.) She currently lives in Durham, North Carolina.
Also By Jennifer Lohmann
Dating by Numbers
Love on Her Terms
A Southern Promise
Winning Ruby Heart
Weekends in Carolina
A Promise for the Baby
The First Move
Reservations for Two
Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Her Rebound Guy
Jennifer Lohmann
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ISBN: 978-1-474-08470-3
HER REBOUND GUY
© 2018 Jennifer Lohmann
Published in Great Britain 2018
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
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www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
“I’d like to make a proposal,” Caleb said.
He took her raised eyebrow as an invitation to continue. “I like you, Beck. You like me. And you want more sex in your life.”
“Yeah, but not willy-nilly.”
“Nothing I’m proposing is willy-nilly. I’d like to offer you companionship, conversation and sex while you look for the man you want to marry. Or until our relationship has burned its course.”
“A little man on the side.”
“Little? Come on.” He tried to act insulted, but the way her hand came up to her mouth in embarrassment was too cute not to laugh.
“But the on-the-side part is right?”
“I guess, yes. You are free to date other people. I’m free to date other people.”
“So why would we be dating each other?”
“Because we like each other. And because you probably need time to kiss a few frogs before you settle on your prince.”
Dear Reader (#uc8205a00-018e-573a-9ffe-d67265e0bf47),
Like Dating by Numbers, this book emerged out of my own forays into online dating. I...well, I wasn’t good at it. I met the Viking, fell in love and got married, so I was successful, but “good at it” seemed to mean I went on a lot of dates (I didn’t) and knew what I wanted out of the experience (I didn’t). You think, Everyone is telling me to do X, so I’m going to do it. But X isn’t you, and you can’t fight you. Enter Beck. Happily married when you first meet her in Dating by Numbers and on her way to divorce at the end. Confused, frustrated and scared by the entire experience—but determined.
From stage left comes Caleb, who claims to know what he wants and what he’s doing.
The truth, of course, is that dating is scary. There are those who admit it to themselves and those who don’t. But we’re all fumbling our way through until we meet the person with whom our muddy waters suddenly clear.
Oh, and for those curious, the pictures of my dog got more likes than any of the pictures of me.
Happy reading,
Jennifer
In memory of Tweedy, who was always there for me when I needed her. I’ll miss you, dear friend. Take Seamus for a walk for me.
Contents
Cover (#uc6057e0b-a4fe-5e14-a7ea-8c6af03fe5f2)
Back Cover Text (#u57ce684e-bebe-5cf2-bf48-b0021660114c)
About the Author (#u303057f4-7e69-5987-8070-14b7836bffe6)
Booklist (#u65d40327-fe60-5439-b057-43723dfe2ccd)
Title Page (#u7123cf3b-f594-5d92-ac19-b16174a96c27)
Copyright (#u64b5d976-b48a-5a36-922f-a7c8bcd93617)
Introduction (#uf82c90fe-bcac-539d-9248-0d7becf452bd)
Dear Reader (#u2cf2d7e8-0305-5c10-9db1-35ab3b1b1a3b)
Dedication (#u4974e73d-e02f-5477-8e09-470484787abc)
CHAPTER ONE (#ub8e4f154-0b74-5f4a-b0bb-ee4f78f5c0d7)
CHAPTER TWO (#u31dd0c81-9023-59ba-8e4b-1fe8f368bae7)
CHAPTER THREE (#u9d3d40e1-6e00-5238-873c-9e1441efc515)
CHAPTER FOUR (#u1947389e-06c3-5fd2-acd8-b72e3ae87504)
CHAPTER FIVE (#u25352840-26a4-51a8-be7f-aeb3a90b0b9d)
CHAPTER SIX (#u3acaa18c-3d2e-5150-a5d7-7d9e2b048870)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#u39bd2155-0d73-5420-9601-045d09024a95)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#uc8205a00-018e-573a-9ffe-d67265e0bf47)
IT’S A BIT like shopping the J.Crew catalog back in high school, Beck Macgruder thought as she finished posting information about who she was and then took a look at the men on the online-dating site she’d picked to try first. Some of the men were, well, she hated to be uncharitable, but they weren’t attractive at all.
Or, at least, she corrected in her own head as she scrolled past picture after picture, they hadn’t posted a flattering picture of themselves. Perhaps they didn’t have a flattering picture. Maybe they hadn’t known better. Maybe they didn’t have a friend to look at the pictures they posted and suggest something nicer.
There. That was a more charitable version of the story that had resulted in such a terrible picture posted on a dating website. It wasn’t that they were unattractive; it was that they hadn’t known it was a bad picture.
Picking a photo for a dating website was hard. Hard, of course, because there wasn’t a soul on earth who could look at a picture of themselves with anything like an objective eye. At least Beck had been able to get the opinion of her friend Marsie, who had found a man through online dating. Or, not exactly through online dating. Marsie’s fellow is a coworker of hers. They’d challenged each other to see who could find a partner first through an online-dating site, and then ended up deciding they were perfect for each other.
Right, Beck thought as she scrolled past another guy. Online dating wasn’t a guarantee of finding the perfect guy. As Beck figured it, online dating opened your mind to the possibility that there was someone out there for you, so long as you were looking for them. It was like tempting fate, but in a good way.
And it’s not like she was looking for one guy; she was looking for a lot of them. As she figured it, online dating was also a way to sample the merchandise before even deciding if she wanted to buy. Again.
Marriages weren’t returnable and you never got back what you’d paid out.
She clicked on a guy with potential and scanned the information he’d included about himself. Ah, yes, just like catalog shopping. This one looked good, but he wasn’t for her. This one was the male equivalent of spaghetti straps. Bandeau tops. He’d probably make someone else’s arms look good, but not hers.
Dampness bumped against her knee and she absently reached down to scratch the head of the boxer-pit-hound-and-probably-something-else dog she’d picked up at the animal shelter several months before. Seamus was a good-looking dog. All the pictures she’d taken of him in the months since he’d joined her household included a big grin, ears that could flop or perk depending on mood and a tail that looked more like the handle of a delicate teacup than anything that should belong on an animal with a room-clearing fart.
Of course, he was adorable in all of those pictures, so she’d included one of him by himself and one of them together in the photos she’d posted to the online-dating site. Best for men to know that she had a “manly” dog. He didn’t even eat vegetables, for God’s sake. Especially since the other information she put on the site included that she was a coordinator of events, mostly weddings. And she had wicker furniture on her porch.
With her dog’s chin resting on her knee, she hit the back button and scanned over her options again.
There. That guy would fit her like the perfect shoe. At least from his picture. Dark, messy, romantic hair and light green eyes. A man who would sit in her wicker rocking chair and read Byron’s poetry to her. Romantic—at least that’s what she assumed Byron’s poetry would be like.
All swoony.
And, after a nasty divorce where she’d felt every last second of North Carolina’s required year-long separation, Beck needed swoony.
She clicked.
Her disappointment must have rippled through her body, because Seamus huffed a little on her leg. Mr. Swoony wasn’t an English professor. Or a poet. Or a playwright—a pale imitation of a poet, but it would match the curls in his hair.
Mr. Swoony did say he was a journalist, though. That was a type of writer and somewhat swoony. And he liked biking. That was interesting. Long bike rides down some of the trails in The Research Triangle area. Maybe they would plan a complete Rails-to-Trails ride from the mountains of North Carolina to the coast. She could picture his hair curling out from under the rim of his helmet along his neck. And, oh yes, there would be picnics.
Beck could make a mean picnic. After years of working events and in restaurants, she knew how to choose food that would be easy to eat no matter the circumstances. Bride wearing a dress with long bell sleeves that brush across the table? No problem. Bride with a healthy décolletage who doesn’t want to fish food out from between her breasts before the honeymoon starts? No problem. Food that packs nicely, is good at room temperature and easy to eat with your hands? No problem.
She put her hand on Seamus’s head while she considered her next move. Mr. Swoony looked like he would enjoy a nice picnic. And the kind of guy she would like to make a nice picnic for.
And Beck missed making a picnic for people. Neil hadn’t been interested in picnics. Of course, she hadn’t thought she’d be interested in picnics, either, until she’d clicked on Mr. Swoony’s picture. It didn’t matter what he called himself on his profile. She was going to think of him as Mr. Swoony. And she was going to click.
A wink, to start. Messages on the first night of exploration seemed a little forward. She still didn’t know the rules of the online-dating world. She didn’t even know if there were rules. Heavens, despite all this data and Marsie’s insistence that online dating could be hacked with the perfect algorithm, online dating still seemed like the Wild West of meeting men. Which was why she was starting small, with one site, even when there were newer, flashier dating sites available.
Though, Beck considered as she evaluated the next picture on the screen, online dating couldn’t be any more Wild West than going to a bar and trying to look pretty.
Not that she would admit doing either to anyone right now. Everyone from her mom to Marsie to the servers at Buono Come Il Pane said she should wait a little longer before dating again.
“Get that husband of yours out of your head.” That bit of advice she rejected out of hand. Neil had been her college boyfriend and the only man she’d ever seriously dated. How could she get him out of her head if she didn’t have an idea of the kind of man who could replace him? Or even if a man should replace him? Seamus might fit in that companion spot nicely. And then there was the option of empty—empty could be good.
“Find yourself.” Which was stupid, because Beck knew where she was and she had a dog who snored in her bedroom to ground her to the fact that she was here, in her house, and Neil—the dog hater—wasn’t.
“You’re young. Take your time.” She paused a little every time that objection came up. Not because it was one hundred percent valid, but because it wasn’t a hundred percent invalid. She was thirty-two. Not young, unless she was being compared to her parents, but not old, either.
Maybe the biological clock existed. Maybe it didn’t. But something in her head had been ticking nonstop since Neil moved out—and before then, if she was going to be honest with herself, here in the privacy of her own home. She wouldn’t let the annoying noise of others run her life, but she wouldn’t ignore it, either.
Enough.
Marsie’s single piece of advice had been not to let online dating be the way she measured anything about her life, and it was the one piece of advice Beck had listened to. Getting responses wouldn’t determine her self-esteem level. She wouldn’t only look for dates. And, while she generally rejected Marsie’s insistence on all things scheduled, she would at least set up a schedule for checking her profile responses. No reason to have online dating become another Facebook that she trolled because she was bored.
On the other hand, she thought while Seamus sighed for his dinner and a walk, winking at one guy felt like a tacit admission that the men online weren’t all that interesting. Or that she felt over her head. Or that all those people were right and it was too early for her to be here.
With only a quick glance at the pictures and a more cursory look at the profile information, Beck winked at a few other guys. Then she logged out, snapped her laptop shut and put the thing someplace inconvenient while it charged, just to lessen the incentive to obsessively check if any of the men had responded to her wink.
When she stood, Seamus hopped on his hind legs. He didn’t jump on her—they’d been working on that—but he bounced. When she reached for the leash, he bowed and barked once, sharply, before running to the door and trying his doggy-darnedest to sit at the door through his excitement and get his leash attached to his collar.
Once she and Seamus stepped into the fading winter sunlight, online dating was forgotten. Mr. Swoony included.
* * *
THE PROBLEM, CALEB Taggert thought, with scheduling dates anytime during when the General Assembly was in session was that you couldn’t control when the men—and it was mostly men talking—would shut up. In theory, everything and everyone had a time limit. In reality, the battles of the General Assembly waged on and on and on. And had for years now.
The guy talking now had been talking for hours. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t hours, but Caleb had stopped taking detailed notes and was letting his recorder do most of the work. The representative had stopped saying anything new or interesting at least ten minutes ago. The bill under discussion was this man’s pet project and he was going to say what he wanted to say. For reasons Caleb didn’t know, but probably had to do with some backend deal he wanted to know about, committee leadership wasn’t cutting this guy off. Of course, half of what he said was bullshit. Caleb’s copy for the Sunday paper would include a lot of fact-checking and reminding the people of North Carolina about the rules regarding voter registration, IDs and the history of poll taxes.
The Civil Rights Era had a long tail, with battles like gerrymandering and voting rights seeming to stick to his beloved home state like dog shit to a shoe. The only bright spot—if one could call it that—was that debates like this one reminded Caleb why he’d become a reporter and who he was responsible to. The representative blathering on would be an entertaining guy to have a beer with, but there wasn’t much else good Caleb could say about him. But the constituents whom the man shook hands with when he was home deserved to know what he did with the faith they put in him.
Caleb’s article would also include some nice details regarding the recent polling about gerrymandering and one-voter-one-vote done in his home district. Stark comparisons like that made good copy.
Finally, the guy stopped talking about voters counting twice, voting in districts where they weren’t registered and—the money shot of scare tactics—undocumented immigrants voting. The session was about to be wrapped up and then all the people crowded into the committee room would spill out onto the lawn for a rally in favor of election-map reform. He’d need to stay for that, too, and talk with some of the protestors. The paper was sending a photographer over—there were bound to be some good signs and probably an arrest or two.
Politics in North Carolina hadn’t been boring...well, they’d never been boring, but they’d certainly gotten more interesting in the past ten years. Power grabs tend to do that, no matter which party has its grasping hands out.
Caleb had a date in thirty minutes and a twenty-minute drive looming before he could hope to park. Of course, the representative who had driveled on about voter fraud had no knowledge of Caleb’s personal life and wouldn’t care if he did. The paper didn’t care about his personal life, either. He had other reps to interview, copy to write and deadlines to meet. None of which was conducive to his evening plans.
Caleb gave in and pulled out his phone.
Diatribe about made-up voter fraud or not, he tried to adhere to the current research about phones, distraction and meetings, and he usually kept his phone hidden when he should be paying attention to someone else. Especially on a day like today, when the rumor was that a bill limiting the people’s right to protest was going to be snuck onto the end of this bill—not quite in the dead of night, but they would certainly try to do it when no reporters were watching.
Besides, the research said loud and clear that “people can’t multitask.” It’s just that researchers never established whether boredom to the point of drool counted as multitasking.
Plus, he had his recorder going. If the guy slipped and mentioned that he had just bought a house outside of his district—well, Caleb would have that shit on tape. And the rumor about the rider with limits to protesting had come from an excellent source, one who would get Caleb the rider as soon as she saw it.
Power grabs also made for strange bedfellows.
Swiping down on his phone screen brought a list of notifications, most of which weren’t a surprise. Twenty work emails, three of which promised information in exchange for keeping the sender’s identity a secret. Ten personal emails. And a text from his dad.
Whoa-hoe... What was this? A notification from one of the dating apps he used. A wink—so a passive sign of interest from someone, rather than anything active.
Before he clicked to see who the wink was from, he texted his current date with information that he’d be late because of a work meeting and that he would bow to her wishes whether she wanted to wait, reschedule or call him an ass and kiss him goodbye.
After a quick glance up to make sure he wasn’t missing anything, Caleb flicked the notification open. Dogfan20895 was cute. Square jaw, but a big, toothy smile that more than made up for it. Dark brown eyes. A wicked way of lifting her eyebrows—wouldn’t that be fun to see her do in real life. Given that she had one photo of her with a brindle hound and one picture of the hound itself, she wasn’t kidding about being a dog fan.
But...she had a nice set of breasts and he couldn’t get over how arched those brows looked, so he winked back. Then he looked at her pictures again. Her smile was nice. The way she was laughing in that picture of her with her dog was even better. Caleb clicked the message button and typed out something quick.
Hey. Cute smile. Cute dog, too. What’s his name?
It wasn’t his best opening line, but he was working, supposed to be meeting another woman for a date and hadn’t read her profile yet. She’d either bite or she wouldn’t.
The world—especially the online-dating world—was full of women. If she didn’t at least nibble, well, there’d be another woman along with a smile that suggested she knew what he was up to.
CHAPTER TWO (#uc8205a00-018e-573a-9ffe-d67265e0bf47)
“I DON’T LIKE the wall color,” the statuesque blonde with her hair up in a neat French roll said as she swept her arm around at the creamy, peachy beige that made up the walls of Buono Come Il Pane. “It’s too...bland. My wedding won’t be bland. It will be different,” the prospective bride said with the same finality she’d used for every proclamation she’d made about her wedding.
Different. Special. Unique. Memorable. All a lot of requests for something special out of a woman named Jennifer. Not that there was anything wrong with the name, but...
But the name was on every tenth woman, or so it seemed. Being one of a hundred Jennifers in any given square mile probably contributed to her desire for a unique wedding. Beck could be more forgiving.
Maybe.
Buono Come Il Pane hosted events of all kinds. Graduations. Retirement parties. Anniversaries. Birthdays. And weddings. Beck loved weddings the most—she really did. Her divorce hadn’t changed the fact that she loved happily-ever-afters and romances and engagement stories. But there were particular brides she didn’t love, and this woman seemed likely to walk down the aisle as one of them.
“Buono Come Il Pane’s decoration evokes the warmth of Tuscany,” Beck said. Buono Come Il Pane translated to “good as bread” and it meant something like “good as gold.” They served a small menu of finely crafted Tuscan food. They didn’t boast of the size of their wine list, letting the quality of their selections speak for themselves instead. The interior design was much the same—not spare so much as elegant.
“Its simplicity isn’t for everyone, of course. That’s a decision you and your fiancé have to make.” Beck glanced at the groom, Tanner, who’d come to the appointment with his future bride. He’d come—Beck would give him that. But that seemed to be the only nod he’d make to participating in planning the event that would cement his life to another’s.
Maybe he had a stressful job, she thought. Or perhaps he was worried about a friend of his. Or had something else on his mind, other than the wedding. There, Beck thought, satisfied that she’d turned her irritation with his silence around. The prospective groom was here to support the love of his life, but they both knew he had a lot on his mind because...work. Work was a nicer reason than a sick friend he might be worried about.
Beck smiled charitably at the man before turning back to the woman, who was standing with her hands on her hips, looking thoughtfully at the walls.
“I don’t suppose you could paint the walls...” Jennifer said, trailing off.
“No. It is important to us that we make our brides happy and that their wedding day is special, but we can’t repaint the walls.”
“Well, rats,” the woman said. Beck tried not to laugh. The woman was high-maintenance and, despite all her talk about special, unique and different, had no idea what she wanted her wedding to look like. But she had said “rats” with such honest disappointment that Beck couldn’t help but try to like the woman.
“Buono Come Il Pane has a specific look and a specific feel. Might I ask why, if we’re not what you wanted, did you make an appointment? And why are you still considering us? We’d love to be the right place for you, of course,” Beck hastened to add, “but we know we’re not the right place for every bride and it’s important that you’re comfortable with the location you choose.”
“This is my dad’s favorite restaurant,” the future groom chimed in from his spot against the wall. “If we pick here, he’ll chip in half of the wedding costs and her parents will give us the difference for a honeymoon.”
“Our house down payment,” the bride said. “That’s a better long-term decision.”
See, Beck’s inner nice chided. It’s good that you decided to like the woman. She’s like all the other brides, trying to plan her future in the best way she knows how.
Even if she wants you to repaint and will probably want different linens. And different silverware. And won’t like the wine options. Or the food.
But she was a woman who was trying to figure out what she wanted and was determined to make it happen. That was worth a nod of respect, if nothing else.
“Money is important to consider when deciding on wedding venues. It’s easy to spend more money than you’d planned on and then be strapped later. I can’t tell you what to do, but we offer a basic set of options for brides, things that we think best show off our restaurant and the beauty of the occasion. If those aren’t what would make your wedding day the party you’ve always wanted, then perhaps we’re not the best place for you.”
It was easy enough for Beck to turn down one bride. Buono Come Il Pane was booked for June over a year in advance and the rest of the year’s availability was usually gone eight months in advance. When she was done with this appointment, she had a bridal event to plan for and she usually came out of those events with a couple more bookings.
Plus, a happy bride was the best possible advertising. An unhappy bride was the worst. If the woman was going to be unhappy with her wedding at Buono Come Il Pane, it was worth the money to pay her to go away.
“We might be willing to accept this restaurant’s style,” Tanner said, interested in the conversation now that money was on the line. “Right, honey? It could be worth our time.”
Jennifer smiled indulgently at him. “We want to honeymoon in Belize, and we have our eye on those private suites on stilts out in the water. Right now, it’s a wee bit out of our price range. Though, a down payment for a house would still be a better investment.”
“Well,” Beck said with a clap of her hands and quick glance at her watch. “You both have a lot of thinking to do before you decide on anything. Personal opinion, spend a lot of time—separately—thinking about what you each want. Then come together and make sure you overlap on the big stuff. That you’re not giving up anything that’s important to you. That’s really life advice—” the kind Beck wished she had taken “—and a wedding is a good place to start. It is the beginning of your life together.”
“Huh,” the groom said as he turned to stare back at the walls and art, clearly no longer interested in the conversation.
But his bride evaluated Beck more closely before asking, “Are you married?”
For most of her career, she’d loved to answer “Yes” and tell the bride that she’d had the most beautiful wedding under the sun. To say that they were blissfully happy. That she wasn’t always a bridal and events planner, but a bride. That she had been the magical bride, happy enough to walk on water, and had known what it was to come home to a loved one, share a glass of wine and chat about your day.
But those days were over. “I’m not,” she said, not willing to go into any details with a customer and a stranger.
“Divorced?”
“Well, yes. So I know of what I speak when I say you need to think about what’s important to you and make sure your fiancé feels the same.” She and Neil had always felt perfect for each other, until they weren’t.
The bride leaned in close to Beck, like they were teen girls sharing a confidence. “Tanner and I met through online dating. It’s possible, you know. The trick is to make sure you pick the right dating site. Some are for people looking for easy...” She paused, words rolling through her eyes before she settled on, “Companionship. The good sites attract men looking for marriage and commitment. Pick one of those.”
“Thank you,” Beck said surprised. The woman wasn’t giving her new advice, and she was a stranger, but she meant her advice honestly. Sincere, much like Beck had been when telling this couple to think about what they want before settling on a wedding venue.
“I’m looking,” she said, hesitant to confide too much to a stranger and prospective—though unlikely—customer. “I’ll admit it’s hard.”
Though, there was that message waiting for her when she’d come home from the walk yesterday.
She’d thought about that message all through making her dinner of roasted beets, blue cheese and pita bread—all things her ex-husband hadn’t liked. Eating her dinner, she’d still been thinking about that message. At that point, the amount of time she had been putting into thinking about the message had seemed excessive. And a little scary.
So much portent put into a little message by someone she didn’t know and might not even like. So much power in that little notification at the top of her cell phone.
She understood now why people said that you couldn’t take online dating personally. She hadn’t even been twenty-four hours in and already that message felt like life or death.
So, she’d made a deal with herself. No checking the message until she hadn’t given it a thought for at least five hours. By her count, when the bride had mentioned online dating, it had been four hours and fifty-seven minutes, not counting the hours she’d spent sleeping.
Close enough.
Jennifer patted her on the back. “You’ll get there. It’s hard, but it will happen. You’ll get your Prince Charming,” she said with a loving glance at her fiancé, who was looking too closely at the art on the walls to really be looking at them at all.
“Thanks. I hope you’re right.” Beck had only been separated for a year and divorced for twelve days, but she knew she wanted to get married again eventually, even if she occasionally pretended otherwise. The saying about fishes and bicycles was all well and good, but what if the fish wanted a bicycle? What if coming home to a bicycle had been better than coming home to nothing?
Take your time. Learn to love yourself alone. Spend time looking at all those couples you work with. Then you will know what you want out of your next husband. Get right into that dating pool or all the good ones will get away. Make sure to use a good moisturizer. Once you start getting wrinkles, it will only get harder.
All the advice was well-meant and none of it helpful. The fact that one piece of advice often contradicted every other piece of advice, sometimes out of the mouth of the same person, only muddled her already muddy mind more.
“You seem like a good person,” the woman said, giving her another long look. “So, I’ll give you a little more advice. Stay away from the handsome men.”
It was rude, but Beck couldn’t help glancing at the woman’s fiancé. He was good-looking enough—on the cusp between someone she thought would look good on someone else’s arm and who would look good on her arm.
“Tanner’s good-looking, but not handsome,” Jennifer said under her voice. “And as my grandmother used to say, handsome is as handsome does.”
Beck wasn’t entirely sure how to take this piece of advice, so she said, “I’ll keep that in mind,” and decided to leave it at that.
If his picture was anything to judge, Mr. Swoony was handsome. She smiled to cover up the desire to beat her head against the wall. The message might not even be from Mr. Swoony. It could be from someone else altogether. Mr. Less-than Swoony, for example, or Mr. Rotten Eggs.
“Thank you, to the both of you, for coming in today,” she said, her hand outstretched for the prospective bride to take. “Even if you decide that Buono Come Il Pane isn’t for you, I’m glad to have chatted with you and we appreciate you thinking of us.”
“Oh, of course. Tanner’s father insisted. And this does look like a nice place.”
Nice place, hah, Beck thought, the advice and comments about the wall colors and thinking about handsome men getting to her.
If only getting remarried didn’t have to involve dating, this process would be much easier. Meet a nice guy. Fall in love. Get married. That’s what she’d done in college, with Neil.
And here she was, newly evaluating what she wanted out of her future. That, at least, was a lot like college.
Once the happy couple left, holding hands and whispering to each other as they walked out the door, Beck went back to the tiny room they called her office and sat in front of her computer. Before she got back to her planning document for the bridal event she was working on, she pulled her phone out of her purse and checked the message.
Hey. Cute smile. Cute dog, too. What’s his name?
Mr. Swoony had written back. Her shoulders fell with a relief that she would be embarrassed to admit to anyone. Whether or not she should need validation from a stranger on an online-dating service, getting it felt better than not getting it and that was the darn truth.
Before writing back, she checked her other notifications. No other messages, just a couple of winks and a couple of likes for the pictures she’d posted. She held the phone up a little closer to her face to see those likes of her pictures.
Well, she thought as she sat back in her chair. There’s a fine how-do-you-do. All three likes on her photos were on pictures of Seamus.
At least men seemed to like her dog. She hoped he appreciated how popular he was among the men online. Mr. Swoony had even taken some of the precious real estate in his short message to say he was cute.
For a brief second, Beck thought about changing her profile picture to one with her and Seamus, but then decided she was overthinking the whole thing and needed to stop before she drove herself crazy.
Instead, she did what she thought was the reasonable thing and replied to Mr. Swoony’s message.
Thanks! Seamus, my dog, is a sweetheart. Stinky breath, but really, what dog doesn’t have stinky breath? You said in your profile that you like to hang out in downtown Raleigh. What’s your favorite place? I loved Busy Bee and was enormously sad that it closed.
What will I do without those tots?!
Her finger hovered over how to sign the message. With her name? Mr. Swoony hadn’t signed with his name. Maybe names just weren’t done at this stage in online dating. Maybe they were supposed to get to know each other a little better.
Maybe he’s not an online-dating veteran, either, and everyone in this room knows you’re overthinking this, Beck. Self-chiding done, she sent the message and called herself done with online dating for the day.
She had work to do and better things to think about than a romantic-looking guy who, if she were to believe today’s bride, was too handsome for his own good.
* * *
WELL, HELLO, CALEB thought as he read the message on his phone from Ms. Dogfan while he waited for his takeout, sitting in one of the plastic chairs in his favorite Chinese restaurant. Like the tables, the chairs were mostly for decoration. No one ate here—they ordered off the sign above the counter and got their food to go. The food was good and the restaurant catered to the busy professional who didn’t have the time or energy to figure out how to use the kitchen.
Or, as in Caleb’s case, only swept the crap off the kitchen counters when company was due over.
He’d shove everything into his office and shut the door for Ms. Dogfan. She hadn’t written very much, but it was cute. Short. Succinct. Charming enough to make him want to know more. That and her smile was enough to write back.
Ah, yes. Busy Bee had the best tater tots. And huevos rancheros. You could never go wrong with their brunch. It’s not a bar and it’s not tots, but have you had the fries at Chuck’s? I’m partial to those. And the milkshakes don’t hurt.
Seamus, huh? That seems like a good name for your dog. Does he have a green collar? And do you buy him a little green bow tie on St. Patrick’s Day?
—Caleb
There. That was enough to keep the conversation going. After all, these emails were really about deciding if they wanted to meet in person. Best not to give too much away and either not live up to the email charm or say something so phenomenally stupid that the woman wouldn’t be interested in meeting at all.
Not exchanging lots of emails was part of the trick, too. Emails gave you time to think about what you wanted to say, to edit your words and your tone. To rethink. He’d been on a couple of dates with women who’d been absolutely enthralling over email but flat in person.
Likely, a few women had thought the same about him before he’d learned to offer a date early—like three quick exchanges in.
“Thirty-five,” the man barked from behind the counter. Abby, his daughter, must be at soccer practice tonight, because she wasn’t working the register. She was a bubbly girl who chatted with the customers as she rang up their orders; she even shared little details of her life with her favorites. Caleb knew how to ask questions, so he knew what college she wanted to apply to—North Carolina State University. What she wanted to study—Fashion and Textile Design. And what her parents thought about her dreams—nothing good.
Caleb felt for the girl. He’d disappointed his parents, too, despite trying to do the opposite when he’d started writing for his college paper and discovered that he loved it. Whenever Abby complained, Caleb gave her the same advice that every young adult needed to hear—life was long and your life almost never turns out as planned, but it usually turns out okay if you let it.
Much like online dating, Caleb thought as he accepted the plastic bag of food Mr. Lin shoved across the cracked laminate.
His phone rang as he approached his car. Only after he’d opened the passenger door and shoved enough papers out of the way to have a place to put his food was he able to reach into his pocket. A missed call from his sister, Candice. After he got settled, he called her back.
“Caleb, you have to get me out of this date.” Her voice echoed against the hard surfaces of whatever room she was in—probably the bathroom.
The hairs on the back of his head stood at attention. “Do I need to come get you, get you out of this date?”
“No. It’s not that bad. Just, I said yes to a date with a coworker and I shouldn’t have, because, awkward if it doesn’t work out.”
“Just tell the guy that you’re not that into him.” He was backing out of the parking spot, which is why he didn’t notice the silence on the other end of the line. “You’ve slept with him already, haven’t you?”
“Is it better if there wasn’t any sleeping?” He groaned and she tsked. “Not like you have any room to judge.”
“Dating is a game and it’s not an even playing field.” Like life and all the best sports, there was a strategy to dating, and Caleb had studied it. Not that he abused the tricks he knew—he wasn’t out to prey on women or trick them into a date they didn’t want. But he wasn’t going to sabotage himself, either, and he fully expected the women on the other end of the computer to be using the same tricks—or be in the process of learning them.
But he knew the rules were stacked in his favor. Candice generously shared with him all the dick pics she’d gotten, even though he assured her that one was enough. But he’d rather look at “the log,” as she called them, than any of the screenshots she’d sent him of men calling her a bitch when she wouldn’t show them hers.
“You say that...” He didn’t need her to finish her sentence. They’d had this argument many times, usually when she called him because she’d gotten herself into a sticky situation.
“You’ve got to think about,” he started to say, stopping when he heard her voice finish the admonition, “what your desired outcome is.”
Candice said her desired outcome was a steady job, steady housing and a steady boyfriend. Then she would do something like have sex with her coworker before she knew if she liked him, put her job at risk and—this was his baby sister, after all—then she’d likely find out the guy was also her new roommate’s favorite cousin.
“You sleep around.” A familiar argument for a familiar ride home.
“I like women. I’m looking for company for a night or two. Nothing else.”
He liked how soft a woman’s skin was and all their laughs and the variety of their bodies and their smells. Whenever his coworkers said he was a lady’s man—almost always with a raised eyebrow and a twinge of jealousy in their voices, even the married ones—he told them they could be, too, if they started liking all women and approaching them with metaphorical open arms. Women knew when a man was listening to them just because he wanted to get some. And make no mistake, Caleb liked sex and usually wanted some with the woman he was on a date with, but he’d enjoy the conversation and the company whether sex was on or off the table.
He’d watched a few of his coworkers approach women at bars during happy hour. Some women they wanted to listen to. Some they just wanted to bang. And in other cases, it only seemed to matter that they had two X chromosomes. Women could feel the difference in the way a man approached them, and they responded accordingly. And men couldn’t fake it. They were either genuine or creeps.
The car in front of him stopped suddenly and Caleb had to slam on his brakes, holding out his arm to stop his dinner from flying forward into his dash. The phone, sitting in the center console, nearly spilled out onto the floor. If his sister landed in the pile of papers covering the floor mat, he’d never find her. And he’d never hear the end of it. He might have embraced the idea that all journalists are pack rats, but his sister still called him a slob and wondered what the appeal of the unkempt writer was.
When this special series on election maps was over, he’d bundle all this paper up in a box, nicely labeled, and pack it in his attic, until the next story buried him.
He recovered enough from the near accident to pay attention to the phone call and hear his sister’s voice fill his car with, “Maybe all I want is a man’s company for a night or two.”
“Then walk out of the stall you’re in, head to the guy’s table and tell him the one night was fabulous—”
“It wasn’t.”
“You’re about to dump him. You can lie about the fabulousness of the night.”
“Do you lie to your dates?”
“We’re talking about you and how you’re going to tell him that the one night was all you wanted. And you’re going to stop telling men how you need to find a nice guy. That’s what gets you into these situations.”
“I do want a nice guy.”
“No, you don’t. Like me, you want a good time and a disappointed father.”
Candice’s giggle carried Caleb down the street to the entrance of his own neighborhood. “Did you get a text from him today, too?”
“The one about the Kerrs having their fourth grandchild? Yup.”
“What if this guy gets mad?”
As he turned into the small road leading to his townhome, he repeated the same thing he always told her. “If he gets mad, then you made the right decision. If he doesn’t get mad, he might be worth another night of a good time.”
Then he remembered what his sister had said about her one-night stand. “Only not this one, since the first night wasn’t that good of a time.”
As he put his car in Park, he thought about the book he joked about writing. Dating Advice by Caleb. Something to compete with those creepy pickup artists who advocated cornering women and never taking no for an answer.
His goal was good company, great sex and no long-term commitments, in that order. He was also just fine with the idea that a woman had sovereignty over the decisions she made about her time and her body.
“I just got home. We good?” He turned the car off.
“Yeah. He probably suspects something is up. Mad or not, he won’t be surprised.”
“Uh, no,” he agreed with a laugh.
“You have a hot date you need to get ready for?”
“Hot date with a continuing-education class on writing narrative nonfiction.” Tonight, his relationship included not alienating his computer by spilling fried rice on it while he finished his copy. He needed the keyboard to still like him enough that he could pursue his own passions after meeting his deadline.
“I didn’t know you were interested in writing nonfiction.”
“I’m a man of surprises.”
She laughed hard enough to practically bray. “No, you’re not. You just think you are.”
“Go out and break a man’s heart. Send me a text and let me know how it goes when you’re done.”
“Bye, bro.”
“Bye, sis.”
Once they’d hung up, Caleb tossed his phone in the bag with his food and prepared for the usual night of a single man, rather than the nights all his coworkers imagined he lived. If he were feeling especially frisky, maybe he’d ask the cute dog lover to meet him for drinks. That was all the action he could handle tonight.
CHAPTER THREE (#uc8205a00-018e-573a-9ffe-d67265e0bf47)
BECK STOOD ON the sidewalk outside a cocktail bar in Durham’s small downtown, trying not to look stood up. It wasn’t easy. With all the people out and about early on a spring evening, there wasn’t much space to stand with anything approaching nonchalance.
Caleb, aka Mr. Swoony, was late. She looked quickly at her phone. Okay, calling him late wasn’t entirely fair, since she had been fifteen minutes early. She’d rushed everything today, starting from the moment she’d sat bolt upright this morning, an hour before her alarm had gone off. She’d had three cups of coffee, two more than she usually had when she woke up. But she’d tried to waste some of her extra hour over coffee and a magazine. It had been that or stare at her closet and rethink what she’d planned to wear today, which was guaranteed to be a bad idea. Of course, too much coffee had given her the shakes, which meant her homework assignments for her art class were a mess.
And then she’d stared at herself in the mirror, trying to figure out what first date hair and makeup should look like. And she’d changed her mind about what to wear before settling back on the ruffled cream-colored dress with a peachy cardigan, seafoam green scarf and matching bangles. Later, when she’d called her friend Marsie—who had been dating forever before meeting the man she was set to marry—her unhelpful friend had told her not to worry about what she was wearing and instead think about what she would talk about with a stranger.
Knowing what to say to a stranger had never been a problem for Beck, but finally she had decided Marsie was right about the first part. She pulled out the outfit she’d planned to wear originally, got dressed and then left for her date.
Of course, she’d driven too fast and there hadn’t been any traffic, so her plan to sail casually through the door of the bar at exactly six in the evening wouldn’t work. Now she had to try to make it look as though this wasn’t her first date since...college.
And, as it had for the entirety of the day, trying was failing her. As she shifted from foot to foot to foot and wondered where to rest her hands, she probably looked like a woman who’d already had too much to drink and was about to have more.
“Beck?”
She started at the smooth, deep voice that said her name from the left. “Caleb?” she asked as she turned. All this time she’d been staring out to the parking garage to the right, not expecting him to come from the left.
His shoes were nice. Casual black loafers, well-worn, but not scuffed, like he both wore them a lot, but also took care of them. Dark jeans with trim hips and the hem of a light purple button-down.
And an outstretched hand, which she took before meeting his eyes. But when she did meet his eyes... God, they were as light green in person as they had been in his pictures. Not only were they an unreal light green, but they were smiling, and his entire face was surrounded by pitch-black hair that made it look as though he’d just gotten out of bed in the best possible way.
He might be the most handsome man she’d ever seen in real life, and if it wasn’t for the slight crook in his nose where he’d probably broken it, she’d think he stepped out of a photoshopped magazine spread.
He was slender and tall, too. Willowy, without being weak-looking. Frankly, it was all a bit unreal.
She smiled back at him as she took his hand. Well, if this was going to be her first date in over twelve years, at least she was starting on a high note.
“Nice to meet you,” she said. God, his hand was warm, even on a cool late-spring night when he wasn’t wearing a jacket. He was probably perfect and did things like keep the woman in bed next to him warm, even if she always had ice-block feet.
“Likewise. Shall we?” He swept one hand onto the glass of the bar’s front door.
“Yes.”
He opened the door for her and she took one step into what felt eerily like her new future.
* * *
BECK WAS NERVOUS enough that her hand shook as he had gripped it in his. She even walked like she was nervous, with her shoulders up near her ears and quick, rabbit-like steps that made the ruffled bits at the bottom of her dress bounce about her fine legs. And her square jaw had tightened as she’d smiled, rather than opening in the bright grin he remembered from her profile picture. Her rich brown hair was shoulder-length and feathery around her chin and collarbone.
She was just as cute as she’d been in her profile pictures, with intelligent eyes and an open face. In fact, her nerves were endearing. Caleb couldn’t remember the last time he’d been nervous on a date, nor could he remember the last time he could recognize that one of his dates was nervous.
Her profile said that she was divorced. If he had to guess, she hadn’t been divorced long. Once inside, he stood back to watch her move as she approached the bar.
“Hi,” she said to the young woman wiping a glass dry. Then, to his surprise, she stood on her toes and her legs looked almost a mile long sticking out of the bottom of her dress. The hem of her cardigan lifted, though not enough for him to see if she had a nice ass.
He was trying to figure out what she was all about when she said, “That’s a nice dress,” to the younger woman behind the bar, who beamed wide with pleasure. “That’s a Marauder’s Map on your dress, isn’t it?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the girl says. “You like Harry Potter?”
“Doesn’t everyone? Or everyone who knows anything.” Beck sank back on her heels and Caleb could see that she was smiling.
Well, isn’t this different. Caleb had been on hundreds of dates and planned to go on hundreds more before he died. Many of those women he’d gone out with had been nice. They’d been friendly to waitstaff and kind to the person who helped them in the shop. But Beck struck him as different. She was one of those rare people who was kind to people because she saw each and every person in front of her as a unique and interesting individual who was worthy of getting to know.
That was different from someone being polite because they were supposed to or because they were a cheerful introvert. Even through her nerves, Beck exuded a warmth that even the bored-with-life hipster behind the bar responded to. Caleb had been to this bar what felt like a thousand times, both on his own and with dates. The bartender had never looked back at him with a real, honest-to-God smile, no matter how polite he was.
Beck was different, alright. If Caleb had to guess, he’d say Beck was one of those people who hugged strangers and they didn’t mind.
He was so lost in his own thought and evaluation of her that he didn’t notice she’d ordered and paid for her drink until the girl was handing over a martini glass with a purplish liquid in it and Beck was agreeing to start a tab.
“Anywhere you want to sit?” she asked, turning to face him.
There weren’t a lot of seats in this bar to begin with, and his favorite date table was taken. “How about that one?” he asked, gesturing to a booth away from the door.
“Sounds good,” she said and then stepped away. He stayed put but continued watching her make her way through the people until she was at the table he had gestured to. Then she got out her phone, typed something quickly, and then seemed to turn the volume down and put the phone into her purse.
He’d turned the ringer of his phone off back when he’d parked his car. And it was a point in her favor that she’d done the same and tucked it away where it couldn’t be a distraction. He turned back to the bar and ordered his gin and tonic and some bar snacks. He ignored the little voice in his head that told him his life was changing today. His life had the possibility of changing every day, with every breath.
Beck was sweet and he dug the intelligent sweep of her eyebrows, but she wasn’t going to change his life any more than any of the other women before her had. Even if the smile she greeted him with held a hint of mischief.
CHAPTER FOUR (#uc8205a00-018e-573a-9ffe-d67265e0bf47)
“SO, TELL ME about your dog. Why is he named Seamus?” Mr. Swoony—she supposed she should be calling him Caleb now—asked as he lounged in the bar’s booth. Lounge was a quiet word for the sprawl of all his limbs across the fabric. Only a man at ease with his body from tip to toe could so easily extend his extremities without worrying about whacking over the large vase of flowers next to his right hand.
He was probably good in bed. A man that comfortable with himself had to be good in bed, right? Or, maybe, it meant that he only thought of himself. What did she know? Neil was the last man she might have looked at and evaluated how good he’d be in bed, and yet she couldn’t remember if she’d ever done that. Since it had been college, probably not.
She took a sip from her Aviation cocktail, smiling a little. At her thoughts. At her lack of experience. At the big leap she felt like she was taking into life. She wasn’t smiling at Caleb, exactly, until she caught his gaze and a shiver of pleasure ran down her spine.
Definitely good in bed. More certainly, it had been over a year since she’d had sex and that was long enough to make a woman imagine orgasms in every man’s gaze.
“Seamus?” She looked away quickly before she actually imagined what the sex would be like. That sounded too much like committing herself to a roll in the hay, and she wasn’t sure she was ready to do that. Over a year might be a long time, but she could wait longer. She wasn’t looking for an open barn door.
“The shelter said he was found muddy, in a swamp. The woman who found him and cleaned him up said he looked like a half-dead beast dragged out of the bogs.” She shrugged, a little self-conscious. “It made me think of Seamus Heaney.”
He raised a black brow, which made her more self-conscious. “Poetry, huh?” Then he smiled and her self-consciousness disappeared with his casual acceptance.
“I’m proof that English majors get jobs.”
He barked a laugh. “So am I.”
They shared another quick glance that made her toes tingle. It was harder to look away this time.
Friends told her that she needed to know what she wanted with this whole dating thing, but they hadn’t told her how to know what the person she had a drink with wanted out of the experience. Well, except for the bride, Jennifer. But Jennifer’s advice had only been to pick the right dating site and avoid handsome men. Caleb was in direct violation of at least one of those pieces of advice.
What did Caleb want?
Unable to bring herself to ask that question, she asked, “What do you do?” instead, spinning her martini glass on the table. His profile had said he was a reporter, but that was vague.
“I write for the Raleigh paper. Politics. I cover the General Assembly.”
That set her back a little in her seat. “Not a simple job. And always something to report on.” Anything happening in national politics had to have a run in the state first, sometimes including the out-and-out battles.
“All those bills made in the dead of night. I have trouble keeping track,” she confessed. “And the laws they pass don’t seem to relate to anything. What does women’s health have to do with motorcycle safety laws?” She’d been against that one on principle. And Leslie was one of her favorite people to work with, so she’d been against the bill that banned people from bathrooms and even called her representatives about that one. She was prouder of her stance when she learned later that the bill had included a bunch of other stuff about restricting local government. Frankly, she was generally against bills coming out of her state capital on principle. Maybe she would be for them under different, more open circumstances, but she didn’t know what was in them because they were presented and passed within hours.
Secrecy was bad, and being against secrecy was easy. That was a political stance she could get behind. But having to admit that she struggled to keep track made her feel like she was out of her league, especially when the only other thing she could think to add was, “Your job sounds hard.”
He smiled, like he heard it all the time. But also like he enjoyed his job and was not-so-secretly pleased every time someone said, “Oohh.”
“It uses my writing skills, which is good. And I like talking to people, and being a reporter gives me an excuse to ask people questions. And,” he shrugged like he was humble about his job, even though she could tell he wasn’t, “I think freedom of the press is important. So, I’m glad to be a part of that.”
“You said English major, not a journalism major. Do you have a wild tale of career changes? Some dark experience in your past that made you determined to expose evildoers and right wrongs?”
“Like a bite from a radioactive spider?” He had the most delightful shrug. Comfortable and agreeable, like he’d seemed to be all night. She tried to imagine him tracking down sources—if they even called them sources—or badgering someone he was interviewing until they gave away their secrets. Tried and couldn’t. He seemed too slippery to be hard, and she didn’t even mean slippery in a bad way. More like water, flowing around obstacles and making its own path.
And, like water, he could settle into a comfortable stillness, which he did as he answered her question. “I liked to write as a kid, tell stories and make up lives of the neighbors’ pets. I’d sit them down and ask them questions about their day, then report the gossip to my parents.”
His face froze for a moment, so clear that she thought she could see all the way to the bottom of his soul and some inner hurt he was trying to hide, but then he smiled and the secrets he might be keeping were obscured by the mask he wore.
A reflecting pool she would be tempted to sit and think next to suddenly revealing the soul of the water sprite inside.
“My dad didn’t like me telling those stories,” he said. “Especially after Mom died. She’d been the person who liked to hear them most. ‘Kids’ nonsense,’ he used to say, and he would tell me I was too old to be playing make-believe.”
His cheeks were smooth, his eyes were wide and clear, and anyone glancing over at their table wouldn’t think he might be saying anything upsetting. For all Beck could tell, he didn’t consider this to be an upsetting story.
Still pretending, she thought. Only he doesn’t realize he’s pretending anymore.
“That’s the kind of guy my dad is, you know. Old-fashioned. Men are men and that means stoic faces and no talking to pets. So, I would tell the stories to my younger sister and we would play television. Game shows and TV news, with me reporting on the pets. For some reason, my sister always reported on weather and sports.” His voice softened when he spoke about his sister, and that was cute. And, if she were honest, made her a bit jealous as an only child.
“Anyway,” he said with a shake of his head that cleared the emotion out of his voice, “Once I got to college, I thought I should be a writer, because I liked to tell those stories. My roommate worked for the college paper and I tagged along, writing stories for them. I covered town politics and how it affected the college.”
He snorted. “I used to joke that college town politics were a lot like the politics of the pets—all that emotion sharing a tight space. One Christmas, I was watching the nightly news with my dad and sister. I don’t even remember what the reporter was talking about, but I remember my dad complaining about politicians and ‘the man’ and the cheats. It’s not like he did bad. He was a car salesman at a nice dealership and he made a good living, but he seemed to always think the world was keeping secrets from him and those secrets were why he wasn’t doing better.”
Beck nodded in sympathy. “I grew up in DC. I really should know and understand politics better than I do, but it always seemed too...opaque is the word I want, I think. And getting older hasn’t made it any easier to understand.” She hadn’t paid that much attention, either. Both because North Carolina politics were dead-of-night things and because politics, like her parents, had always seemed cold.
“Yeah. That’s how most people feel, I think. My dad is my audience, even though he thinks I’m as crooked as the people I report on.”
She winced at that admission.
“I understood what the reporter was talking about. The local politics I was reporting on for the school paper are almost as far from national politics as a cat is from a dog, but they’re still pets and I understood pets. My dad didn’t and still doesn’t.”
“Reporting seems like a manly job. Smoke-filled backrooms. Secret committees.” She knew what it was to have parents who didn’t approve of your work. Her parents had been remote and never deigned to talk with her about their jobs, but they were still shocked when she didn’t follow in their footsteps.
Her parents thought she was a glorified waitress. They didn’t see how she made memories for people or why that might be a worthwhile job.
“Some of it is contamination by proximity.” This shrug was less effortless. “Politicians are all crooks and, since I count some politicians as my friends, then I must be a crook, too.”
“And are you? That seems like the sort of thing I should know, even if this is a first date.”
She meant it as a joke and he laughed, both of them pretending that what she’d said had actually been funny. For all the momentary glimpses she’d gotten of his soul, his surface might as well be a thick sheet of ice. Short of some thaw, she couldn’t see in.
And he can’t see out. Or in, either. There was a little boy in there still hurt by his father’s disapproval, and that little boy didn’t talk to the man sitting across the table from her.
“I don’t think my dad wants to know more about the rules that govern his life. If he knew, he might have to do something about the things that make him unhappy. And some of it is that he doesn’t like his son knowing more than he does. To him, I’m still telling stories and by stories, he means lies. Holidays at my house are a barrel of laughs.”
He snorted again, a wry noise offset by his embarrassed half smile. “I don’t know why I’m telling you any of this, especially after one drink on a first date. Normally, I just tell people that my sister and I played television news as kids, but I like writing more than I like television news, so here I am. That’s the sanitized version.”
It was her turn to shrug and she tried to make it the easy, careless movement he’d seemed to perfect. “I’m easy to talk to?”
“Yes, Ms. Dogfan, yes, you are. In fact, you are so easy to talk to that I’m going to get another drink. Want one?”
“Yes, please.” She liked being thought of as easy to talk to. Nothing he’d confessed had been scandalous, but she knew why it felt personal. And she didn’t think it was that she was easy to talk to so much as it was the dark bar, with soft music and bench seats that cocooned around them. A little bubble, where nothing they confessed to each other would escape.
Safe, she thought. He had felt safe talking with her, which she understood, since she felt safe sitting here with him, too. Which surprised her. Standing outside the bar, shifting back and forth on her feet, she’d felt like her nerves were radiating out through Durham’s small downtown, forcing walkers to push through it like it was a heavy wind.
Those nerves had stayed with her as she’d ordered her drink and as she’d silenced her phone. Then Caleb had sat down, asked about Seamus and poof—all those nerves were gone. If he asked, she might lay out all her secrets on the table for him to pick through.
Might. She was determined to be smart about this whole dating thing and laying her baggage on the table for Caleb to examine was not even in the same time zone as smart.
Though, she considered as she watched the way he laughed with the bartender and chatted up other people at the bar, smart didn’t seem like much fun when his lanky body was part of the equation. In the abstract, all the contradicting advice left her at sea in her own life, each life preserver she was being tossed leading her to an unknown shore.
She could land on Caleb. She’d probably be back adrift again, but kissing those shoulders might be worth it. And then she could say she tried. One less choice available to her.
She was still watching him as he returned with two drinks and a report of snacks. Carefree as he was—or as he was pretending to be, considering the story he’d told her about how he got into journalism—her staring didn’t seem to bother him. “It’s not dinner,” he said as he sat down and told her what he ordered. “But we could go get dinner, if you want.”
She cocked her head. “You just ordered us another drink.”
“Well, yes.” He looked amused and she wasn’t sure what he was smiling about until he said, “Am I just a two-drink dude, or might you want dinner even after that second drink?”
“Oh!” He’d told her that personal and revealing story, which was sweet, but that he liked her well enough to think even an hour into the future hadn’t occurred to her. She’d been thinking well over an hour into the future, but she’d been thinking about how good his black hair would look against her white sheets. Dinner hadn’t played a part in any of those thoughts.
“Let’s see how we feel after this second drink and round of snacks. Maybe we won’t need dinner,” she said.
For a moment, she thought she saw the hurt of rejection flitter over his face, but then he seemed to consider what else she might mean. He put his hand on the table, palm up. “No dinner, huh?”
Emboldened by the soft lighting and a little alcohol, Beck put her hand on top of his. “Maybe no dinner. Depends on how hungry we are.”
He raised an eyebrow. They were holding hands, or not quite. When he curled his fingers, the tips brushed her palm and she could feel his touch in her toes. “Does it also depend on what we’re hungry for?”
“Yes.”
“Your lead, Beck.” Their hands were still touching, hers on top, both with the ability and acknowledgment that she could pull away at any moment. That he wanted her to be touching him, but wouldn’t argue if she felt otherwise. She relaxed her arm, letting her palm fall onto his and curled her fingers around the side of his hand.
His recognition that she could say no made her want to say yes. It made her want to scream “yes” as he was on top of her, maybe kissing her neck.
Sex with a near-deadly handsome near stranger was an option to her now. She could take this man home with her. She could go home with him. The realization made her feel almost two feet taller. And she certainly felt stronger. There had been moments during her separation when she had realized that she could make her own choices, but for the first time, she felt like she was in control.
The second feeling was different and it was heady.
She didn’t lift her hand when their snacks were brought over. He didn’t move his hand, either, and they both switched off drinking and eating with the other hand. She didn’t want to let him go.
Over their second round of drinks, he asked her about her job. Her second cocktail buzzed through her head. The room was dim. So, when he asked her what she liked about her job, she felt comfortable enough to confess the truth. “Honestly, it’s been hard. I’m not a wedding planner and people come to my restaurant for other types of celebrations, but mostly it’s weddings. I talk to a lot of excited brides who are certain that this is forever and, well, that’s hard right now.”
She looked at the bar for a moment, studying the bartender’s movements and the way the woman leaned into customers she liked and leaned away from the ones she didn’t. Once she felt less immersed in her own pain, she turned her attention back to Caleb. “It’s a little easier now than it was. I’m no longer angry at my ex, at the world and especially at the happy couples.”
She paused to take a sip of her cocktail. “Work is easier when I can celebrate with my customers, instead of pretending.”
“Newly divorced, then?” he asked.
“My divorce went through...” She paused, pleased the date didn’t pop into her head immediately. “A couple weeks ago.”
She pressed her lips together, but the words slipped out anyway. “You’re my first date since Neil left. God, which makes you my first date in over ten years.”
He sat up straight, which amused her. He had looked so good when he was relaxed and easy in his chair. Sitting up straight, shoulders back, chin lifted didn’t seem to fit his romantic, sensual lips. “Am I? Well, then, I shall be extra good tonight.”
“You would treat me differently because I haven’t had a date in forever?” For reasons she couldn’t put her finger on, she found that offensive.
“I remember what it was like to be divorced. I felt like I was hunting around for the real Caleb, who I was without my ex around. I didn’t know what I wanted or why. The first woman I went on a date with gave me time to figure myself out. And she was patient when I freaked a little. It’s a gift I would like to pass on to you.”
She still eyed him suspiciously. “Should I worry that you’re too perfect?”
“No pressure is the point. No one needs pressure, but you especially don’t need it now.”
“So, am I going to be disappointed by man number two that I date?”
He shrugged. “I can’t speak for man number two. I hope not. But I understand men can be shits. I’m probably a shit more than I realize. Or would admit to.”
She laughed. She couldn’t help herself. He was open and disarming. It was almost an impossible combination to resist. She picked up the last olive and popped it in her mouth, and then took a sip of the last bit of her drink. “Let’s go,” she said, tightening her fingers so that she had a hold on his hand.
“Dinner?” he asked.
“I have food at my house.” She could make her own choices and she was choosing him. At least for tonight.
“Are you okay to drive?”
She turned her head and knew the answer immediately. “No.”
“Are you okay to invite me home?”
“Yes.” She bit her bottom lip, but in for a penny, in for a pound. “I think I made the decision to bring you home when you put your hand out. I didn’t need the second drink to loosen my inhibitions, but I did want to talk with you more.”
“Give me a chance to mess up,” he said, but he was smiling and there was no malice in his voice.
“I like to think I was giving you a chance to succeed beyond your wildest dreams.”
“Tell you what. I’ll go and close out our tabs. We can add your drinks to my bill. We’ll get a takeout pizza from the place down the street so you don’t have to make us dinner. Then we’ll head to your place.”
“Are you giving me a chance to change my mind?” For some reason, the idea that he might be doing that pissed her off. She appreciated the lack of pressure. She didn’t need to be treated like a child.
“Hell, no.” He caught her gaze and the air between them practically caught fire. “I’m hungry. I like pizza. And I plan on stripping your clothes off as soon as we step through your door.” He hadn’t needed to tell her his plans; she could read them in his slow, sensual smile. “That won’t leave you time to make us dinner.”
“Okay,” she said with a nod as she scooted out of the booth. She wanted this. She wanted him.
She waited by the door, watching while he paid for their food and drinks. His body was long and lean. He’d slouched and practically relaxed all through drinks, but he was also in control of each part from tip to toe. He lounged because he was completely comfortable in his body, not because he was lazy. He rolled with that confidence as he walked toward her. “Ready?”
“Yes,” she answered as she slipped through the open door.
Out on the street, she took the elbow he offered and sank against him for the walk to the pizza place. She hadn’t had so much to drink that she was unsteady on her feet, but she usually drank wine, not cocktails. And at home, not a bar. Plus, there had been all those months that she hadn’t kept wine at home, for fear that it would become too quick a companion to her sorrow.
The Aviations were going straight to her head. The knowledge that she was going to have sex was going...well, it was going straight to the rest of her body, making her weak in the knees. Coming on her own wasn’t the same as sharing the experience with someone. And Caleb was going to be a good person to share the experience with.
“Do you trust me to drive your car?” he asked, after they’d ordered their pizza and were back on the sidewalk, escaping the press of the crowded restaurant.
His question pulled her back, unhappily, to reality. She’d been happily imagining what his hand on her breast would be like and had to ask him to repeat himself.
“Do you trust me to drive your car?” When she looked up at him, the streetlight caught a twinkle in his eye that made her think he knew exactly what she had been thinking.
“Why?” She wasn’t sure of the answer. Trust seemed a tricky thing in a situation like this. She had trusted his emails enough to say yes to the date. In the bar she trusted him enough to slip her hand into his and let him lead her wherever he wanted her to go.
Which just proved Marsie right. When Beck had wondered if she should invite a man back over to her house after a first date or go to a hotel or something, Marsie’s advice had been to ask why she would be having sex with a man she didn’t trust enough to see where she lived.
Beck hadn’t had a good answer to that one.
She had read The Gift of Fear. She listened to her gut. And Caleb didn’t ring any alarm bells with her. But that was sex and walking through her front door. She didn’t know anything about his driving.
They were standing close to each other on the sidewalk. She felt his every movement and had to focus on what he was saying instead of letting her mind wander to how his body would feel, naked against hers.
“Well,” he explained, “you don’t feel comfortable driving. And driving won’t be a problem for me. I could drive you to your house in my car and, tomorrow morning, drive you to come get your car. Or, I could drive you in your car to your house and I’m the one who has to come get my car in the morning. Me driving your car seems both the more gentlemanly thing to do and the most practical. If we were going to my house, I’d say we should take my car.”
She looked up at him and bit her lip. What if he wouldn’t leave in the morning? She’d been living alone in her house for over a year and, to be honest, quite liked it. The toilet seat was never up.
“Or,” he said as he leaned against the building and she felt like she had space to breathe—to think, “we could take our pizza and eat it over on the tables at Five Points and we can go our separate ways for the night. And there are hotels. Nice ones. If you’re looking for a night, but not another date.”
He shrugged. “But I’d like to see you another time.”
The shrug was the clincher, full of interest but no pressure that she raise that toilet seat because he expected it. “Drive me home. We’ll have pizza and see where we go from there. That sounds good.”
He peeled himself off the building and was back in her space again. She liked him in her space. Frankly, she wanted him to be in more of her space. For there to be no space. He probably had dark, curly chest chair and she wanted to run her hands over it.
“Great.” God, even his smile was romantic, slow and full of promises. She was going to have sex. She was going to come. For the first time in months, she wouldn’t be completely responsible for making it happen. And it was going to be awesome.
The woman at the hostess stand gestured to them from the other side of the restaurant’s big windows. Beck stayed outside while Caleb went in and got the pizza. When he hit the sidewalk, a box of hot pizza in his hand, she fell into step beside him while they walked to her car.
She didn’t say anything, wasn’t even sure there was anything to say. It felt almost like losing her virginity for a second time—she could either babble out her nerves or let them keep her quiet company. She chose quiet company.
CHAPTER FIVE (#uc8205a00-018e-573a-9ffe-d67265e0bf47)
BECK DIDN’T SAY a word the entire way from the pizza place to her car, three whole blocks. Caleb would have worried, but she didn’t seem reluctant to be coming with him. Or to have him coming with her, since they were on their way to her house in her car.
Nerves, he figured. He remembered those days, right after his marriage had ended when he’d been at a bar for the first time, looking for company. He hadn’t been very good at meeting women when he’d been younger. Memories from his early twenties bordered on painful. Whenever he looked at pictures of himself from those years, he couldn’t take his eyes off the Adam’s apple as big as his nose and the Ichabod Crane awkwardness, complete with trying to woo the beautiful Katrina with poetry. Caleb had kept his life, but there had been moments when he’d wondered if the poor schoolmaster had been relieved to have his humiliation disappear at the hands of the headless horseman. In those years, he certainly wouldn’t have turned down a big hole to swallow him up, Adam’s apple first.
That first night back in the game after his separation, he’d opened the door to the bar and his only thought had been, “Let me not be alone for an hour.” Instead of poetry, he’d walked up to the first woman who made eye contact and said, “Hi, I’m Caleb,” while sticking out his hand.
All his confidence about talking with random strangers after years of being a reporter puffed out in an embarrassing whimper when she’d said, “I’m taken,” making her friends laugh. Except one of the women had come up to him at the bar a little later and introduced herself as “Sabrina, but my friends call me ‘Not Taken.’” It was his turn to laugh. He’d stumbled through questions about her job and her interests and they’d ended up back at his house.
The nerves had only disappeared when Sabrina had left the next morning. And they’d shown up again and again and again for the first year as slowly the memories of shuffling his feet and bad poetry faded into the background. Sometimes he missed the nerves. He didn’t miss being nervous, really, but that lack of nerves reminded him that he’d been dating for a long time.
That was not a thought he liked, though he wasn’t sure what the alternative was. And without dating, he wouldn’t meet a woman like Beck. There was something about that square chin and big, round smile that did him in—reality was even better than her profile picture.
“Anything I should know about the car?” he asked after he’d put the pizza in the back and slid into the driver’s seat.
“Nope. Drives like it’s supposed to.”
He turned the key. “Good. I like it when the D means drive.”
Unless she was giving him directions, Beck also was silent for the entire drive back to her house. Which was also fine, since Caleb wasn’t certain he’d be able to hear her over the growl of his stomach as the smell of pizza permeated everything.
* * *
EVERYTHING WAS HAPPENING in slow motion, Beck realized as she stuck the key into her lock and turned it. Seamus was barking in the background. She could feel Caleb behind her, a large, mostly unknown presence that she welcomed, even if she wasn’t sure what she was going to do with him. Or, she knew what she wanted to do with him, but she just worried that she was out of practice with the whole process, from pre-sex to post-sex. The last time she had taken a near stranger to her house was...well, it would have been her dorm room in college and they had both been drunk enough that she couldn’t remember if she’d had a good time.
Since then, it had only been Neil. With a shock, she realized she was glad it wasn’t Neil tonight.
As soon as the door opened and they both stepped in, her dog was there, bouncing up and down and making any need to talk to each other moot. Caleb actually got down on one knee, holding the pizza box up high. Seamus gave him one big lick before settling down for a solid ear scratch.
“This is the famous Seamus,” he said, looking up at her. Seamus had a dopey grin on his face, his tongue lolling out to the side. The dog slobber added a shine to his nose, making Caleb even more perfect.
She nodded. “No green collar, though. Maybe for St. Patrick’s Day.”
He rocked back on his heels and then stood, still balancing the pizza box. “It’d look good on him. But the blue collar he has now looks good, too.”
“Thanks.”
They stood in her entryway, Seamus between them, looking back and forth, waiting for one of them to do something exciting. Give him a slice, probably. Lucky to be a dog and know both what he wanted and to not feel self-conscious about how to get it.
“What do we do now?” she asked.
“That depends on what you want out of the night.” He held his arms out. It felt like an invitation, though she didn’t step inside them. Not yet. “I’m here. If you changed your mind about what I’m here for, I’ll take an Uber back to my car. No hard feelings. If you didn’t...”
“I didn’t,” she interrupted. The last thing she wanted was for him to think she was changing her mind. “I’m just nervous. It’s been...” She paused. “A long time since I’ve done this.”
“Had sex?”
“Over a year for that. Divorce, you know.”
“I know,” he said with a slow nod and she felt that same instant connection she had in the bar, this sense that he understood her nerves and didn’t judge her for them. That she was safe.
“And sex during marriage is different,” she said.
“Well, sure. In the best case, you manage to be both experimental and steady about what gets the other person off. In the worst case...” He shrugged. She didn’t need him to finish that statement. In the worst case, you didn’t have sex and either your libido died a slow, lonely death or you relieved your frustrations elsewhere. Horrible cases, both.
“How about this? I need to wash the slobber off my face and Seamus probably wants a trip outside. Let’s take care of the practicalities and come back to reassess. We can talk. Drink a little wine. There’s pizza to eat. Calm the nerves a little.”
“Am I the only one that’s nervous?”
She must have caught him off guard, because his eyes went wide for a moment before returning to their regular, dreamy state. “I remember being nervous, but it’s been a long time. Maybe it went away. Maybe I just learned to ignore it.”
The other questions floating about her head settled into one decision. “The powder room is to the right. The kitchen is through there,” she said with a gesture of her hand. “The wine should be pretty easy to spot, if you want to open a bottle. The glasses should be easy to spot, too.”
“Okay,” he said with a long stride in the direction she’d pointed. She thought about it for a moment, but then she decided to be amused by how easily he moved through someone else’s house. If he was practiced, well, that would make the rest of the night, especially with her nerves, easier.
As soon as she heard the pizza box hit the counter, she set her purse down and snagged the leash.
Seamus did his business and then wandered back inside and straight into the kitchen to check out the new person in the house and the pizza. Beck dashed upstairs for the condoms she’d bought after signing up for online dating. They might make it back to her bedroom for round two, but she had spent the car ride imagining the snap of his buttons as she undressed him, and she didn’t plan to wait until after dinner. Nerves be damned.
Both Caleb and a glass of red waited for her when she walked into the kitchen. The wine glinted in the light above the center island. Caleb smiled at her and she had to take a deep breath before she was able to smile back. Tossing the strand of foil packets on the counter, she took the wine in her hand, tasted a sip just large enough to make her skin feel sensitive and then set the glass on the counter, next to the condoms.
He raised a brow at the string of condoms and then a corner of his lips rose as she took his glass from him and set that on the counter. But he didn’t say anything. His eyes followed her every movement as she walked around to stand directly in front of him and then lowered as she stepped close to him. It was her turn to be in his space. He smelled a lot like pizza and a little like wine and Dove soap.
The tip of her nose touched the underside of his chin, nudging his face up to expose his neck. “So, do we kiss first?”
She could feel his smile as the muscles of his face changed against her nose. “Is this Pretty Woman? Kisses aren’t part of the deal?”
He moved his chin a little and her nose bumped against his skin. “Which one of us are you implying is the prostitute?”
That question made her look up. His pupils had gotten big, making his eyes nearly a forest green with only the slight line of sea green around the edges. Angry? Aroused? Probably a little bit of both, given what she hadn’t meant to imply. “I’m not sure what to do,” she said.
“What do you want to do?” he asked, his voice deep and gravelly.
Beck pressed her two palms on either side of his face and pulled his head down to hers for a kiss. He had large, romantic lips and he knew how to use them. She sank into the kiss, sank into him and sank into the touch of another person.
She could disappear.
Their lips stayed connected as he sidestepped a couple feet to one of her barstools and hopped up on it. He opened up his knees and pulled her in between his legs, nibbling the edge of her lips and cradling her body in his. He was hard; she could feel that through his jeans and her thin skirt. Strong thigh muscles, too, probably from the biking he said he was into—her last conscious thought before he shifted forward in the stool, slipping his hands down her back to her butt and pushing her forward. The movement pressed the wetness of her panties against her and the evidence of her own desire aroused her more.
“This will be my first time in a long time,” she said after she pulled her mouth away and was dropping kisses on his jawbone. He had a sharp jawline and the scruff of his beard was rough against her skin. A good kind of rough. A rough that she would remember tomorrow, long after he had left.
“I know.” He leaned back in the chair, pressing harder against her. “You mentioned that.”
Emboldened by his casual acceptance, she shifted so that she could kiss her way down his neck. As she worked her way down from his neck, the buttons on his shirt popped open with the same satisfying noise that she had hoped they would. He sucked in his breath when she took his nipple into her mouth, the mess of dark hair she’d expected tickling her nose.
She had never wanted to enjoy the male body so much in her life. Never before wanted to explore its hard edges and soft lines, to match a kiss and a touch to a noise of pleasure. Like water, she’d thought of him before, only now he was water in a desert and she was thirsting. His fingers slipping beneath her underwear to her pussy hinted at the relief of a deep drink, though pressing her forehead against his chest wasn’t enough to quench her ache. His fingers stroked and twirled and played. If she didn’t think, she wouldn’t remember to breathe. Then there were no thoughts left to be had, no breath left to be had and she came in a glorious, light-filled rush.
“My turn,” he said.
She was too empty to pay much attention as he shifted her around a bit to undo his jeans and slip a condom on. His hands were back on her butt, lifting her and moving her, and suddenly she was straddling him on her tiptoes and he was inside her.
“Oh, God,” she said in a hot breath. “I have missed this.”
“Yeah,” he said, moving her on him in long strokes. His palms gripped her tightly, his fingers prodding into her flesh and guiding her where he wanted her to be. “Like it?”
“Yes,” she said, throwing her head back and pushing herself forward, pushing him deeper.
Sex was great. She hadn’t forgotten, just hadn’t wanted to remember, so that she didn’t feel lonelier. With Caleb inside her, there was no reason to feel empty. Plenty of reason to look at him, though. She snapped her head back forward so she could see the way the muscles of his face tightened with his pleasure, enjoying the tensing of the ligaments of his neck and feeling the hot burst of breath against her cheek as he grunted with his efforts. Her first sex in well over a year and she was going to memorize the details, hold them out and examine them when she was lonely.
His hands stayed on her butt while his nose bumped up against her face. A handsome, kind, interesting man buried deep inside her. He’d given her pleasure and she was giving him pleasure. This—this man and this moment—was what she had been looking for when she’d signed up for online dating.
Especially this man. When she turned, his lips caught hers, and with one gentle bite, he held her mouth against his. Then his muscles stilled and he grunted with a couple last hard pushes inside her.
He lay his forehead against her and they stayed still, connected and intimate. Then he shifted, pushing her gently away. “I’ve got to go take care of the condom.”
“Of course.” She pulled herself off him, feeling empty as he slid out of her and headed to the powder room. She had missed sex. But she had especially missed married sex, where sex didn’t have to end because of a condom, but you could stay joined until the man’s cock softened enough that he slipped out. She missed a man’s softened cock between her legs in their shared dampness.
Well, that wasn’t going to happen while she was dating. That was a committed, monogamous relationship feeling only.
She shimmied a little and adjusted her panties so they were back in a comfortable position. Married sex was a thing to miss, but this non-married sex had been wonderful and she’d take advantage of it for as long as she could.
She swiped the empty foil packet off the counter and tossed it into the trash. After Caleb was out of the bathroom, she slipped in and she washed her hands. To her pleasant surprise, Caleb was already getting out plates for dinner.
“I hope you don’t mind,” he said as he rested two plates on his forearm. “I figured we were both hungry, so I should get everything as ready as I could.”
“I don’t mind at all,” she said, enjoying the truth of that statement. He stood in her kitchen like he belonged there.
CHAPTER SIX (#uc8205a00-018e-573a-9ffe-d67265e0bf47)
CALEB TOOK THE plates to the dining room while Beck grabbed flatware and wineglasses. They both came back for the pizza box and wine bottle. Which had come first, she wondered, his ability to move through another person’s space with no self-consciousness or his reporting? He’d said he started reporting with his college paper, and it was fun to imagine him busting into the dean’s office, some hot question on his mind and his reporter’s notebook in hand.
For some reason, she didn’t picture him as a hot college student with his romantic hair and intense green eyes. He’d probably had the eyes, but she imagined him more awkward, with a buzz cut, maybe, and needing time to grow into his limbs. It fit better with how at ease he could make her feel—like he knew what it was to be out of place and ensured those he cared about didn’t feel that way.
Cared about. Silly turn of phrase after one date. If she wasn’t careful, she’d get ahead of herself.
“The pizza’s gotten cold,” he said, pulling her out of her imaginings as the box slid out of his hands to the table.
“It’ll be good anyway. And it was a good trade-off,” she said, with a shy smile, the idea of caring about someone after one date lingering in the back of her head. What did it even mean to care about someone? And how much did letting a man inside you change that? How much did being inside a woman change that?
Did sex have to change it at all?
“Absolutely,” he agreed. “This is a nice room, by the way.”
“Thanks.” She hesitated, with more she wanted to say on her tongue and too much on her mind to remain light and funny. Of course, he’d not remained light and funny with her—not with that story over drinks. If he could share something so personal, so could she.
She was at least that brave. And he was at least that safe. “One night, not long after Neil moved out, I was sitting on one of the barstools, eating a frozen dinner, when I realized that I had this huge house and was only using one bathroom, one bedroom and the kitchen. So I’ve been eating in the dining room ever since.”
“Making the space your own. I remember that feeling,” he said with a nod, and she knew she’d made the right choice—the right choice about everything tonight.
Caleb reached out and opened the pizza box. To Beck’s surprise, he first grabbed her plate. “How many pieces do you want?”
The pizza smelled amazing. It had lamb meatballs and kale, and she could eat every slice, if she put her mind to it. Back when Neil had first moved out, she’d been afraid to allow herself any indulgence, for fear that she wouldn’t be able to stop. Like with the dining room, she’d been letting her fear ruin her enjoyment of her house, of food and of her life.
“Two, please.” They were small pieces, and she had come a long way since Neil had moved out.
He placed two pieces on her plate and then set it in front of her and filled up her wineglass. “Mind if I take the rest?”
“No. Help yourself.”
“Thanks.” He took the other two pieces and then sat back in his chair.
They each ate a couple bites in silence until Caleb took a sip of wine and cleared his throat. Beck looked up from her own food. “I was the one who moved out. I moved into this random town house. It was the first thing I could find after we decided to separate. I still live in it, actually.”
He took another drink of wine and she realized that, for the first time tonight, he was nervous—though he probably didn’t realize it. “I spent the first three months thinking, ‘this is where Leah would put...’ whatever it was I was holding in my hand. She was particular about where she put stuff, more so than I am. I think it took longer for me to get used to putting pictures up where I wanted them to go than it took me to get used to sleeping in a bed alone.”
“I’m still not used to that,” she admitted before she took another bite of her pizza, which was salty and rich and delicious. After she swallowed, she said, “It’s one of the reasons I got a dog, actually.”
“Seamus sleeps on your bed?” he asked, with a raise of one eyebrow as he looked around the room for the dog. “Will I fit, too?”
Her forty-five-pound hound mix sat patiently by the edge of the table, waiting for handouts. Begging was on the list of things to work on, after he stopped jumping up on people.
Beck shook her head and chuckled. “A dog on the bed seemed like a good idea at the time, but Seamus doesn’t like sharing a bed with me any more than I like sharing a bed with him. He likes his personal space. I don’t like to be kicked. I got him an expensive dog bed for the bedroom and now we’re both happy.”
“Good. I was hoping to stay the night. And I don’t share.”
Warmth from the pizza, the wine and the heated look in his eyes spread through her body. “I was hoping you would, too.” He would wrap around her body quite nicely in a bed, her butt tucked against his crotch and his arm draped across her shoulder. Both naked, because they’d just had sex and she was the satisfied kind of sleepy that only came post-orgasm.
Yes, quite nicely indeed.
The thought was as delicious as the pizza.
“Like you, I miss sharing a bed.” He put his wineglass on the table and picked up the last slice of pizza on his plate. “It’s not enough for me to want to get remarried, though.”
And—like God had snapped Her fingers—all her warmth was gone. “Not get married again?”
“No. Divorce was horrible.” There was pain in his voice and his eyes, though when he blinked, it seemed to go away and he was back to being a charming man who seemed to have no problems. Did the mask fit so well that he’d forgotten he wore it?
“Fifty percent of marriages end in divorce.” He recited the words with the flat expertise of a man who dealt in facts for a living. “The odds aren’t good, especially given how bad the bad can be.”
“But...” She took a deep breath to control the sinking feeling in her chest. “The good can be really good. I remember being happily married.” She remembered the fighting more, but the good memories were in her head. Somewhere.
He shook his head. “I’m not sure I had anything good enough to make the bad worth it. Leah isn’t a bad person—we just suffered the difficulty of two people making a life together and not picking that right person to do that with.”
“Why date?” She wanted to get to know the world of men, sure. Have some sex and have a good time. But getting married had always been at the back of her mind, even if she hadn’t agreed to this date thinking that Caleb would be the one.
“For the same reason you are. Companionship. Conversation. Sex.”
“But not marriage.”
“Not long-term, no.”
Beck was silent for a long time while she processed what he meant, what that meant for their night and what the rolling of her stomach was trying to tell her, especially when she still wanted to curl up in his arms and feel the soft puff of his breath on her neck.
Her silence didn’t go unnoticed. He put his pizza down and assessed her. “Have I said something to upset you?”
Yes. “I’m surprised is all.”
“I didn’t think you would be looking for marriage. Not now, right after your divorce has gone through.”
I didn’t think so, either. If asked, she would have said she wanted to get married, but that first she wanted to date around a bit. Learn about men in their thirties, instead of in their late teens and twenties. She would have said exactly what Caleb had assumed.
But hearing it said back to her... No, that wasn’t what she wanted. Not that she had assumed she would stay with the first man she met, but she didn’t know how to have sex without thinking about something long-term. Not that it had to lead to marriage, necessarily, but that marriage had to be a possibility. It couldn’t be so far off the table as to be on another continent.
To buy herself some time, she reached for her wineglass and took a sip. Then another. Then another. Once some of the warmth was back, she experimented with a white lie. “I can’t say I’d thought about it one way or the other.”
Mostly true. Hardly counted as a lie at all.
“I didn’t send you a message or arrange this date expecting a wedding ring in a year.”
Completely true.
He let out a long breath. “Okay. Good. You’re interesting. You’re incredibly sexy and we’ve got enough of a connection that I didn’t want to be sent home.” He gave her a look bordering on naughty and said, “The sex was good.”
“The sex was good.” She wanted more of it. With Caleb. And she wanted to fall asleep with their limbs all in a tangle and the possibility of morning sex between them. Marriage was still a long-term goal. This night, with him, was her short-term goal and she was going to meet it.
If nothing else, she was going to prove to herself that she could do it. What it was, she wasn’t exactly certain. One-night stand, maybe. Let herself be comfortable with a stranger. Not pin her hopes on talking him into something she believed in, but he might not want. Not try to convince him of the rightness of her ways.
That was a short-term goal that matched up with her long-term ones.
Her mind made up, Beck popped the last bite of pizza in her mouth. “In fact, I’m done eating. I say we take this wine bottle up to the bedroom and see just how good more sex can be.”
His smile was wide and romantic, back to the Mr. Swoony that she’d called him in her mind. “I’m game for that.”
Beck wasn’t quite on her game as they joked and laughed while cleaning up their dinner. But she wanted sex again, and so she pretended, knowing she wouldn’t have to fake the orgasm. And, right now, that last part was more important.
CHAPTER SEVEN (#uc8205a00-018e-573a-9ffe-d67265e0bf47)
BECK HAD BEEN right about not needing to fake her orgasm. The force of it—brought on by Caleb’s magical tongue—should have put her right to sleep. Should have, but it didn’t. Instead, she lay in bed all night—Caleb breathing softly next to her and Seamus snoring softly on the floor—wondering what she was going to do in the morning.
Was this a one-night stand?
I’ve never had a one-night stand. But I’ve got nothing against them and I’m supposed to be trying new things. No reason a one-night stand can’t be a new thing. I’ve never had one, though. You’ve never been divorced before, either. The goal is not to figure out your future based on one night. You don’t even have to know now what you’re going to do come morning.
You don’t have to decide anything now.
And so it went. All night, in an exhausting bout of self-doubt and confusion.
Though not exhausting enough to put her to sleep.
But by the time Caleb had woken up and his hand had reached out for her skin, she knew that she was going to end their relationship as soon as they got out of bed. Trying new things, not pinning her hopes on one stranger...all of those things were fine, but company, companionship and sex with no end goal in sight was not something she wanted.
The one thing she wasn’t confused about was how much she had missed having sex. And an orgasm was definitelyon the list of things she wanted, and Caleb was good at giving them, so she pushed herself into his exploring hands and reached out to do a little exploring of her own.
* * *
CALEB PRACTICALLY SLID out of Beck’s bed, uncertain if his legs would hold him. Three orgasms in the span of twelve hours would do that to a man. “Mind if I clean up a bit?” he asked over his shoulder.
“You can take a shower, if you like. There are extra towels in the cabinet. I’ll make coffee.”
Beck’s voice had an edge that cut through his fog of sex and morning and had him turning around to face her, suddenly conscious of how naked he was. “Is everything okay?”
She was resting against the headboard, the sheets pulled up to her neck, hiding a magnificent pair of breasts. Clearly, he wasn’t going to have those nipples in his mouth again this morning, but he hoped for the next weekend. Maybe another night this week, if they could both swing it with work schedules.
“I didn’t sleep well,” was all she said. The vague sentence didn’t answer his question, but he didn’t push. Mornings after were weird. Being divorced for a couple years hadn’t made them any less weird, though it had made him more forgiving of how other people reacted when they woke up to find a stranger in their bed.
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Jennifer Lohmann
Was she falling for the wrong man again?Caleb Taggert is exactly what recent divorcee Beck Magruder needs—intelligent, handsome, and blissfully uninterested in anything long term. Her first date with Caleb does not disappoint. Yet after a night of passion, Beck realizes she’s looking for more than just a fling. Saying goodbye to an almost perfect man isn't easy.Luckily Caleb offers Beck a deal: no-strings attached fun, plus free advice for online dating. It’s the perfect arrangement, until Beck falls for Caleb. Suddenly, no other man can compete. What started as a fling has the potential to become something more. But is Beck ready to bet her future on it?
Is she falling for the wrong man again?
Caleb Taggert is exactly what recent divorcée Beck Magruder needs—intelligent, handsome and blissfully uninterested in anything long-term. Her first date with Caleb does not disappoint. Yet after a night of passion, Beck realizes she’s looking for more than just a fling. Saying goodbye to an almost perfect man isn’t easy.
Luckily Caleb offers Beck a deal: no-strings-attached fun, plus free advice for online dating. It’s the perfect arrangement, until Beck falls for Caleb. Suddenly, no other man can compete. What started as a fling has the potential to become something more. But is Beck ready to bet her future on it?
JENNIFER LOHMANN is a Rocky Mountain girl at heart, having grown up in southern Idaho and Salt Lake City. When she’s not writing or talking with librarians around the country about reading, she cooks and laughs with her own personal Viking. Together, they wrangle three cats. (The boa constrictor is better behaved.) She currently lives in Durham, North Carolina.
Also By Jennifer Lohmann
Dating by Numbers
Love on Her Terms
A Southern Promise
Winning Ruby Heart
Weekends in Carolina
A Promise for the Baby
The First Move
Reservations for Two
Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Her Rebound Guy
Jennifer Lohmann
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ISBN: 978-1-474-08470-3
HER REBOUND GUY
© 2018 Jennifer Lohmann
Published in Great Britain 2018
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.
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www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
“I’d like to make a proposal,” Caleb said.
He took her raised eyebrow as an invitation to continue. “I like you, Beck. You like me. And you want more sex in your life.”
“Yeah, but not willy-nilly.”
“Nothing I’m proposing is willy-nilly. I’d like to offer you companionship, conversation and sex while you look for the man you want to marry. Or until our relationship has burned its course.”
“A little man on the side.”
“Little? Come on.” He tried to act insulted, but the way her hand came up to her mouth in embarrassment was too cute not to laugh.
“But the on-the-side part is right?”
“I guess, yes. You are free to date other people. I’m free to date other people.”
“So why would we be dating each other?”
“Because we like each other. And because you probably need time to kiss a few frogs before you settle on your prince.”
Dear Reader (#uc8205a00-018e-573a-9ffe-d67265e0bf47),
Like Dating by Numbers, this book emerged out of my own forays into online dating. I...well, I wasn’t good at it. I met the Viking, fell in love and got married, so I was successful, but “good at it” seemed to mean I went on a lot of dates (I didn’t) and knew what I wanted out of the experience (I didn’t). You think, Everyone is telling me to do X, so I’m going to do it. But X isn’t you, and you can’t fight you. Enter Beck. Happily married when you first meet her in Dating by Numbers and on her way to divorce at the end. Confused, frustrated and scared by the entire experience—but determined.
From stage left comes Caleb, who claims to know what he wants and what he’s doing.
The truth, of course, is that dating is scary. There are those who admit it to themselves and those who don’t. But we’re all fumbling our way through until we meet the person with whom our muddy waters suddenly clear.
Oh, and for those curious, the pictures of my dog got more likes than any of the pictures of me.
Happy reading,
Jennifer
In memory of Tweedy, who was always there for me when I needed her. I’ll miss you, dear friend. Take Seamus for a walk for me.
Contents
Cover (#uc6057e0b-a4fe-5e14-a7ea-8c6af03fe5f2)
Back Cover Text (#u57ce684e-bebe-5cf2-bf48-b0021660114c)
About the Author (#u303057f4-7e69-5987-8070-14b7836bffe6)
Booklist (#u65d40327-fe60-5439-b057-43723dfe2ccd)
Title Page (#u7123cf3b-f594-5d92-ac19-b16174a96c27)
Copyright (#u64b5d976-b48a-5a36-922f-a7c8bcd93617)
Introduction (#uf82c90fe-bcac-539d-9248-0d7becf452bd)
Dear Reader (#u2cf2d7e8-0305-5c10-9db1-35ab3b1b1a3b)
Dedication (#u4974e73d-e02f-5477-8e09-470484787abc)
CHAPTER ONE (#ub8e4f154-0b74-5f4a-b0bb-ee4f78f5c0d7)
CHAPTER TWO (#u31dd0c81-9023-59ba-8e4b-1fe8f368bae7)
CHAPTER THREE (#u9d3d40e1-6e00-5238-873c-9e1441efc515)
CHAPTER FOUR (#u1947389e-06c3-5fd2-acd8-b72e3ae87504)
CHAPTER FIVE (#u25352840-26a4-51a8-be7f-aeb3a90b0b9d)
CHAPTER SIX (#u3acaa18c-3d2e-5150-a5d7-7d9e2b048870)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#u39bd2155-0d73-5420-9601-045d09024a95)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#uc8205a00-018e-573a-9ffe-d67265e0bf47)
IT’S A BIT like shopping the J.Crew catalog back in high school, Beck Macgruder thought as she finished posting information about who she was and then took a look at the men on the online-dating site she’d picked to try first. Some of the men were, well, she hated to be uncharitable, but they weren’t attractive at all.
Or, at least, she corrected in her own head as she scrolled past picture after picture, they hadn’t posted a flattering picture of themselves. Perhaps they didn’t have a flattering picture. Maybe they hadn’t known better. Maybe they didn’t have a friend to look at the pictures they posted and suggest something nicer.
There. That was a more charitable version of the story that had resulted in such a terrible picture posted on a dating website. It wasn’t that they were unattractive; it was that they hadn’t known it was a bad picture.
Picking a photo for a dating website was hard. Hard, of course, because there wasn’t a soul on earth who could look at a picture of themselves with anything like an objective eye. At least Beck had been able to get the opinion of her friend Marsie, who had found a man through online dating. Or, not exactly through online dating. Marsie’s fellow is a coworker of hers. They’d challenged each other to see who could find a partner first through an online-dating site, and then ended up deciding they were perfect for each other.
Right, Beck thought as she scrolled past another guy. Online dating wasn’t a guarantee of finding the perfect guy. As Beck figured it, online dating opened your mind to the possibility that there was someone out there for you, so long as you were looking for them. It was like tempting fate, but in a good way.
And it’s not like she was looking for one guy; she was looking for a lot of them. As she figured it, online dating was also a way to sample the merchandise before even deciding if she wanted to buy. Again.
Marriages weren’t returnable and you never got back what you’d paid out.
She clicked on a guy with potential and scanned the information he’d included about himself. Ah, yes, just like catalog shopping. This one looked good, but he wasn’t for her. This one was the male equivalent of spaghetti straps. Bandeau tops. He’d probably make someone else’s arms look good, but not hers.
Dampness bumped against her knee and she absently reached down to scratch the head of the boxer-pit-hound-and-probably-something-else dog she’d picked up at the animal shelter several months before. Seamus was a good-looking dog. All the pictures she’d taken of him in the months since he’d joined her household included a big grin, ears that could flop or perk depending on mood and a tail that looked more like the handle of a delicate teacup than anything that should belong on an animal with a room-clearing fart.
Of course, he was adorable in all of those pictures, so she’d included one of him by himself and one of them together in the photos she’d posted to the online-dating site. Best for men to know that she had a “manly” dog. He didn’t even eat vegetables, for God’s sake. Especially since the other information she put on the site included that she was a coordinator of events, mostly weddings. And she had wicker furniture on her porch.
With her dog’s chin resting on her knee, she hit the back button and scanned over her options again.
There. That guy would fit her like the perfect shoe. At least from his picture. Dark, messy, romantic hair and light green eyes. A man who would sit in her wicker rocking chair and read Byron’s poetry to her. Romantic—at least that’s what she assumed Byron’s poetry would be like.
All swoony.
And, after a nasty divorce where she’d felt every last second of North Carolina’s required year-long separation, Beck needed swoony.
She clicked.
Her disappointment must have rippled through her body, because Seamus huffed a little on her leg. Mr. Swoony wasn’t an English professor. Or a poet. Or a playwright—a pale imitation of a poet, but it would match the curls in his hair.
Mr. Swoony did say he was a journalist, though. That was a type of writer and somewhat swoony. And he liked biking. That was interesting. Long bike rides down some of the trails in The Research Triangle area. Maybe they would plan a complete Rails-to-Trails ride from the mountains of North Carolina to the coast. She could picture his hair curling out from under the rim of his helmet along his neck. And, oh yes, there would be picnics.
Beck could make a mean picnic. After years of working events and in restaurants, she knew how to choose food that would be easy to eat no matter the circumstances. Bride wearing a dress with long bell sleeves that brush across the table? No problem. Bride with a healthy décolletage who doesn’t want to fish food out from between her breasts before the honeymoon starts? No problem. Food that packs nicely, is good at room temperature and easy to eat with your hands? No problem.
She put her hand on Seamus’s head while she considered her next move. Mr. Swoony looked like he would enjoy a nice picnic. And the kind of guy she would like to make a nice picnic for.
And Beck missed making a picnic for people. Neil hadn’t been interested in picnics. Of course, she hadn’t thought she’d be interested in picnics, either, until she’d clicked on Mr. Swoony’s picture. It didn’t matter what he called himself on his profile. She was going to think of him as Mr. Swoony. And she was going to click.
A wink, to start. Messages on the first night of exploration seemed a little forward. She still didn’t know the rules of the online-dating world. She didn’t even know if there were rules. Heavens, despite all this data and Marsie’s insistence that online dating could be hacked with the perfect algorithm, online dating still seemed like the Wild West of meeting men. Which was why she was starting small, with one site, even when there were newer, flashier dating sites available.
Though, Beck considered as she evaluated the next picture on the screen, online dating couldn’t be any more Wild West than going to a bar and trying to look pretty.
Not that she would admit doing either to anyone right now. Everyone from her mom to Marsie to the servers at Buono Come Il Pane said she should wait a little longer before dating again.
“Get that husband of yours out of your head.” That bit of advice she rejected out of hand. Neil had been her college boyfriend and the only man she’d ever seriously dated. How could she get him out of her head if she didn’t have an idea of the kind of man who could replace him? Or even if a man should replace him? Seamus might fit in that companion spot nicely. And then there was the option of empty—empty could be good.
“Find yourself.” Which was stupid, because Beck knew where she was and she had a dog who snored in her bedroom to ground her to the fact that she was here, in her house, and Neil—the dog hater—wasn’t.
“You’re young. Take your time.” She paused a little every time that objection came up. Not because it was one hundred percent valid, but because it wasn’t a hundred percent invalid. She was thirty-two. Not young, unless she was being compared to her parents, but not old, either.
Maybe the biological clock existed. Maybe it didn’t. But something in her head had been ticking nonstop since Neil moved out—and before then, if she was going to be honest with herself, here in the privacy of her own home. She wouldn’t let the annoying noise of others run her life, but she wouldn’t ignore it, either.
Enough.
Marsie’s single piece of advice had been not to let online dating be the way she measured anything about her life, and it was the one piece of advice Beck had listened to. Getting responses wouldn’t determine her self-esteem level. She wouldn’t only look for dates. And, while she generally rejected Marsie’s insistence on all things scheduled, she would at least set up a schedule for checking her profile responses. No reason to have online dating become another Facebook that she trolled because she was bored.
On the other hand, she thought while Seamus sighed for his dinner and a walk, winking at one guy felt like a tacit admission that the men online weren’t all that interesting. Or that she felt over her head. Or that all those people were right and it was too early for her to be here.
With only a quick glance at the pictures and a more cursory look at the profile information, Beck winked at a few other guys. Then she logged out, snapped her laptop shut and put the thing someplace inconvenient while it charged, just to lessen the incentive to obsessively check if any of the men had responded to her wink.
When she stood, Seamus hopped on his hind legs. He didn’t jump on her—they’d been working on that—but he bounced. When she reached for the leash, he bowed and barked once, sharply, before running to the door and trying his doggy-darnedest to sit at the door through his excitement and get his leash attached to his collar.
Once she and Seamus stepped into the fading winter sunlight, online dating was forgotten. Mr. Swoony included.
* * *
THE PROBLEM, CALEB Taggert thought, with scheduling dates anytime during when the General Assembly was in session was that you couldn’t control when the men—and it was mostly men talking—would shut up. In theory, everything and everyone had a time limit. In reality, the battles of the General Assembly waged on and on and on. And had for years now.
The guy talking now had been talking for hours. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t hours, but Caleb had stopped taking detailed notes and was letting his recorder do most of the work. The representative had stopped saying anything new or interesting at least ten minutes ago. The bill under discussion was this man’s pet project and he was going to say what he wanted to say. For reasons Caleb didn’t know, but probably had to do with some backend deal he wanted to know about, committee leadership wasn’t cutting this guy off. Of course, half of what he said was bullshit. Caleb’s copy for the Sunday paper would include a lot of fact-checking and reminding the people of North Carolina about the rules regarding voter registration, IDs and the history of poll taxes.
The Civil Rights Era had a long tail, with battles like gerrymandering and voting rights seeming to stick to his beloved home state like dog shit to a shoe. The only bright spot—if one could call it that—was that debates like this one reminded Caleb why he’d become a reporter and who he was responsible to. The representative blathering on would be an entertaining guy to have a beer with, but there wasn’t much else good Caleb could say about him. But the constituents whom the man shook hands with when he was home deserved to know what he did with the faith they put in him.
Caleb’s article would also include some nice details regarding the recent polling about gerrymandering and one-voter-one-vote done in his home district. Stark comparisons like that made good copy.
Finally, the guy stopped talking about voters counting twice, voting in districts where they weren’t registered and—the money shot of scare tactics—undocumented immigrants voting. The session was about to be wrapped up and then all the people crowded into the committee room would spill out onto the lawn for a rally in favor of election-map reform. He’d need to stay for that, too, and talk with some of the protestors. The paper was sending a photographer over—there were bound to be some good signs and probably an arrest or two.
Politics in North Carolina hadn’t been boring...well, they’d never been boring, but they’d certainly gotten more interesting in the past ten years. Power grabs tend to do that, no matter which party has its grasping hands out.
Caleb had a date in thirty minutes and a twenty-minute drive looming before he could hope to park. Of course, the representative who had driveled on about voter fraud had no knowledge of Caleb’s personal life and wouldn’t care if he did. The paper didn’t care about his personal life, either. He had other reps to interview, copy to write and deadlines to meet. None of which was conducive to his evening plans.
Caleb gave in and pulled out his phone.
Diatribe about made-up voter fraud or not, he tried to adhere to the current research about phones, distraction and meetings, and he usually kept his phone hidden when he should be paying attention to someone else. Especially on a day like today, when the rumor was that a bill limiting the people’s right to protest was going to be snuck onto the end of this bill—not quite in the dead of night, but they would certainly try to do it when no reporters were watching.
Besides, the research said loud and clear that “people can’t multitask.” It’s just that researchers never established whether boredom to the point of drool counted as multitasking.
Plus, he had his recorder going. If the guy slipped and mentioned that he had just bought a house outside of his district—well, Caleb would have that shit on tape. And the rumor about the rider with limits to protesting had come from an excellent source, one who would get Caleb the rider as soon as she saw it.
Power grabs also made for strange bedfellows.
Swiping down on his phone screen brought a list of notifications, most of which weren’t a surprise. Twenty work emails, three of which promised information in exchange for keeping the sender’s identity a secret. Ten personal emails. And a text from his dad.
Whoa-hoe... What was this? A notification from one of the dating apps he used. A wink—so a passive sign of interest from someone, rather than anything active.
Before he clicked to see who the wink was from, he texted his current date with information that he’d be late because of a work meeting and that he would bow to her wishes whether she wanted to wait, reschedule or call him an ass and kiss him goodbye.
After a quick glance up to make sure he wasn’t missing anything, Caleb flicked the notification open. Dogfan20895 was cute. Square jaw, but a big, toothy smile that more than made up for it. Dark brown eyes. A wicked way of lifting her eyebrows—wouldn’t that be fun to see her do in real life. Given that she had one photo of her with a brindle hound and one picture of the hound itself, she wasn’t kidding about being a dog fan.
But...she had a nice set of breasts and he couldn’t get over how arched those brows looked, so he winked back. Then he looked at her pictures again. Her smile was nice. The way she was laughing in that picture of her with her dog was even better. Caleb clicked the message button and typed out something quick.
Hey. Cute smile. Cute dog, too. What’s his name?
It wasn’t his best opening line, but he was working, supposed to be meeting another woman for a date and hadn’t read her profile yet. She’d either bite or she wouldn’t.
The world—especially the online-dating world—was full of women. If she didn’t at least nibble, well, there’d be another woman along with a smile that suggested she knew what he was up to.
CHAPTER TWO (#uc8205a00-018e-573a-9ffe-d67265e0bf47)
“I DON’T LIKE the wall color,” the statuesque blonde with her hair up in a neat French roll said as she swept her arm around at the creamy, peachy beige that made up the walls of Buono Come Il Pane. “It’s too...bland. My wedding won’t be bland. It will be different,” the prospective bride said with the same finality she’d used for every proclamation she’d made about her wedding.
Different. Special. Unique. Memorable. All a lot of requests for something special out of a woman named Jennifer. Not that there was anything wrong with the name, but...
But the name was on every tenth woman, or so it seemed. Being one of a hundred Jennifers in any given square mile probably contributed to her desire for a unique wedding. Beck could be more forgiving.
Maybe.
Buono Come Il Pane hosted events of all kinds. Graduations. Retirement parties. Anniversaries. Birthdays. And weddings. Beck loved weddings the most—she really did. Her divorce hadn’t changed the fact that she loved happily-ever-afters and romances and engagement stories. But there were particular brides she didn’t love, and this woman seemed likely to walk down the aisle as one of them.
“Buono Come Il Pane’s decoration evokes the warmth of Tuscany,” Beck said. Buono Come Il Pane translated to “good as bread” and it meant something like “good as gold.” They served a small menu of finely crafted Tuscan food. They didn’t boast of the size of their wine list, letting the quality of their selections speak for themselves instead. The interior design was much the same—not spare so much as elegant.
“Its simplicity isn’t for everyone, of course. That’s a decision you and your fiancé have to make.” Beck glanced at the groom, Tanner, who’d come to the appointment with his future bride. He’d come—Beck would give him that. But that seemed to be the only nod he’d make to participating in planning the event that would cement his life to another’s.
Maybe he had a stressful job, she thought. Or perhaps he was worried about a friend of his. Or had something else on his mind, other than the wedding. There, Beck thought, satisfied that she’d turned her irritation with his silence around. The prospective groom was here to support the love of his life, but they both knew he had a lot on his mind because...work. Work was a nicer reason than a sick friend he might be worried about.
Beck smiled charitably at the man before turning back to the woman, who was standing with her hands on her hips, looking thoughtfully at the walls.
“I don’t suppose you could paint the walls...” Jennifer said, trailing off.
“No. It is important to us that we make our brides happy and that their wedding day is special, but we can’t repaint the walls.”
“Well, rats,” the woman said. Beck tried not to laugh. The woman was high-maintenance and, despite all her talk about special, unique and different, had no idea what she wanted her wedding to look like. But she had said “rats” with such honest disappointment that Beck couldn’t help but try to like the woman.
“Buono Come Il Pane has a specific look and a specific feel. Might I ask why, if we’re not what you wanted, did you make an appointment? And why are you still considering us? We’d love to be the right place for you, of course,” Beck hastened to add, “but we know we’re not the right place for every bride and it’s important that you’re comfortable with the location you choose.”
“This is my dad’s favorite restaurant,” the future groom chimed in from his spot against the wall. “If we pick here, he’ll chip in half of the wedding costs and her parents will give us the difference for a honeymoon.”
“Our house down payment,” the bride said. “That’s a better long-term decision.”
See, Beck’s inner nice chided. It’s good that you decided to like the woman. She’s like all the other brides, trying to plan her future in the best way she knows how.
Even if she wants you to repaint and will probably want different linens. And different silverware. And won’t like the wine options. Or the food.
But she was a woman who was trying to figure out what she wanted and was determined to make it happen. That was worth a nod of respect, if nothing else.
“Money is important to consider when deciding on wedding venues. It’s easy to spend more money than you’d planned on and then be strapped later. I can’t tell you what to do, but we offer a basic set of options for brides, things that we think best show off our restaurant and the beauty of the occasion. If those aren’t what would make your wedding day the party you’ve always wanted, then perhaps we’re not the best place for you.”
It was easy enough for Beck to turn down one bride. Buono Come Il Pane was booked for June over a year in advance and the rest of the year’s availability was usually gone eight months in advance. When she was done with this appointment, she had a bridal event to plan for and she usually came out of those events with a couple more bookings.
Plus, a happy bride was the best possible advertising. An unhappy bride was the worst. If the woman was going to be unhappy with her wedding at Buono Come Il Pane, it was worth the money to pay her to go away.
“We might be willing to accept this restaurant’s style,” Tanner said, interested in the conversation now that money was on the line. “Right, honey? It could be worth our time.”
Jennifer smiled indulgently at him. “We want to honeymoon in Belize, and we have our eye on those private suites on stilts out in the water. Right now, it’s a wee bit out of our price range. Though, a down payment for a house would still be a better investment.”
“Well,” Beck said with a clap of her hands and quick glance at her watch. “You both have a lot of thinking to do before you decide on anything. Personal opinion, spend a lot of time—separately—thinking about what you each want. Then come together and make sure you overlap on the big stuff. That you’re not giving up anything that’s important to you. That’s really life advice—” the kind Beck wished she had taken “—and a wedding is a good place to start. It is the beginning of your life together.”
“Huh,” the groom said as he turned to stare back at the walls and art, clearly no longer interested in the conversation.
But his bride evaluated Beck more closely before asking, “Are you married?”
For most of her career, she’d loved to answer “Yes” and tell the bride that she’d had the most beautiful wedding under the sun. To say that they were blissfully happy. That she wasn’t always a bridal and events planner, but a bride. That she had been the magical bride, happy enough to walk on water, and had known what it was to come home to a loved one, share a glass of wine and chat about your day.
But those days were over. “I’m not,” she said, not willing to go into any details with a customer and a stranger.
“Divorced?”
“Well, yes. So I know of what I speak when I say you need to think about what’s important to you and make sure your fiancé feels the same.” She and Neil had always felt perfect for each other, until they weren’t.
The bride leaned in close to Beck, like they were teen girls sharing a confidence. “Tanner and I met through online dating. It’s possible, you know. The trick is to make sure you pick the right dating site. Some are for people looking for easy...” She paused, words rolling through her eyes before she settled on, “Companionship. The good sites attract men looking for marriage and commitment. Pick one of those.”
“Thank you,” Beck said surprised. The woman wasn’t giving her new advice, and she was a stranger, but she meant her advice honestly. Sincere, much like Beck had been when telling this couple to think about what they want before settling on a wedding venue.
“I’m looking,” she said, hesitant to confide too much to a stranger and prospective—though unlikely—customer. “I’ll admit it’s hard.”
Though, there was that message waiting for her when she’d come home from the walk yesterday.
She’d thought about that message all through making her dinner of roasted beets, blue cheese and pita bread—all things her ex-husband hadn’t liked. Eating her dinner, she’d still been thinking about that message. At that point, the amount of time she had been putting into thinking about the message had seemed excessive. And a little scary.
So much portent put into a little message by someone she didn’t know and might not even like. So much power in that little notification at the top of her cell phone.
She understood now why people said that you couldn’t take online dating personally. She hadn’t even been twenty-four hours in and already that message felt like life or death.
So, she’d made a deal with herself. No checking the message until she hadn’t given it a thought for at least five hours. By her count, when the bride had mentioned online dating, it had been four hours and fifty-seven minutes, not counting the hours she’d spent sleeping.
Close enough.
Jennifer patted her on the back. “You’ll get there. It’s hard, but it will happen. You’ll get your Prince Charming,” she said with a loving glance at her fiancé, who was looking too closely at the art on the walls to really be looking at them at all.
“Thanks. I hope you’re right.” Beck had only been separated for a year and divorced for twelve days, but she knew she wanted to get married again eventually, even if she occasionally pretended otherwise. The saying about fishes and bicycles was all well and good, but what if the fish wanted a bicycle? What if coming home to a bicycle had been better than coming home to nothing?
Take your time. Learn to love yourself alone. Spend time looking at all those couples you work with. Then you will know what you want out of your next husband. Get right into that dating pool or all the good ones will get away. Make sure to use a good moisturizer. Once you start getting wrinkles, it will only get harder.
All the advice was well-meant and none of it helpful. The fact that one piece of advice often contradicted every other piece of advice, sometimes out of the mouth of the same person, only muddled her already muddy mind more.
“You seem like a good person,” the woman said, giving her another long look. “So, I’ll give you a little more advice. Stay away from the handsome men.”
It was rude, but Beck couldn’t help glancing at the woman’s fiancé. He was good-looking enough—on the cusp between someone she thought would look good on someone else’s arm and who would look good on her arm.
“Tanner’s good-looking, but not handsome,” Jennifer said under her voice. “And as my grandmother used to say, handsome is as handsome does.”
Beck wasn’t entirely sure how to take this piece of advice, so she said, “I’ll keep that in mind,” and decided to leave it at that.
If his picture was anything to judge, Mr. Swoony was handsome. She smiled to cover up the desire to beat her head against the wall. The message might not even be from Mr. Swoony. It could be from someone else altogether. Mr. Less-than Swoony, for example, or Mr. Rotten Eggs.
“Thank you, to the both of you, for coming in today,” she said, her hand outstretched for the prospective bride to take. “Even if you decide that Buono Come Il Pane isn’t for you, I’m glad to have chatted with you and we appreciate you thinking of us.”
“Oh, of course. Tanner’s father insisted. And this does look like a nice place.”
Nice place, hah, Beck thought, the advice and comments about the wall colors and thinking about handsome men getting to her.
If only getting remarried didn’t have to involve dating, this process would be much easier. Meet a nice guy. Fall in love. Get married. That’s what she’d done in college, with Neil.
And here she was, newly evaluating what she wanted out of her future. That, at least, was a lot like college.
Once the happy couple left, holding hands and whispering to each other as they walked out the door, Beck went back to the tiny room they called her office and sat in front of her computer. Before she got back to her planning document for the bridal event she was working on, she pulled her phone out of her purse and checked the message.
Hey. Cute smile. Cute dog, too. What’s his name?
Mr. Swoony had written back. Her shoulders fell with a relief that she would be embarrassed to admit to anyone. Whether or not she should need validation from a stranger on an online-dating service, getting it felt better than not getting it and that was the darn truth.
Before writing back, she checked her other notifications. No other messages, just a couple of winks and a couple of likes for the pictures she’d posted. She held the phone up a little closer to her face to see those likes of her pictures.
Well, she thought as she sat back in her chair. There’s a fine how-do-you-do. All three likes on her photos were on pictures of Seamus.
At least men seemed to like her dog. She hoped he appreciated how popular he was among the men online. Mr. Swoony had even taken some of the precious real estate in his short message to say he was cute.
For a brief second, Beck thought about changing her profile picture to one with her and Seamus, but then decided she was overthinking the whole thing and needed to stop before she drove herself crazy.
Instead, she did what she thought was the reasonable thing and replied to Mr. Swoony’s message.
Thanks! Seamus, my dog, is a sweetheart. Stinky breath, but really, what dog doesn’t have stinky breath? You said in your profile that you like to hang out in downtown Raleigh. What’s your favorite place? I loved Busy Bee and was enormously sad that it closed.
What will I do without those tots?!
Her finger hovered over how to sign the message. With her name? Mr. Swoony hadn’t signed with his name. Maybe names just weren’t done at this stage in online dating. Maybe they were supposed to get to know each other a little better.
Maybe he’s not an online-dating veteran, either, and everyone in this room knows you’re overthinking this, Beck. Self-chiding done, she sent the message and called herself done with online dating for the day.
She had work to do and better things to think about than a romantic-looking guy who, if she were to believe today’s bride, was too handsome for his own good.
* * *
WELL, HELLO, CALEB thought as he read the message on his phone from Ms. Dogfan while he waited for his takeout, sitting in one of the plastic chairs in his favorite Chinese restaurant. Like the tables, the chairs were mostly for decoration. No one ate here—they ordered off the sign above the counter and got their food to go. The food was good and the restaurant catered to the busy professional who didn’t have the time or energy to figure out how to use the kitchen.
Or, as in Caleb’s case, only swept the crap off the kitchen counters when company was due over.
He’d shove everything into his office and shut the door for Ms. Dogfan. She hadn’t written very much, but it was cute. Short. Succinct. Charming enough to make him want to know more. That and her smile was enough to write back.
Ah, yes. Busy Bee had the best tater tots. And huevos rancheros. You could never go wrong with their brunch. It’s not a bar and it’s not tots, but have you had the fries at Chuck’s? I’m partial to those. And the milkshakes don’t hurt.
Seamus, huh? That seems like a good name for your dog. Does he have a green collar? And do you buy him a little green bow tie on St. Patrick’s Day?
—Caleb
There. That was enough to keep the conversation going. After all, these emails were really about deciding if they wanted to meet in person. Best not to give too much away and either not live up to the email charm or say something so phenomenally stupid that the woman wouldn’t be interested in meeting at all.
Not exchanging lots of emails was part of the trick, too. Emails gave you time to think about what you wanted to say, to edit your words and your tone. To rethink. He’d been on a couple of dates with women who’d been absolutely enthralling over email but flat in person.
Likely, a few women had thought the same about him before he’d learned to offer a date early—like three quick exchanges in.
“Thirty-five,” the man barked from behind the counter. Abby, his daughter, must be at soccer practice tonight, because she wasn’t working the register. She was a bubbly girl who chatted with the customers as she rang up their orders; she even shared little details of her life with her favorites. Caleb knew how to ask questions, so he knew what college she wanted to apply to—North Carolina State University. What she wanted to study—Fashion and Textile Design. And what her parents thought about her dreams—nothing good.
Caleb felt for the girl. He’d disappointed his parents, too, despite trying to do the opposite when he’d started writing for his college paper and discovered that he loved it. Whenever Abby complained, Caleb gave her the same advice that every young adult needed to hear—life was long and your life almost never turns out as planned, but it usually turns out okay if you let it.
Much like online dating, Caleb thought as he accepted the plastic bag of food Mr. Lin shoved across the cracked laminate.
His phone rang as he approached his car. Only after he’d opened the passenger door and shoved enough papers out of the way to have a place to put his food was he able to reach into his pocket. A missed call from his sister, Candice. After he got settled, he called her back.
“Caleb, you have to get me out of this date.” Her voice echoed against the hard surfaces of whatever room she was in—probably the bathroom.
The hairs on the back of his head stood at attention. “Do I need to come get you, get you out of this date?”
“No. It’s not that bad. Just, I said yes to a date with a coworker and I shouldn’t have, because, awkward if it doesn’t work out.”
“Just tell the guy that you’re not that into him.” He was backing out of the parking spot, which is why he didn’t notice the silence on the other end of the line. “You’ve slept with him already, haven’t you?”
“Is it better if there wasn’t any sleeping?” He groaned and she tsked. “Not like you have any room to judge.”
“Dating is a game and it’s not an even playing field.” Like life and all the best sports, there was a strategy to dating, and Caleb had studied it. Not that he abused the tricks he knew—he wasn’t out to prey on women or trick them into a date they didn’t want. But he wasn’t going to sabotage himself, either, and he fully expected the women on the other end of the computer to be using the same tricks—or be in the process of learning them.
But he knew the rules were stacked in his favor. Candice generously shared with him all the dick pics she’d gotten, even though he assured her that one was enough. But he’d rather look at “the log,” as she called them, than any of the screenshots she’d sent him of men calling her a bitch when she wouldn’t show them hers.
“You say that...” He didn’t need her to finish her sentence. They’d had this argument many times, usually when she called him because she’d gotten herself into a sticky situation.
“You’ve got to think about,” he started to say, stopping when he heard her voice finish the admonition, “what your desired outcome is.”
Candice said her desired outcome was a steady job, steady housing and a steady boyfriend. Then she would do something like have sex with her coworker before she knew if she liked him, put her job at risk and—this was his baby sister, after all—then she’d likely find out the guy was also her new roommate’s favorite cousin.
“You sleep around.” A familiar argument for a familiar ride home.
“I like women. I’m looking for company for a night or two. Nothing else.”
He liked how soft a woman’s skin was and all their laughs and the variety of their bodies and their smells. Whenever his coworkers said he was a lady’s man—almost always with a raised eyebrow and a twinge of jealousy in their voices, even the married ones—he told them they could be, too, if they started liking all women and approaching them with metaphorical open arms. Women knew when a man was listening to them just because he wanted to get some. And make no mistake, Caleb liked sex and usually wanted some with the woman he was on a date with, but he’d enjoy the conversation and the company whether sex was on or off the table.
He’d watched a few of his coworkers approach women at bars during happy hour. Some women they wanted to listen to. Some they just wanted to bang. And in other cases, it only seemed to matter that they had two X chromosomes. Women could feel the difference in the way a man approached them, and they responded accordingly. And men couldn’t fake it. They were either genuine or creeps.
The car in front of him stopped suddenly and Caleb had to slam on his brakes, holding out his arm to stop his dinner from flying forward into his dash. The phone, sitting in the center console, nearly spilled out onto the floor. If his sister landed in the pile of papers covering the floor mat, he’d never find her. And he’d never hear the end of it. He might have embraced the idea that all journalists are pack rats, but his sister still called him a slob and wondered what the appeal of the unkempt writer was.
When this special series on election maps was over, he’d bundle all this paper up in a box, nicely labeled, and pack it in his attic, until the next story buried him.
He recovered enough from the near accident to pay attention to the phone call and hear his sister’s voice fill his car with, “Maybe all I want is a man’s company for a night or two.”
“Then walk out of the stall you’re in, head to the guy’s table and tell him the one night was fabulous—”
“It wasn’t.”
“You’re about to dump him. You can lie about the fabulousness of the night.”
“Do you lie to your dates?”
“We’re talking about you and how you’re going to tell him that the one night was all you wanted. And you’re going to stop telling men how you need to find a nice guy. That’s what gets you into these situations.”
“I do want a nice guy.”
“No, you don’t. Like me, you want a good time and a disappointed father.”
Candice’s giggle carried Caleb down the street to the entrance of his own neighborhood. “Did you get a text from him today, too?”
“The one about the Kerrs having their fourth grandchild? Yup.”
“What if this guy gets mad?”
As he turned into the small road leading to his townhome, he repeated the same thing he always told her. “If he gets mad, then you made the right decision. If he doesn’t get mad, he might be worth another night of a good time.”
Then he remembered what his sister had said about her one-night stand. “Only not this one, since the first night wasn’t that good of a time.”
As he put his car in Park, he thought about the book he joked about writing. Dating Advice by Caleb. Something to compete with those creepy pickup artists who advocated cornering women and never taking no for an answer.
His goal was good company, great sex and no long-term commitments, in that order. He was also just fine with the idea that a woman had sovereignty over the decisions she made about her time and her body.
“I just got home. We good?” He turned the car off.
“Yeah. He probably suspects something is up. Mad or not, he won’t be surprised.”
“Uh, no,” he agreed with a laugh.
“You have a hot date you need to get ready for?”
“Hot date with a continuing-education class on writing narrative nonfiction.” Tonight, his relationship included not alienating his computer by spilling fried rice on it while he finished his copy. He needed the keyboard to still like him enough that he could pursue his own passions after meeting his deadline.
“I didn’t know you were interested in writing nonfiction.”
“I’m a man of surprises.”
She laughed hard enough to practically bray. “No, you’re not. You just think you are.”
“Go out and break a man’s heart. Send me a text and let me know how it goes when you’re done.”
“Bye, bro.”
“Bye, sis.”
Once they’d hung up, Caleb tossed his phone in the bag with his food and prepared for the usual night of a single man, rather than the nights all his coworkers imagined he lived. If he were feeling especially frisky, maybe he’d ask the cute dog lover to meet him for drinks. That was all the action he could handle tonight.
CHAPTER THREE (#uc8205a00-018e-573a-9ffe-d67265e0bf47)
BECK STOOD ON the sidewalk outside a cocktail bar in Durham’s small downtown, trying not to look stood up. It wasn’t easy. With all the people out and about early on a spring evening, there wasn’t much space to stand with anything approaching nonchalance.
Caleb, aka Mr. Swoony, was late. She looked quickly at her phone. Okay, calling him late wasn’t entirely fair, since she had been fifteen minutes early. She’d rushed everything today, starting from the moment she’d sat bolt upright this morning, an hour before her alarm had gone off. She’d had three cups of coffee, two more than she usually had when she woke up. But she’d tried to waste some of her extra hour over coffee and a magazine. It had been that or stare at her closet and rethink what she’d planned to wear today, which was guaranteed to be a bad idea. Of course, too much coffee had given her the shakes, which meant her homework assignments for her art class were a mess.
And then she’d stared at herself in the mirror, trying to figure out what first date hair and makeup should look like. And she’d changed her mind about what to wear before settling back on the ruffled cream-colored dress with a peachy cardigan, seafoam green scarf and matching bangles. Later, when she’d called her friend Marsie—who had been dating forever before meeting the man she was set to marry—her unhelpful friend had told her not to worry about what she was wearing and instead think about what she would talk about with a stranger.
Knowing what to say to a stranger had never been a problem for Beck, but finally she had decided Marsie was right about the first part. She pulled out the outfit she’d planned to wear originally, got dressed and then left for her date.
Of course, she’d driven too fast and there hadn’t been any traffic, so her plan to sail casually through the door of the bar at exactly six in the evening wouldn’t work. Now she had to try to make it look as though this wasn’t her first date since...college.
And, as it had for the entirety of the day, trying was failing her. As she shifted from foot to foot to foot and wondered where to rest her hands, she probably looked like a woman who’d already had too much to drink and was about to have more.
“Beck?”
She started at the smooth, deep voice that said her name from the left. “Caleb?” she asked as she turned. All this time she’d been staring out to the parking garage to the right, not expecting him to come from the left.
His shoes were nice. Casual black loafers, well-worn, but not scuffed, like he both wore them a lot, but also took care of them. Dark jeans with trim hips and the hem of a light purple button-down.
And an outstretched hand, which she took before meeting his eyes. But when she did meet his eyes... God, they were as light green in person as they had been in his pictures. Not only were they an unreal light green, but they were smiling, and his entire face was surrounded by pitch-black hair that made it look as though he’d just gotten out of bed in the best possible way.
He might be the most handsome man she’d ever seen in real life, and if it wasn’t for the slight crook in his nose where he’d probably broken it, she’d think he stepped out of a photoshopped magazine spread.
He was slender and tall, too. Willowy, without being weak-looking. Frankly, it was all a bit unreal.
She smiled back at him as she took his hand. Well, if this was going to be her first date in over twelve years, at least she was starting on a high note.
“Nice to meet you,” she said. God, his hand was warm, even on a cool late-spring night when he wasn’t wearing a jacket. He was probably perfect and did things like keep the woman in bed next to him warm, even if she always had ice-block feet.
“Likewise. Shall we?” He swept one hand onto the glass of the bar’s front door.
“Yes.”
He opened the door for her and she took one step into what felt eerily like her new future.
* * *
BECK WAS NERVOUS enough that her hand shook as he had gripped it in his. She even walked like she was nervous, with her shoulders up near her ears and quick, rabbit-like steps that made the ruffled bits at the bottom of her dress bounce about her fine legs. And her square jaw had tightened as she’d smiled, rather than opening in the bright grin he remembered from her profile picture. Her rich brown hair was shoulder-length and feathery around her chin and collarbone.
She was just as cute as she’d been in her profile pictures, with intelligent eyes and an open face. In fact, her nerves were endearing. Caleb couldn’t remember the last time he’d been nervous on a date, nor could he remember the last time he could recognize that one of his dates was nervous.
Her profile said that she was divorced. If he had to guess, she hadn’t been divorced long. Once inside, he stood back to watch her move as she approached the bar.
“Hi,” she said to the young woman wiping a glass dry. Then, to his surprise, she stood on her toes and her legs looked almost a mile long sticking out of the bottom of her dress. The hem of her cardigan lifted, though not enough for him to see if she had a nice ass.
He was trying to figure out what she was all about when she said, “That’s a nice dress,” to the younger woman behind the bar, who beamed wide with pleasure. “That’s a Marauder’s Map on your dress, isn’t it?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the girl says. “You like Harry Potter?”
“Doesn’t everyone? Or everyone who knows anything.” Beck sank back on her heels and Caleb could see that she was smiling.
Well, isn’t this different. Caleb had been on hundreds of dates and planned to go on hundreds more before he died. Many of those women he’d gone out with had been nice. They’d been friendly to waitstaff and kind to the person who helped them in the shop. But Beck struck him as different. She was one of those rare people who was kind to people because she saw each and every person in front of her as a unique and interesting individual who was worthy of getting to know.
That was different from someone being polite because they were supposed to or because they were a cheerful introvert. Even through her nerves, Beck exuded a warmth that even the bored-with-life hipster behind the bar responded to. Caleb had been to this bar what felt like a thousand times, both on his own and with dates. The bartender had never looked back at him with a real, honest-to-God smile, no matter how polite he was.
Beck was different, alright. If Caleb had to guess, he’d say Beck was one of those people who hugged strangers and they didn’t mind.
He was so lost in his own thought and evaluation of her that he didn’t notice she’d ordered and paid for her drink until the girl was handing over a martini glass with a purplish liquid in it and Beck was agreeing to start a tab.
“Anywhere you want to sit?” she asked, turning to face him.
There weren’t a lot of seats in this bar to begin with, and his favorite date table was taken. “How about that one?” he asked, gesturing to a booth away from the door.
“Sounds good,” she said and then stepped away. He stayed put but continued watching her make her way through the people until she was at the table he had gestured to. Then she got out her phone, typed something quickly, and then seemed to turn the volume down and put the phone into her purse.
He’d turned the ringer of his phone off back when he’d parked his car. And it was a point in her favor that she’d done the same and tucked it away where it couldn’t be a distraction. He turned back to the bar and ordered his gin and tonic and some bar snacks. He ignored the little voice in his head that told him his life was changing today. His life had the possibility of changing every day, with every breath.
Beck was sweet and he dug the intelligent sweep of her eyebrows, but she wasn’t going to change his life any more than any of the other women before her had. Even if the smile she greeted him with held a hint of mischief.
CHAPTER FOUR (#uc8205a00-018e-573a-9ffe-d67265e0bf47)
“SO, TELL ME about your dog. Why is he named Seamus?” Mr. Swoony—she supposed she should be calling him Caleb now—asked as he lounged in the bar’s booth. Lounge was a quiet word for the sprawl of all his limbs across the fabric. Only a man at ease with his body from tip to toe could so easily extend his extremities without worrying about whacking over the large vase of flowers next to his right hand.
He was probably good in bed. A man that comfortable with himself had to be good in bed, right? Or, maybe, it meant that he only thought of himself. What did she know? Neil was the last man she might have looked at and evaluated how good he’d be in bed, and yet she couldn’t remember if she’d ever done that. Since it had been college, probably not.
She took a sip from her Aviation cocktail, smiling a little. At her thoughts. At her lack of experience. At the big leap she felt like she was taking into life. She wasn’t smiling at Caleb, exactly, until she caught his gaze and a shiver of pleasure ran down her spine.
Definitely good in bed. More certainly, it had been over a year since she’d had sex and that was long enough to make a woman imagine orgasms in every man’s gaze.
“Seamus?” She looked away quickly before she actually imagined what the sex would be like. That sounded too much like committing herself to a roll in the hay, and she wasn’t sure she was ready to do that. Over a year might be a long time, but she could wait longer. She wasn’t looking for an open barn door.
“The shelter said he was found muddy, in a swamp. The woman who found him and cleaned him up said he looked like a half-dead beast dragged out of the bogs.” She shrugged, a little self-conscious. “It made me think of Seamus Heaney.”
He raised a black brow, which made her more self-conscious. “Poetry, huh?” Then he smiled and her self-consciousness disappeared with his casual acceptance.
“I’m proof that English majors get jobs.”
He barked a laugh. “So am I.”
They shared another quick glance that made her toes tingle. It was harder to look away this time.
Friends told her that she needed to know what she wanted with this whole dating thing, but they hadn’t told her how to know what the person she had a drink with wanted out of the experience. Well, except for the bride, Jennifer. But Jennifer’s advice had only been to pick the right dating site and avoid handsome men. Caleb was in direct violation of at least one of those pieces of advice.
What did Caleb want?
Unable to bring herself to ask that question, she asked, “What do you do?” instead, spinning her martini glass on the table. His profile had said he was a reporter, but that was vague.
“I write for the Raleigh paper. Politics. I cover the General Assembly.”
That set her back a little in her seat. “Not a simple job. And always something to report on.” Anything happening in national politics had to have a run in the state first, sometimes including the out-and-out battles.
“All those bills made in the dead of night. I have trouble keeping track,” she confessed. “And the laws they pass don’t seem to relate to anything. What does women’s health have to do with motorcycle safety laws?” She’d been against that one on principle. And Leslie was one of her favorite people to work with, so she’d been against the bill that banned people from bathrooms and even called her representatives about that one. She was prouder of her stance when she learned later that the bill had included a bunch of other stuff about restricting local government. Frankly, she was generally against bills coming out of her state capital on principle. Maybe she would be for them under different, more open circumstances, but she didn’t know what was in them because they were presented and passed within hours.
Secrecy was bad, and being against secrecy was easy. That was a political stance she could get behind. But having to admit that she struggled to keep track made her feel like she was out of her league, especially when the only other thing she could think to add was, “Your job sounds hard.”
He smiled, like he heard it all the time. But also like he enjoyed his job and was not-so-secretly pleased every time someone said, “Oohh.”
“It uses my writing skills, which is good. And I like talking to people, and being a reporter gives me an excuse to ask people questions. And,” he shrugged like he was humble about his job, even though she could tell he wasn’t, “I think freedom of the press is important. So, I’m glad to be a part of that.”
“You said English major, not a journalism major. Do you have a wild tale of career changes? Some dark experience in your past that made you determined to expose evildoers and right wrongs?”
“Like a bite from a radioactive spider?” He had the most delightful shrug. Comfortable and agreeable, like he’d seemed to be all night. She tried to imagine him tracking down sources—if they even called them sources—or badgering someone he was interviewing until they gave away their secrets. Tried and couldn’t. He seemed too slippery to be hard, and she didn’t even mean slippery in a bad way. More like water, flowing around obstacles and making its own path.
And, like water, he could settle into a comfortable stillness, which he did as he answered her question. “I liked to write as a kid, tell stories and make up lives of the neighbors’ pets. I’d sit them down and ask them questions about their day, then report the gossip to my parents.”
His face froze for a moment, so clear that she thought she could see all the way to the bottom of his soul and some inner hurt he was trying to hide, but then he smiled and the secrets he might be keeping were obscured by the mask he wore.
A reflecting pool she would be tempted to sit and think next to suddenly revealing the soul of the water sprite inside.
“My dad didn’t like me telling those stories,” he said. “Especially after Mom died. She’d been the person who liked to hear them most. ‘Kids’ nonsense,’ he used to say, and he would tell me I was too old to be playing make-believe.”
His cheeks were smooth, his eyes were wide and clear, and anyone glancing over at their table wouldn’t think he might be saying anything upsetting. For all Beck could tell, he didn’t consider this to be an upsetting story.
Still pretending, she thought. Only he doesn’t realize he’s pretending anymore.
“That’s the kind of guy my dad is, you know. Old-fashioned. Men are men and that means stoic faces and no talking to pets. So, I would tell the stories to my younger sister and we would play television. Game shows and TV news, with me reporting on the pets. For some reason, my sister always reported on weather and sports.” His voice softened when he spoke about his sister, and that was cute. And, if she were honest, made her a bit jealous as an only child.
“Anyway,” he said with a shake of his head that cleared the emotion out of his voice, “Once I got to college, I thought I should be a writer, because I liked to tell those stories. My roommate worked for the college paper and I tagged along, writing stories for them. I covered town politics and how it affected the college.”
He snorted. “I used to joke that college town politics were a lot like the politics of the pets—all that emotion sharing a tight space. One Christmas, I was watching the nightly news with my dad and sister. I don’t even remember what the reporter was talking about, but I remember my dad complaining about politicians and ‘the man’ and the cheats. It’s not like he did bad. He was a car salesman at a nice dealership and he made a good living, but he seemed to always think the world was keeping secrets from him and those secrets were why he wasn’t doing better.”
Beck nodded in sympathy. “I grew up in DC. I really should know and understand politics better than I do, but it always seemed too...opaque is the word I want, I think. And getting older hasn’t made it any easier to understand.” She hadn’t paid that much attention, either. Both because North Carolina politics were dead-of-night things and because politics, like her parents, had always seemed cold.
“Yeah. That’s how most people feel, I think. My dad is my audience, even though he thinks I’m as crooked as the people I report on.”
She winced at that admission.
“I understood what the reporter was talking about. The local politics I was reporting on for the school paper are almost as far from national politics as a cat is from a dog, but they’re still pets and I understood pets. My dad didn’t and still doesn’t.”
“Reporting seems like a manly job. Smoke-filled backrooms. Secret committees.” She knew what it was to have parents who didn’t approve of your work. Her parents had been remote and never deigned to talk with her about their jobs, but they were still shocked when she didn’t follow in their footsteps.
Her parents thought she was a glorified waitress. They didn’t see how she made memories for people or why that might be a worthwhile job.
“Some of it is contamination by proximity.” This shrug was less effortless. “Politicians are all crooks and, since I count some politicians as my friends, then I must be a crook, too.”
“And are you? That seems like the sort of thing I should know, even if this is a first date.”
She meant it as a joke and he laughed, both of them pretending that what she’d said had actually been funny. For all the momentary glimpses she’d gotten of his soul, his surface might as well be a thick sheet of ice. Short of some thaw, she couldn’t see in.
And he can’t see out. Or in, either. There was a little boy in there still hurt by his father’s disapproval, and that little boy didn’t talk to the man sitting across the table from her.
“I don’t think my dad wants to know more about the rules that govern his life. If he knew, he might have to do something about the things that make him unhappy. And some of it is that he doesn’t like his son knowing more than he does. To him, I’m still telling stories and by stories, he means lies. Holidays at my house are a barrel of laughs.”
He snorted again, a wry noise offset by his embarrassed half smile. “I don’t know why I’m telling you any of this, especially after one drink on a first date. Normally, I just tell people that my sister and I played television news as kids, but I like writing more than I like television news, so here I am. That’s the sanitized version.”
It was her turn to shrug and she tried to make it the easy, careless movement he’d seemed to perfect. “I’m easy to talk to?”
“Yes, Ms. Dogfan, yes, you are. In fact, you are so easy to talk to that I’m going to get another drink. Want one?”
“Yes, please.” She liked being thought of as easy to talk to. Nothing he’d confessed had been scandalous, but she knew why it felt personal. And she didn’t think it was that she was easy to talk to so much as it was the dark bar, with soft music and bench seats that cocooned around them. A little bubble, where nothing they confessed to each other would escape.
Safe, she thought. He had felt safe talking with her, which she understood, since she felt safe sitting here with him, too. Which surprised her. Standing outside the bar, shifting back and forth on her feet, she’d felt like her nerves were radiating out through Durham’s small downtown, forcing walkers to push through it like it was a heavy wind.
Those nerves had stayed with her as she’d ordered her drink and as she’d silenced her phone. Then Caleb had sat down, asked about Seamus and poof—all those nerves were gone. If he asked, she might lay out all her secrets on the table for him to pick through.
Might. She was determined to be smart about this whole dating thing and laying her baggage on the table for Caleb to examine was not even in the same time zone as smart.
Though, she considered as she watched the way he laughed with the bartender and chatted up other people at the bar, smart didn’t seem like much fun when his lanky body was part of the equation. In the abstract, all the contradicting advice left her at sea in her own life, each life preserver she was being tossed leading her to an unknown shore.
She could land on Caleb. She’d probably be back adrift again, but kissing those shoulders might be worth it. And then she could say she tried. One less choice available to her.
She was still watching him as he returned with two drinks and a report of snacks. Carefree as he was—or as he was pretending to be, considering the story he’d told her about how he got into journalism—her staring didn’t seem to bother him. “It’s not dinner,” he said as he sat down and told her what he ordered. “But we could go get dinner, if you want.”
She cocked her head. “You just ordered us another drink.”
“Well, yes.” He looked amused and she wasn’t sure what he was smiling about until he said, “Am I just a two-drink dude, or might you want dinner even after that second drink?”
“Oh!” He’d told her that personal and revealing story, which was sweet, but that he liked her well enough to think even an hour into the future hadn’t occurred to her. She’d been thinking well over an hour into the future, but she’d been thinking about how good his black hair would look against her white sheets. Dinner hadn’t played a part in any of those thoughts.
“Let’s see how we feel after this second drink and round of snacks. Maybe we won’t need dinner,” she said.
For a moment, she thought she saw the hurt of rejection flitter over his face, but then he seemed to consider what else she might mean. He put his hand on the table, palm up. “No dinner, huh?”
Emboldened by the soft lighting and a little alcohol, Beck put her hand on top of his. “Maybe no dinner. Depends on how hungry we are.”
He raised an eyebrow. They were holding hands, or not quite. When he curled his fingers, the tips brushed her palm and she could feel his touch in her toes. “Does it also depend on what we’re hungry for?”
“Yes.”
“Your lead, Beck.” Their hands were still touching, hers on top, both with the ability and acknowledgment that she could pull away at any moment. That he wanted her to be touching him, but wouldn’t argue if she felt otherwise. She relaxed her arm, letting her palm fall onto his and curled her fingers around the side of his hand.
His recognition that she could say no made her want to say yes. It made her want to scream “yes” as he was on top of her, maybe kissing her neck.
Sex with a near-deadly handsome near stranger was an option to her now. She could take this man home with her. She could go home with him. The realization made her feel almost two feet taller. And she certainly felt stronger. There had been moments during her separation when she had realized that she could make her own choices, but for the first time, she felt like she was in control.
The second feeling was different and it was heady.
She didn’t lift her hand when their snacks were brought over. He didn’t move his hand, either, and they both switched off drinking and eating with the other hand. She didn’t want to let him go.
Over their second round of drinks, he asked her about her job. Her second cocktail buzzed through her head. The room was dim. So, when he asked her what she liked about her job, she felt comfortable enough to confess the truth. “Honestly, it’s been hard. I’m not a wedding planner and people come to my restaurant for other types of celebrations, but mostly it’s weddings. I talk to a lot of excited brides who are certain that this is forever and, well, that’s hard right now.”
She looked at the bar for a moment, studying the bartender’s movements and the way the woman leaned into customers she liked and leaned away from the ones she didn’t. Once she felt less immersed in her own pain, she turned her attention back to Caleb. “It’s a little easier now than it was. I’m no longer angry at my ex, at the world and especially at the happy couples.”
She paused to take a sip of her cocktail. “Work is easier when I can celebrate with my customers, instead of pretending.”
“Newly divorced, then?” he asked.
“My divorce went through...” She paused, pleased the date didn’t pop into her head immediately. “A couple weeks ago.”
She pressed her lips together, but the words slipped out anyway. “You’re my first date since Neil left. God, which makes you my first date in over ten years.”
He sat up straight, which amused her. He had looked so good when he was relaxed and easy in his chair. Sitting up straight, shoulders back, chin lifted didn’t seem to fit his romantic, sensual lips. “Am I? Well, then, I shall be extra good tonight.”
“You would treat me differently because I haven’t had a date in forever?” For reasons she couldn’t put her finger on, she found that offensive.
“I remember what it was like to be divorced. I felt like I was hunting around for the real Caleb, who I was without my ex around. I didn’t know what I wanted or why. The first woman I went on a date with gave me time to figure myself out. And she was patient when I freaked a little. It’s a gift I would like to pass on to you.”
She still eyed him suspiciously. “Should I worry that you’re too perfect?”
“No pressure is the point. No one needs pressure, but you especially don’t need it now.”
“So, am I going to be disappointed by man number two that I date?”
He shrugged. “I can’t speak for man number two. I hope not. But I understand men can be shits. I’m probably a shit more than I realize. Or would admit to.”
She laughed. She couldn’t help herself. He was open and disarming. It was almost an impossible combination to resist. She picked up the last olive and popped it in her mouth, and then took a sip of the last bit of her drink. “Let’s go,” she said, tightening her fingers so that she had a hold on his hand.
“Dinner?” he asked.
“I have food at my house.” She could make her own choices and she was choosing him. At least for tonight.
“Are you okay to drive?”
She turned her head and knew the answer immediately. “No.”
“Are you okay to invite me home?”
“Yes.” She bit her bottom lip, but in for a penny, in for a pound. “I think I made the decision to bring you home when you put your hand out. I didn’t need the second drink to loosen my inhibitions, but I did want to talk with you more.”
“Give me a chance to mess up,” he said, but he was smiling and there was no malice in his voice.
“I like to think I was giving you a chance to succeed beyond your wildest dreams.”
“Tell you what. I’ll go and close out our tabs. We can add your drinks to my bill. We’ll get a takeout pizza from the place down the street so you don’t have to make us dinner. Then we’ll head to your place.”
“Are you giving me a chance to change my mind?” For some reason, the idea that he might be doing that pissed her off. She appreciated the lack of pressure. She didn’t need to be treated like a child.
“Hell, no.” He caught her gaze and the air between them practically caught fire. “I’m hungry. I like pizza. And I plan on stripping your clothes off as soon as we step through your door.” He hadn’t needed to tell her his plans; she could read them in his slow, sensual smile. “That won’t leave you time to make us dinner.”
“Okay,” she said with a nod as she scooted out of the booth. She wanted this. She wanted him.
She waited by the door, watching while he paid for their food and drinks. His body was long and lean. He’d slouched and practically relaxed all through drinks, but he was also in control of each part from tip to toe. He lounged because he was completely comfortable in his body, not because he was lazy. He rolled with that confidence as he walked toward her. “Ready?”
“Yes,” she answered as she slipped through the open door.
Out on the street, she took the elbow he offered and sank against him for the walk to the pizza place. She hadn’t had so much to drink that she was unsteady on her feet, but she usually drank wine, not cocktails. And at home, not a bar. Plus, there had been all those months that she hadn’t kept wine at home, for fear that it would become too quick a companion to her sorrow.
The Aviations were going straight to her head. The knowledge that she was going to have sex was going...well, it was going straight to the rest of her body, making her weak in the knees. Coming on her own wasn’t the same as sharing the experience with someone. And Caleb was going to be a good person to share the experience with.
“Do you trust me to drive your car?” he asked, after they’d ordered their pizza and were back on the sidewalk, escaping the press of the crowded restaurant.
His question pulled her back, unhappily, to reality. She’d been happily imagining what his hand on her breast would be like and had to ask him to repeat himself.
“Do you trust me to drive your car?” When she looked up at him, the streetlight caught a twinkle in his eye that made her think he knew exactly what she had been thinking.
“Why?” She wasn’t sure of the answer. Trust seemed a tricky thing in a situation like this. She had trusted his emails enough to say yes to the date. In the bar she trusted him enough to slip her hand into his and let him lead her wherever he wanted her to go.
Which just proved Marsie right. When Beck had wondered if she should invite a man back over to her house after a first date or go to a hotel or something, Marsie’s advice had been to ask why she would be having sex with a man she didn’t trust enough to see where she lived.
Beck hadn’t had a good answer to that one.
She had read The Gift of Fear. She listened to her gut. And Caleb didn’t ring any alarm bells with her. But that was sex and walking through her front door. She didn’t know anything about his driving.
They were standing close to each other on the sidewalk. She felt his every movement and had to focus on what he was saying instead of letting her mind wander to how his body would feel, naked against hers.
“Well,” he explained, “you don’t feel comfortable driving. And driving won’t be a problem for me. I could drive you to your house in my car and, tomorrow morning, drive you to come get your car. Or, I could drive you in your car to your house and I’m the one who has to come get my car in the morning. Me driving your car seems both the more gentlemanly thing to do and the most practical. If we were going to my house, I’d say we should take my car.”
She looked up at him and bit her lip. What if he wouldn’t leave in the morning? She’d been living alone in her house for over a year and, to be honest, quite liked it. The toilet seat was never up.
“Or,” he said as he leaned against the building and she felt like she had space to breathe—to think, “we could take our pizza and eat it over on the tables at Five Points and we can go our separate ways for the night. And there are hotels. Nice ones. If you’re looking for a night, but not another date.”
He shrugged. “But I’d like to see you another time.”
The shrug was the clincher, full of interest but no pressure that she raise that toilet seat because he expected it. “Drive me home. We’ll have pizza and see where we go from there. That sounds good.”
He peeled himself off the building and was back in her space again. She liked him in her space. Frankly, she wanted him to be in more of her space. For there to be no space. He probably had dark, curly chest chair and she wanted to run her hands over it.
“Great.” God, even his smile was romantic, slow and full of promises. She was going to have sex. She was going to come. For the first time in months, she wouldn’t be completely responsible for making it happen. And it was going to be awesome.
The woman at the hostess stand gestured to them from the other side of the restaurant’s big windows. Beck stayed outside while Caleb went in and got the pizza. When he hit the sidewalk, a box of hot pizza in his hand, she fell into step beside him while they walked to her car.
She didn’t say anything, wasn’t even sure there was anything to say. It felt almost like losing her virginity for a second time—she could either babble out her nerves or let them keep her quiet company. She chose quiet company.
CHAPTER FIVE (#uc8205a00-018e-573a-9ffe-d67265e0bf47)
BECK DIDN’T SAY a word the entire way from the pizza place to her car, three whole blocks. Caleb would have worried, but she didn’t seem reluctant to be coming with him. Or to have him coming with her, since they were on their way to her house in her car.
Nerves, he figured. He remembered those days, right after his marriage had ended when he’d been at a bar for the first time, looking for company. He hadn’t been very good at meeting women when he’d been younger. Memories from his early twenties bordered on painful. Whenever he looked at pictures of himself from those years, he couldn’t take his eyes off the Adam’s apple as big as his nose and the Ichabod Crane awkwardness, complete with trying to woo the beautiful Katrina with poetry. Caleb had kept his life, but there had been moments when he’d wondered if the poor schoolmaster had been relieved to have his humiliation disappear at the hands of the headless horseman. In those years, he certainly wouldn’t have turned down a big hole to swallow him up, Adam’s apple first.
That first night back in the game after his separation, he’d opened the door to the bar and his only thought had been, “Let me not be alone for an hour.” Instead of poetry, he’d walked up to the first woman who made eye contact and said, “Hi, I’m Caleb,” while sticking out his hand.
All his confidence about talking with random strangers after years of being a reporter puffed out in an embarrassing whimper when she’d said, “I’m taken,” making her friends laugh. Except one of the women had come up to him at the bar a little later and introduced herself as “Sabrina, but my friends call me ‘Not Taken.’” It was his turn to laugh. He’d stumbled through questions about her job and her interests and they’d ended up back at his house.
The nerves had only disappeared when Sabrina had left the next morning. And they’d shown up again and again and again for the first year as slowly the memories of shuffling his feet and bad poetry faded into the background. Sometimes he missed the nerves. He didn’t miss being nervous, really, but that lack of nerves reminded him that he’d been dating for a long time.
That was not a thought he liked, though he wasn’t sure what the alternative was. And without dating, he wouldn’t meet a woman like Beck. There was something about that square chin and big, round smile that did him in—reality was even better than her profile picture.
“Anything I should know about the car?” he asked after he’d put the pizza in the back and slid into the driver’s seat.
“Nope. Drives like it’s supposed to.”
He turned the key. “Good. I like it when the D means drive.”
Unless she was giving him directions, Beck also was silent for the entire drive back to her house. Which was also fine, since Caleb wasn’t certain he’d be able to hear her over the growl of his stomach as the smell of pizza permeated everything.
* * *
EVERYTHING WAS HAPPENING in slow motion, Beck realized as she stuck the key into her lock and turned it. Seamus was barking in the background. She could feel Caleb behind her, a large, mostly unknown presence that she welcomed, even if she wasn’t sure what she was going to do with him. Or, she knew what she wanted to do with him, but she just worried that she was out of practice with the whole process, from pre-sex to post-sex. The last time she had taken a near stranger to her house was...well, it would have been her dorm room in college and they had both been drunk enough that she couldn’t remember if she’d had a good time.
Since then, it had only been Neil. With a shock, she realized she was glad it wasn’t Neil tonight.
As soon as the door opened and they both stepped in, her dog was there, bouncing up and down and making any need to talk to each other moot. Caleb actually got down on one knee, holding the pizza box up high. Seamus gave him one big lick before settling down for a solid ear scratch.
“This is the famous Seamus,” he said, looking up at her. Seamus had a dopey grin on his face, his tongue lolling out to the side. The dog slobber added a shine to his nose, making Caleb even more perfect.
She nodded. “No green collar, though. Maybe for St. Patrick’s Day.”
He rocked back on his heels and then stood, still balancing the pizza box. “It’d look good on him. But the blue collar he has now looks good, too.”
“Thanks.”
They stood in her entryway, Seamus between them, looking back and forth, waiting for one of them to do something exciting. Give him a slice, probably. Lucky to be a dog and know both what he wanted and to not feel self-conscious about how to get it.
“What do we do now?” she asked.
“That depends on what you want out of the night.” He held his arms out. It felt like an invitation, though she didn’t step inside them. Not yet. “I’m here. If you changed your mind about what I’m here for, I’ll take an Uber back to my car. No hard feelings. If you didn’t...”
“I didn’t,” she interrupted. The last thing she wanted was for him to think she was changing her mind. “I’m just nervous. It’s been...” She paused. “A long time since I’ve done this.”
“Had sex?”
“Over a year for that. Divorce, you know.”
“I know,” he said with a slow nod and she felt that same instant connection she had in the bar, this sense that he understood her nerves and didn’t judge her for them. That she was safe.
“And sex during marriage is different,” she said.
“Well, sure. In the best case, you manage to be both experimental and steady about what gets the other person off. In the worst case...” He shrugged. She didn’t need him to finish that statement. In the worst case, you didn’t have sex and either your libido died a slow, lonely death or you relieved your frustrations elsewhere. Horrible cases, both.
“How about this? I need to wash the slobber off my face and Seamus probably wants a trip outside. Let’s take care of the practicalities and come back to reassess. We can talk. Drink a little wine. There’s pizza to eat. Calm the nerves a little.”
“Am I the only one that’s nervous?”
She must have caught him off guard, because his eyes went wide for a moment before returning to their regular, dreamy state. “I remember being nervous, but it’s been a long time. Maybe it went away. Maybe I just learned to ignore it.”
The other questions floating about her head settled into one decision. “The powder room is to the right. The kitchen is through there,” she said with a gesture of her hand. “The wine should be pretty easy to spot, if you want to open a bottle. The glasses should be easy to spot, too.”
“Okay,” he said with a long stride in the direction she’d pointed. She thought about it for a moment, but then she decided to be amused by how easily he moved through someone else’s house. If he was practiced, well, that would make the rest of the night, especially with her nerves, easier.
As soon as she heard the pizza box hit the counter, she set her purse down and snagged the leash.
Seamus did his business and then wandered back inside and straight into the kitchen to check out the new person in the house and the pizza. Beck dashed upstairs for the condoms she’d bought after signing up for online dating. They might make it back to her bedroom for round two, but she had spent the car ride imagining the snap of his buttons as she undressed him, and she didn’t plan to wait until after dinner. Nerves be damned.
Both Caleb and a glass of red waited for her when she walked into the kitchen. The wine glinted in the light above the center island. Caleb smiled at her and she had to take a deep breath before she was able to smile back. Tossing the strand of foil packets on the counter, she took the wine in her hand, tasted a sip just large enough to make her skin feel sensitive and then set the glass on the counter, next to the condoms.
He raised a brow at the string of condoms and then a corner of his lips rose as she took his glass from him and set that on the counter. But he didn’t say anything. His eyes followed her every movement as she walked around to stand directly in front of him and then lowered as she stepped close to him. It was her turn to be in his space. He smelled a lot like pizza and a little like wine and Dove soap.
The tip of her nose touched the underside of his chin, nudging his face up to expose his neck. “So, do we kiss first?”
She could feel his smile as the muscles of his face changed against her nose. “Is this Pretty Woman? Kisses aren’t part of the deal?”
He moved his chin a little and her nose bumped against his skin. “Which one of us are you implying is the prostitute?”
That question made her look up. His pupils had gotten big, making his eyes nearly a forest green with only the slight line of sea green around the edges. Angry? Aroused? Probably a little bit of both, given what she hadn’t meant to imply. “I’m not sure what to do,” she said.
“What do you want to do?” he asked, his voice deep and gravelly.
Beck pressed her two palms on either side of his face and pulled his head down to hers for a kiss. He had large, romantic lips and he knew how to use them. She sank into the kiss, sank into him and sank into the touch of another person.
She could disappear.
Their lips stayed connected as he sidestepped a couple feet to one of her barstools and hopped up on it. He opened up his knees and pulled her in between his legs, nibbling the edge of her lips and cradling her body in his. He was hard; she could feel that through his jeans and her thin skirt. Strong thigh muscles, too, probably from the biking he said he was into—her last conscious thought before he shifted forward in the stool, slipping his hands down her back to her butt and pushing her forward. The movement pressed the wetness of her panties against her and the evidence of her own desire aroused her more.
“This will be my first time in a long time,” she said after she pulled her mouth away and was dropping kisses on his jawbone. He had a sharp jawline and the scruff of his beard was rough against her skin. A good kind of rough. A rough that she would remember tomorrow, long after he had left.
“I know.” He leaned back in the chair, pressing harder against her. “You mentioned that.”
Emboldened by his casual acceptance, she shifted so that she could kiss her way down his neck. As she worked her way down from his neck, the buttons on his shirt popped open with the same satisfying noise that she had hoped they would. He sucked in his breath when she took his nipple into her mouth, the mess of dark hair she’d expected tickling her nose.
She had never wanted to enjoy the male body so much in her life. Never before wanted to explore its hard edges and soft lines, to match a kiss and a touch to a noise of pleasure. Like water, she’d thought of him before, only now he was water in a desert and she was thirsting. His fingers slipping beneath her underwear to her pussy hinted at the relief of a deep drink, though pressing her forehead against his chest wasn’t enough to quench her ache. His fingers stroked and twirled and played. If she didn’t think, she wouldn’t remember to breathe. Then there were no thoughts left to be had, no breath left to be had and she came in a glorious, light-filled rush.
“My turn,” he said.
She was too empty to pay much attention as he shifted her around a bit to undo his jeans and slip a condom on. His hands were back on her butt, lifting her and moving her, and suddenly she was straddling him on her tiptoes and he was inside her.
“Oh, God,” she said in a hot breath. “I have missed this.”
“Yeah,” he said, moving her on him in long strokes. His palms gripped her tightly, his fingers prodding into her flesh and guiding her where he wanted her to be. “Like it?”
“Yes,” she said, throwing her head back and pushing herself forward, pushing him deeper.
Sex was great. She hadn’t forgotten, just hadn’t wanted to remember, so that she didn’t feel lonelier. With Caleb inside her, there was no reason to feel empty. Plenty of reason to look at him, though. She snapped her head back forward so she could see the way the muscles of his face tightened with his pleasure, enjoying the tensing of the ligaments of his neck and feeling the hot burst of breath against her cheek as he grunted with his efforts. Her first sex in well over a year and she was going to memorize the details, hold them out and examine them when she was lonely.
His hands stayed on her butt while his nose bumped up against her face. A handsome, kind, interesting man buried deep inside her. He’d given her pleasure and she was giving him pleasure. This—this man and this moment—was what she had been looking for when she’d signed up for online dating.
Especially this man. When she turned, his lips caught hers, and with one gentle bite, he held her mouth against his. Then his muscles stilled and he grunted with a couple last hard pushes inside her.
He lay his forehead against her and they stayed still, connected and intimate. Then he shifted, pushing her gently away. “I’ve got to go take care of the condom.”
“Of course.” She pulled herself off him, feeling empty as he slid out of her and headed to the powder room. She had missed sex. But she had especially missed married sex, where sex didn’t have to end because of a condom, but you could stay joined until the man’s cock softened enough that he slipped out. She missed a man’s softened cock between her legs in their shared dampness.
Well, that wasn’t going to happen while she was dating. That was a committed, monogamous relationship feeling only.
She shimmied a little and adjusted her panties so they were back in a comfortable position. Married sex was a thing to miss, but this non-married sex had been wonderful and she’d take advantage of it for as long as she could.
She swiped the empty foil packet off the counter and tossed it into the trash. After Caleb was out of the bathroom, she slipped in and she washed her hands. To her pleasant surprise, Caleb was already getting out plates for dinner.
“I hope you don’t mind,” he said as he rested two plates on his forearm. “I figured we were both hungry, so I should get everything as ready as I could.”
“I don’t mind at all,” she said, enjoying the truth of that statement. He stood in her kitchen like he belonged there.
CHAPTER SIX (#uc8205a00-018e-573a-9ffe-d67265e0bf47)
CALEB TOOK THE plates to the dining room while Beck grabbed flatware and wineglasses. They both came back for the pizza box and wine bottle. Which had come first, she wondered, his ability to move through another person’s space with no self-consciousness or his reporting? He’d said he started reporting with his college paper, and it was fun to imagine him busting into the dean’s office, some hot question on his mind and his reporter’s notebook in hand.
For some reason, she didn’t picture him as a hot college student with his romantic hair and intense green eyes. He’d probably had the eyes, but she imagined him more awkward, with a buzz cut, maybe, and needing time to grow into his limbs. It fit better with how at ease he could make her feel—like he knew what it was to be out of place and ensured those he cared about didn’t feel that way.
Cared about. Silly turn of phrase after one date. If she wasn’t careful, she’d get ahead of herself.
“The pizza’s gotten cold,” he said, pulling her out of her imaginings as the box slid out of his hands to the table.
“It’ll be good anyway. And it was a good trade-off,” she said, with a shy smile, the idea of caring about someone after one date lingering in the back of her head. What did it even mean to care about someone? And how much did letting a man inside you change that? How much did being inside a woman change that?
Did sex have to change it at all?
“Absolutely,” he agreed. “This is a nice room, by the way.”
“Thanks.” She hesitated, with more she wanted to say on her tongue and too much on her mind to remain light and funny. Of course, he’d not remained light and funny with her—not with that story over drinks. If he could share something so personal, so could she.
She was at least that brave. And he was at least that safe. “One night, not long after Neil moved out, I was sitting on one of the barstools, eating a frozen dinner, when I realized that I had this huge house and was only using one bathroom, one bedroom and the kitchen. So I’ve been eating in the dining room ever since.”
“Making the space your own. I remember that feeling,” he said with a nod, and she knew she’d made the right choice—the right choice about everything tonight.
Caleb reached out and opened the pizza box. To Beck’s surprise, he first grabbed her plate. “How many pieces do you want?”
The pizza smelled amazing. It had lamb meatballs and kale, and she could eat every slice, if she put her mind to it. Back when Neil had first moved out, she’d been afraid to allow herself any indulgence, for fear that she wouldn’t be able to stop. Like with the dining room, she’d been letting her fear ruin her enjoyment of her house, of food and of her life.
“Two, please.” They were small pieces, and she had come a long way since Neil had moved out.
He placed two pieces on her plate and then set it in front of her and filled up her wineglass. “Mind if I take the rest?”
“No. Help yourself.”
“Thanks.” He took the other two pieces and then sat back in his chair.
They each ate a couple bites in silence until Caleb took a sip of wine and cleared his throat. Beck looked up from her own food. “I was the one who moved out. I moved into this random town house. It was the first thing I could find after we decided to separate. I still live in it, actually.”
He took another drink of wine and she realized that, for the first time tonight, he was nervous—though he probably didn’t realize it. “I spent the first three months thinking, ‘this is where Leah would put...’ whatever it was I was holding in my hand. She was particular about where she put stuff, more so than I am. I think it took longer for me to get used to putting pictures up where I wanted them to go than it took me to get used to sleeping in a bed alone.”
“I’m still not used to that,” she admitted before she took another bite of her pizza, which was salty and rich and delicious. After she swallowed, she said, “It’s one of the reasons I got a dog, actually.”
“Seamus sleeps on your bed?” he asked, with a raise of one eyebrow as he looked around the room for the dog. “Will I fit, too?”
Her forty-five-pound hound mix sat patiently by the edge of the table, waiting for handouts. Begging was on the list of things to work on, after he stopped jumping up on people.
Beck shook her head and chuckled. “A dog on the bed seemed like a good idea at the time, but Seamus doesn’t like sharing a bed with me any more than I like sharing a bed with him. He likes his personal space. I don’t like to be kicked. I got him an expensive dog bed for the bedroom and now we’re both happy.”
“Good. I was hoping to stay the night. And I don’t share.”
Warmth from the pizza, the wine and the heated look in his eyes spread through her body. “I was hoping you would, too.” He would wrap around her body quite nicely in a bed, her butt tucked against his crotch and his arm draped across her shoulder. Both naked, because they’d just had sex and she was the satisfied kind of sleepy that only came post-orgasm.
Yes, quite nicely indeed.
The thought was as delicious as the pizza.
“Like you, I miss sharing a bed.” He put his wineglass on the table and picked up the last slice of pizza on his plate. “It’s not enough for me to want to get remarried, though.”
And—like God had snapped Her fingers—all her warmth was gone. “Not get married again?”
“No. Divorce was horrible.” There was pain in his voice and his eyes, though when he blinked, it seemed to go away and he was back to being a charming man who seemed to have no problems. Did the mask fit so well that he’d forgotten he wore it?
“Fifty percent of marriages end in divorce.” He recited the words with the flat expertise of a man who dealt in facts for a living. “The odds aren’t good, especially given how bad the bad can be.”
“But...” She took a deep breath to control the sinking feeling in her chest. “The good can be really good. I remember being happily married.” She remembered the fighting more, but the good memories were in her head. Somewhere.
He shook his head. “I’m not sure I had anything good enough to make the bad worth it. Leah isn’t a bad person—we just suffered the difficulty of two people making a life together and not picking that right person to do that with.”
“Why date?” She wanted to get to know the world of men, sure. Have some sex and have a good time. But getting married had always been at the back of her mind, even if she hadn’t agreed to this date thinking that Caleb would be the one.
“For the same reason you are. Companionship. Conversation. Sex.”
“But not marriage.”
“Not long-term, no.”
Beck was silent for a long time while she processed what he meant, what that meant for their night and what the rolling of her stomach was trying to tell her, especially when she still wanted to curl up in his arms and feel the soft puff of his breath on her neck.
Her silence didn’t go unnoticed. He put his pizza down and assessed her. “Have I said something to upset you?”
Yes. “I’m surprised is all.”
“I didn’t think you would be looking for marriage. Not now, right after your divorce has gone through.”
I didn’t think so, either. If asked, she would have said she wanted to get married, but that first she wanted to date around a bit. Learn about men in their thirties, instead of in their late teens and twenties. She would have said exactly what Caleb had assumed.
But hearing it said back to her... No, that wasn’t what she wanted. Not that she had assumed she would stay with the first man she met, but she didn’t know how to have sex without thinking about something long-term. Not that it had to lead to marriage, necessarily, but that marriage had to be a possibility. It couldn’t be so far off the table as to be on another continent.
To buy herself some time, she reached for her wineglass and took a sip. Then another. Then another. Once some of the warmth was back, she experimented with a white lie. “I can’t say I’d thought about it one way or the other.”
Mostly true. Hardly counted as a lie at all.
“I didn’t send you a message or arrange this date expecting a wedding ring in a year.”
Completely true.
He let out a long breath. “Okay. Good. You’re interesting. You’re incredibly sexy and we’ve got enough of a connection that I didn’t want to be sent home.” He gave her a look bordering on naughty and said, “The sex was good.”
“The sex was good.” She wanted more of it. With Caleb. And she wanted to fall asleep with their limbs all in a tangle and the possibility of morning sex between them. Marriage was still a long-term goal. This night, with him, was her short-term goal and she was going to meet it.
If nothing else, she was going to prove to herself that she could do it. What it was, she wasn’t exactly certain. One-night stand, maybe. Let herself be comfortable with a stranger. Not pin her hopes on talking him into something she believed in, but he might not want. Not try to convince him of the rightness of her ways.
That was a short-term goal that matched up with her long-term ones.
Her mind made up, Beck popped the last bite of pizza in her mouth. “In fact, I’m done eating. I say we take this wine bottle up to the bedroom and see just how good more sex can be.”
His smile was wide and romantic, back to the Mr. Swoony that she’d called him in her mind. “I’m game for that.”
Beck wasn’t quite on her game as they joked and laughed while cleaning up their dinner. But she wanted sex again, and so she pretended, knowing she wouldn’t have to fake the orgasm. And, right now, that last part was more important.
CHAPTER SEVEN (#uc8205a00-018e-573a-9ffe-d67265e0bf47)
BECK HAD BEEN right about not needing to fake her orgasm. The force of it—brought on by Caleb’s magical tongue—should have put her right to sleep. Should have, but it didn’t. Instead, she lay in bed all night—Caleb breathing softly next to her and Seamus snoring softly on the floor—wondering what she was going to do in the morning.
Was this a one-night stand?
I’ve never had a one-night stand. But I’ve got nothing against them and I’m supposed to be trying new things. No reason a one-night stand can’t be a new thing. I’ve never had one, though. You’ve never been divorced before, either. The goal is not to figure out your future based on one night. You don’t even have to know now what you’re going to do come morning.
You don’t have to decide anything now.
And so it went. All night, in an exhausting bout of self-doubt and confusion.
Though not exhausting enough to put her to sleep.
But by the time Caleb had woken up and his hand had reached out for her skin, she knew that she was going to end their relationship as soon as they got out of bed. Trying new things, not pinning her hopes on one stranger...all of those things were fine, but company, companionship and sex with no end goal in sight was not something she wanted.
The one thing she wasn’t confused about was how much she had missed having sex. And an orgasm was definitelyon the list of things she wanted, and Caleb was good at giving them, so she pushed herself into his exploring hands and reached out to do a little exploring of her own.
* * *
CALEB PRACTICALLY SLID out of Beck’s bed, uncertain if his legs would hold him. Three orgasms in the span of twelve hours would do that to a man. “Mind if I clean up a bit?” he asked over his shoulder.
“You can take a shower, if you like. There are extra towels in the cabinet. I’ll make coffee.”
Beck’s voice had an edge that cut through his fog of sex and morning and had him turning around to face her, suddenly conscious of how naked he was. “Is everything okay?”
She was resting against the headboard, the sheets pulled up to her neck, hiding a magnificent pair of breasts. Clearly, he wasn’t going to have those nipples in his mouth again this morning, but he hoped for the next weekend. Maybe another night this week, if they could both swing it with work schedules.
“I didn’t sleep well,” was all she said. The vague sentence didn’t answer his question, but he didn’t push. Mornings after were weird. Being divorced for a couple years hadn’t made them any less weird, though it had made him more forgiving of how other people reacted when they woke up to find a stranger in their bed.
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Jennifer Lohmann
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Was she falling for the wrong man again?Caleb Taggert is exactly what recent divorcee Beck Magruder needs—intelligent, handsome, and blissfully uninterested in anything long term. Her first date with Caleb does not disappoint. Yet after a night of passion, Beck realizes she’s looking for more than just a fling. Saying goodbye to an almost perfect man isn′t easy.Luckily Caleb offers Beck a deal: no-strings attached fun, plus free advice for online dating. It’s the perfect arrangement, until Beck falls for Caleb. Suddenly, no other man can compete. What started as a fling has the potential to become something more. But is Beck ready to bet her future on it?