Christmas in Coconut Creek (Dirty Delta, #1)(59)

“I’m taking your advice.” She walked backward toward the door. “Not sleeping with a guy on the first date.”

That was suddenly the worst advice I’d ever given.

I sighed, watched her wave and disappear through the threshold, and then dropped my head to the steering wheel as I turned the ignition to drive back home.





21





“Are we spending the night?”

Steam billowed toward the light above the shower and an indie rock playlist filtered out of Natalia’s phone on the bathroom sink. I aggressively filed my nails from my perch on the lid of the toilet seat as the room turned into a sauna.

“It’s not like we both don’t have a bed to sleep in,” she answered.

She couldn’t see me roll my eyes, but I did. “Staying the night kind of crosses the friends-with-benefits line, don’t you think?”

“Your situation is crooked as fuck. The lines are already blurred.”

My situation was both the most convenient and inconvenient thing I’d ever experienced at the same time. Frankie scratched an itch I didn’t know I had when it came to men. Which was exactly what was so inconvenient about the whole thing. I already knew I would be struggling to find a guy back in Pine Ridge that fit his mold. He was somehow the perfect gentleman and the perfect scoundrel.

Attractive, smart, vulnerable, begrudgingly funny.

The convenience was that thing he was working with below the belt. Christ. I wasn’t a girl easily impressed after having had my fair share of hook-ups. A dick is a dick, right?

Wrong. So very, very wrong.

So what I first categorized as a convenience was actually the number one glaring inconvenience, really. I thought it’d be hard to find a man to match his first date habits, but in reality, I was putting myself on the fast track to being completely unsatisfied sexually for the remainder of my life.

And he hadn’t even been inside me yet.

“Do you think I’m being stupid?” I groaned.

“I think you’re being a single twenty-six-year-old woman on vacation with a vetted, clean, unattached, attractive man.”

I tapped my cheek with the nail file. “You’re right. I’m just paranoid.”

There was the click of a bottle top opening and closing behind the curtain. “You’re both in the same situation, Phee. I’m sure Frankie has the same concerns as you do about it. Which is good, because it’s been addressed already.”

I nodded to myself. A question I’d thought about briefly but hadn’t entertained crossed my mind. “Do you think he’ll take that job in Colorado?”

After a short pause the shower curtain whipped back and a soapy Natalia peeked her shampooed head out. “What an interesting question.”

“Is it?” I stood and turned toward the mirror, avoiding her eyes but finding them anyway in the reflection.

“One might ask that if they were interested in someone beyond a physical relationship. Which is definitely not the case with you.” She raised a dark eyebrow. “Right?”

“No, right, exactly,” I rushed out. “Just curious, in general. He seemed on the fence about it.”

She closed the curtain and I let out a trapped breath.

“It’d be a miracle to get that man to move that far away from his family.”

“But he was gone for years,” I argued.

“Temporarily,” she countered. “Florida was still his home.”

Add family man to Frankie’s disarming list of generous qualities.

“Think about it though, he’s barely had a chance to sit down since he was a teenager. Now he’s deciding whether or not he wants to settle in a place he’s the most comfortable, with the people he loves, versus a completely new state on the other side of the country with nothing familiar.”

“It’s a big decision,” I agreed. “I would never leave the Springs. As much as I love this sunshine, my family is there, my job, my mailman.”

“How would you ever survive without your mailman?” she asked sarcastically.

“Doug knows not to leave the packages on my front porch because they are constantly stolen. He walks them around the back. We have a system.”

“Of course you do.”

“The point is that I couldn’t abandon my routine either. And if I ever find a man on this sordid fucking plane of existence, I’d want him to get to know my family, and take my brothers out to go fishing, and feel comfortable spending time with my mom if I wasn’t around. So relocating my life away from them would never be an option.”

The water stopped and Nat’s hand jutted out to pull a towel off the wall. A minute later she stepped out of the shower with her hair spun up in it.

“You really do have the perfect tits for porn,” I commented.

She looked down at her chest with a smirk. “Have you talked to your parents by the way?”

I sighed. “I sent a group text with that picture of me that Frankie took at the butterfly museum.”

“And?”

“My mom asked if the dress I was wearing was hers, because she could have sworn she had the same one. My dad sent a Bitmoji of himself wearing a butterfly costume, and Stella was my only sibling to answer and she asked if I could sneak one of them home in my luggage as a Christmas present.”