“Have you really never done the dating app thing?” she asked.
“Do I look like I use dating apps?”
“You look like you hire high-priced call girls to act out your lewd fantasies.”
“And you look like…”
I lost my train of thought when she whipped her black turtleneck over her head. She was wearing a thin-strapped, lacy camisole that dipped low over the tops of her full breasts.
“I look like what?” she prodded, sliding her arms through a hunter-green cardigan in a chunky knit. There were no buttons, nothing to close the sweater over her fantasy-inducing cleavage.
“What?” I repeated. My mouth was dry, and my headache was raging in full force now.
“You were about to insult me. Hit me with it, big guy, before I go meet the future Mr. Sloane Walton.”
I closed my eyes. Her nicknames for me the past several years had been limited to Lucifer and “Hey, asshole.”
“You can’t be serious with this emergency quest for a husband,” I told her.
“Spoken like a man who has all the time in the world to decide when to start a family.”
“I’m never starting a family.” I blamed the dark cleft between her breasts for my uncalculated confession.
She paused, mid-tug on the hem of her tank. “Really?”
“That’s not the point. You can’t go meet a stranger for a date. What if he’s a predator?”
She fluffed her hair out of the neck of her cardigan. It made the generous curves of her breasts threaten to spill over the top of her shirt.
Swarthy Massimo was going to take one look at her and do or say something stupid, and then I was going to have to ruin his fucking life.
“It’s fine. People meet strangers on the internet all the time now, and hardly any of them end up murdered.”
“Sloane,” I barked.
She grinned at me. A happy, smug, full-fledged smile. Jesus, between her breasts and the smile, Too Many Gold Chains Massimo was going to feel like he’d hit the fucking lottery.
“I’ll be fine. Geez, for someone who doesn’t want a family, you’re sure acting Dad-like.”
“What if he doesn’t like to read?”
“Then I guess I’ll just have to keep shopping for a husband.”
“I’m fucking serious, Sloane. What precautions are you taking? Where is this date? Who knows you’ll be there?”
She gripped my coat by the lapels. “Calm the fuck down, Lucifer. It’s in Lawlerville. Lina and Naomi are tracking my phone with a locater app. I sent them screenshots of his profile and our chat. I’m texting them a picture of him when I get there and proof-of-life messages every thirty minutes. If things go downhill, Stef is on deck to call me with a fake emergency forty-five minutes into the date, because I can handle pretty much anything for forty-five minutes, right? If things go really badly, I have pepper spray and a big, fat hardback in my bag. Is that good enough, Suit Daddy?”
“That’s…reasonably thorough,” I admitted when she released me.
“Good. Now, how do I look?” She spread her arms out wide.
She looked beautiful. Fun, spunky, smart, sweet, funny. Fucking breathtaking. I hated Massimo’s fucking guts.
She rolled her eyes. “Never mind. I forgot who I was asking.”
“Suit Daddy?” Her words had finally sunk into my reeling brain.
16
Crunchy Soup and Bad First Dates
Sloane
Massimo was a fraud. Instead of the six-foot-tall, glasses-wearing, gourmet cook hobbyist with a love of popular thriller authors, I was seated across the table from a five-foot-four man-child who had just ordered buttered noodles because marinara was “yucky.”
“My mom makes the best buttered noodles. So if you wanna get with this,” he said, gesturing at his sweater that looked as if it had been intimate with a Weedwacker, “you better learn how to melt that butter just right.”
My God. What had I done to deserve this karma? All I wanted to do was meet a nice, hot guy, have kids, and get a woman out of prison. Was that too much to ask? At least the restaurant was nice. It was part café, part Italian restaurant, part wine bar with checkered tablecloths and the comforting smells of garlic and espresso. If I didn’t have to drive all the way back to Knockemout, I would have been ordering the largest glass of pinot grigio they had.
“Uh, yeah,” I said. “So you said you’re a Grisham fan. Did you read his latest?”
“Who?”
“Grisham. John Grisham,” I prompted.