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“Well, there’s an easy solution.” She grinned. “Just take a date. She’ll run off any prospective women your family is looking to hook you up with, and if you can convince your dad that you’re serious about her, maybe that will get him off your back in a more long-term way.”
He opened his mouth to tell her that was an insane idea but closed it without the words escaping. It was crazy—committable, even—but she had a point. The only problem with that plan was that he didn’t know a woman he could take to a wedding without her getting it into her head that he was looking for something more serious. He dated casually, and he liked keeping it that way. Hell, he liked his life the way it was. He didn’t want or need the oil money his old man kept wafting in front of him, and he definitely didn’t need a woman intent on him putting a ring on her finger. “You know of anyone?” He straightened. “Hey, you want to go to a wedding with me?”
“Hands off my woman, Baldwyn.” Adam appeared in the doorway and shot them both a look. “Whatever you’re planning, sugar, I’m putting my foot down. One zany scheme a decade is more than enough.”
She propped her hands on her hips. “How can you say that? My zany scheme got me you, didn’t it?”
Adam raised his eyebrows. “I didn’t say it was a bad plan.”
“Oh, stop. You two are going to give me cavities.” Quinn shook his head. “Forget I asked. I don’t need any help with this.” He’d figure something out—and fast. The wedding was two weeks away.
More than enough time to find a woman to attend a wedding and pretend we’re serious enough to keep my old man off my back without her getting any funny ideas.
“I think you’re wrong, Quinn. Luckily, I’m here to help!”
She grinned, a light in her eyes that he couldn’t ignore. Whatever he and Adam had said to dissuade her, the wheels were turning in that pretty head of hers, and he was damn sure he wasn’t going to like what came of it.
…
Aubry Kaiser glared at her computer. Even Ninja Kitteh curled up in her lap, purring like a jet engine, wasn’t enough to distract her. No matter how much she focused her not-inconsiderable willpower, the words on the screen didn’t change.
She took a deep breath and looked around Cups and Kittens, the cat café owned by her best friend, Jules. Life went on, the cats in their usual places, lounging around the tables and in convenient sunbeams, the sole other human occupant reading a magazine and ignoring her completely. Just the way she liked it.
But the problem with nothing being abnormal was that she ran out of things to look at thirty seconds into her perusal.
She gave Ninja Kitteh another stroke and looked back to her computer.
A few years ago, the email sitting in her inbox would have made her elated enough to dance on the ceiling, but that was a few years ago. Right now it just represented all the things that were wrong with her life. She reread it for the twelfth time.
You’ve done it! You’re cordially invited to a closed alpha test of the new Deathmatch in San Diego on June 3rd.
She knew for a fact these invites only went out to a handful of people, and part of her was screaming with sheer, unadulterated joy as a result. The Xbox game, Deathmatch… Well, she wouldn’t be completely dramatic if she said that it saved her life when she was a teenager. She’d lived in that little hellhole of a trailer with her shitty mother and her mother’s equally shitty string of boyfriends, and there hadn’t been a single person in her school whom she’d connected with. She’d been adrift and depressed, and then she’d picked up the game on a whim.
And found her tribe.
Her playing—her interacting with people who shared at least one fandom with her—had given her the strength to pursue her interests, to get the hell out and never look back. When she was sixteen, she would have done bodily damage to someone to secure an invite like the one sitting in her inbox. The intervening years hadn’t done anything but deepen her love of the game and the community.
To say she was a fan was a serious understatement.
And this wasn’t even a demo like the ones they’d hosted for large groups at the con in the past—this was a chance to be one of the first sets of eyes on the new game. Ten people were allowed in. Ten. It blew her mind that she’d been invited at all.
But accepting this invite came with such serious drawbacks, she could barely draw a full breath even thinking about it. She’d have to leave the little town of Devil’s Falls, Texas and drive to California. If that wasn’t bad enough, alpha test or not, she’d still have to go to Deathmatch’s annual convention, DeathCon. Last year, there’d been five thousand people there, all crammed into one convention center.
