I let my head flop onto the back of the sofa. “Don’t remind me. What am I going to do about that? I don’t want her anywhere near him.”
Jack stared hard into the distance, toward the front door. His stare at the door was so intense that I wondered if he’d spotted someone he knew. My own gaze followed his, but there was no one. He apparently was merely lost in thought.
Then he turned to me and squeezed my knee with his big hand. “I’ve got an idea.”
“What is it?”
“Your sister thinks we’re dating, right?”
I tilted my head from side to side. “Pretty much. Maybe not dating, exactly, but on the road to dating. We’re taking the onramp to the dating interstate. Why?”
He hung his head and laughed, while his hand still cupped my knee. Little zings of excitement crackled through me. I was starting to like this guy. He rolled with my humor, seemed to like it, even. He also appeared to be eager to try new things, however far-fetched they were.
My ex-boyfriend—Literary Fiction Larry—had been so serious and never went along with my spontaneous ideas. Like the time I suggested we drive to New Hampshire to pet llamas. He thought that was ridiculous.
“Here’s the idea. We—well, you—propose a double date. That way we can spend uninterrupted time with Tyler in a casual setting. You can be incredibly sweet with him, and make your sister think you’re really trying to get along with her new man.”
My face lit up and I put my hand on his. “And you can play the bad cop and ask him lots of questions.”
“Exactly.”
My mouth dropped open. “Just this morning, in fact, my sister begged me to go out with her and Tyler, so I could get to know him. So this is perfect. You can come along, and voilà! Double date.”
We stared at each other and grinned.
# # #
“This is so exciting,” Vera squeaked from the back seat. “Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve been on a double date with my sister?”
“How long?” Jack asked.
We were in his Prius, driving to our date. For a reason unknown to me—Vera had avoided my probing questions—Tyler was meeting us at the restaurant. Which happened to be in Fern City, in an entirely different county. It was a full half hour from Wahoo.
“Maggie and I were in college. We’d met twin guys at a club and went out with them.”
I rolled my eyes. “We got stopped for speeding, and the driver, who happened to be my date, told me I should pay for the ticket because I’d distracted him.”
Jack burst out laughing. “How did you distract him?”
Vera giggled. “He thought Maggie was just that hot.”
“I feel that.”
Vera’s hand snaked around the right side of my seat and pinched my upper arm hard.
“Ow,” I said. “Our dates were identical twins. I couldn’t tell them apart. When we got to the restaurant, I think they switched because my date and I got pretty combative about the speeding ticket. Then one of them told us that he was a werewolf. And he was serious. We took a cab home.”
Vera sighed. “The werewolf was my guy.”
A comeback was on the tip of my tongue, but I refrained. Plus, we were pulling into the parking lot.
“Here we are,” Jack said in a cheerful voice, reading from the sign out front. “Lord of the Wings.”
Even though I wasn’t looking forward to having dinner with Tyler, I was ridiculously excited to peruse the wing menu. There was nothing better than eating a pile of spicy, greasy chicken with your fingers.
We climbed out of the car and Vera walked a few feet in front of us, obviously eager to see her man.
“Nothing says a classy date like this place,” I offered, while observing that it looked like a repurposed Taco Bell building. “Also, who has a romantic double date at a wing house?”
