AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I mean, I was melting at the idea, but that was beside the point. I didn’t read him as vain. He just wasn’t the type that screamed egotistical. His brother Derek, sure, maybe. But Kane? Not as much. He was too quiet and bookish and nerdy about grapes to be that kind of guy.
As I went back and forth over things, I decided I needed help. I needed a rational voice that could talk me down from the ledges of hysteria I was driving myself to and tell me what it was I wasn’t seeing or encourage me to go for it. What I needed was my sister.
I pulled open my phone and texted Jaz to get her opinion. The text was fairly brief, only saying I needed to chat with her about a possible date I was going on and if I should be reading into it what I thought I was reading into it.
Jaz had always been better with guys. Ever since she was a young teen, she seemed to have that confidence and instinct to know which guys were really interested in her and which ones were just looking for somewhere to park for a little while.
I sat for a few moments, waiting on her to return my text, and nothing came. That was odd for her. Usually, when I texted her, she got back pretty quickly.
I checked the time. I knew she had rehearsals frequently. She basically lived either in the studio or onstage. But she always had her phone nearby, and at this time of day, she was usually eating her six leaves of lettuce and a solitary pickle lunch that her ballet figure demanded. That meant she should have responded to me.
I began to worry about her. She was my baby sister, and not having the ability to just see her whenever I felt like was already a strain. Living in San Francisco was exactly what she wanted, but it meant I only saw her when I went into town. Since my job took me all over the place, I didn’t get to see her as much as I wanted, and we relied on texts and video calls to stay as close to in touch as we were. More than one lunch was spent on either end of a video call at two different restaurants. Waiters often thought we were insane, but it was part of the fun.
After about ten minutes, I decided I needed to let it go. She was going to respond to me when she got around to it, but clearly, she was otherwise occupied at the moment.
Leaving my predicament up to me to figure out meant I was going to go the path of least resistance. Which meant that I could go, and I would attempt to enjoy my company and a nice dinner but wouldn’t try to read too much into it. It couldn’t hurt to have one dinner. I had heard of other investigators going to dinner with clients before to talk about their soil and had suggested it myself once to a little old man in Rosemont. He had declined my invitation, but the point remained that it wasn’t entirely unheard of for it to be work related.
Even if they were super hot though?
Probably.
Maybe.
9
Kane
Dinner with Danica was the plan for the evening, and as far as I was concerned, there was a pretty good chance it was actually going to be a date. It might be silly for me to have been excited by that prospect considering what little I knew of her and how the dinner suggestion had been proposed, but there I was excited about it nonetheless.
Simon curled around my feet as I brushed my teeth and got my things together for a shower. His purr was like a lawn mower engine when you were trying to do something that needed concentration. It called to me to come, sit down, relax and let him curl up in my lap. But that wasn’t going to happen now, I had to wash the days’ worth of dirt and sweat off.
I opened up a new can of the gourmet cat food Simon liked and put it in his bowl. Once he was happily noshing on it, I headed into the bathroom and closed the door. After getting undressed, I stepped in the shower and felt simultaneously relaxed and energized by the hot water on my skin.
It had been a while since I’d last gone out, that was true. Maybe that was the reason for the added excitement for the dinner and less about who it was with, I thought. The last time I had been out had been with a waitress I had a casual thing with for a few months before she moved, and we stopped seeing each other.
