AllFreeNovel
Share Us
If I could get through tomorrow morning and get the work done as quickly as possible, I could head out early and find her some flowers or something to add to the date atmosphere. I grinned at the thought of seeing her face when I arrived and checked my phone. No new messages.
Putting the phone down, I skipped to the next song on the playlist and began singing along. It was going to be a good weekend; all I had to do was get through that day and the next morning.
28
Danica
All day I paced back and forth across my living room. With no other work to do and the house spotless, there really wasn’t anything else to keep me occupied. I tried on literally everything in my closet, put them all back together, put them back in the closet, organized them by color, then function, then season, then pulled half of them back out to try on again. Eventually, Jaz came in and chose for me just so I would stop.
I was pretty sure her outfit idea was dumb as hell. But I promised her I wouldn’t argue if she helped me, and she said it was hot.
But I didn’t want to get anything on it or get it wrinkled, so it still sat on my bed, spread out, with the door closed so my pup wouldn’t go in there and shed on it like he always did.
Anxiety was clenching my heart and giving me tons of ideas about how things could go wrong. Like, what if he didn’t show up? What if he thought this wasn’t worth it, that all the drama and the complications of having a long-distance relationship and me having a baby was too much? That he didn’t want to deal with all that? How could I blame him?
I paced and paced and paced until five, then went into my room and put on my outfit. Several curses at the buttons on the dress, curses at the way my eyes were shaped, curses at how my boobs either didn’t show enough cleavage to be enticing or showed too much and made me look like a stripper later, and I was ready. Or as ready as I could be.
Walking out of my bedroom, adjusting the slip and heading to where Jaz was sitting on the couch with the pup in her lap, I was stopped in my tracks by a knock at the door. Jaz and I stared at each other, our eyes wide, frozen in place.
“Oh shit,” Jaz whispered. “Is that him?”
“I don’t know,” I whisper-yelled. “It could be! It could also be anybody. What do I do?”
“Uhh, answer the door, dummy.”
“And if I answer the door to the mailman looking like this?” I motioned to the cleavage that had settled on the “stripper” category.
“Then you get you never have to worry about your mail being lost,” Jaz said. “Answer the door!”
Getting up and tiptoe running through the room, dog in hand, Jaz disappeared into her bedroom. I took stock of myself, making sure I did, indeed, have all my clothes on, and took a deep breath. There was another knock on the door, and I shook my head, putting on a smiling face that I was fairly sure was the fakest expression I had ever had.
“Coming,” I said cheerfully.
All the maybes that were floating around in my head disappeared as soon as I opened the door. Not only was Kane there, but he was all dressed up. The five-o’-clock stubble that usually adorned his strong jaw was gone, shaved clean. His hair was parted on one side and looked like it had been freshly cut. He wore nice black slacks and a button-up red shirt that had the sleeves rolled up to the elbow. It was fitted and showed off his barrel chest and strong arms. My eyes couldn’t move off his muscular forearms for a moment, but eventually, they traveled back to his eyes.
“Guh,” I muttered.
“What?” he asked, a smile stretching wide across his face.
Guh? Guh was all I got out?
Somewhere in the back of the house, I could hear Jaz snorting with laughter.
“Go-good evening,” I finally forced out. “You look s—um, uh, great.”
I closed my eyes, my brain at war with itself over its inability to get any messages out that didn’t make me look like a lunatic.
“So do you,” he said. “As usual, you look incredible.”
Slowly, I smiled, my head, mouth, and eyebrows all moving somewhat independently of each other, all in an attempt to simply lean back and look confident and smile. I could feel how awkward I looked and felt like I looked like a robot who was short-circuiting.
“Thank you,” I forced out. “Would you like to come in?”
“Sure, for a minute. We have our reservation in just a little bit. Though, you might want to put these away.” It wasn’t until that moment that I realized he was holding one hand lightly behind his back. When he pulled it back around, I saw he was holding a small bouquet of roses.
