I laugh and make my way to the front of the hotel.
Burger. Brush teeth. Bed.
I grin.
I’ll try not to imagine a hot, green-eyed grump in bed with me.
CHAPTER 4
Megan
“I legitimately hate my boss,”Calista says, nearly growling into the phone.
“What happened now?” I squint through my windshield into the morning sunlight. “You sound extra passionate today, and it’s Saturday. How can you be pissed at your boss on a Saturday?”
“Remember that guy I met at the airport? The hot guy in the suit and glasses?”
“Vaguely.”
She sighs. “It’s been a while. I can see why you might forget him.”
“Or I might forget him because you’ve had—how many men have you been with since you met him?”
“Not the point.” She smacks her lips together. “We had a … I’m going to say a date because that sounds more politically correct. But it was really dinner and a hookup.”
I grin and silence Chris’s directions.
Calista and I have a lot in common—we love the beach, Brad Pitt movies, and everything that happened in the nineties. But in some ways, we’re opposites. When it comes to men and dating, we’re on different spectrums.
My friend dates fast and hard. There’s an objective to it all.Find a husband. She’s convinced there’s one man out there created just for her, and she’ll know it when she meets him. So why bother pretending to be serious about someone she knows isn’tthe one? It only prolongs or prevents her from fulfilling her happy ending.
Me? I date cautiously. The goal isn’t … well, there isn’t one besides a good time. The concept offorever and ever, amenmakes me itch. My eye twitches, and I feel like I’m going to throw up. A clock starts ticking as soon as I get attached, and I’ve never found the pain of the loss to be worth the experience. I bow out before things get too serious.
“Anyway, there’s no dinner and no hookup because I have to travel to Albuquerque tonight,” she says, growling the words. “I’ve been traveling for our department for the past three months, and that bastard promised me he would give me a break so I could try to have a normal life.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, me too. LAX is going to be a nightmare.But,” she says, her voice brightening, “because I was running on fury and adrenaline last night after I got my travel notification, I spent a couple of hours online.”
I know where this is going. “Calista. No.”
Gravel crunches beneath my car tires as I turn onto a country road. Strands of corn sway in the breeze on either side.What is it with cornfields?I hit the gas a little harder.
“Chase Marshall won an award last year for Lineman of the Year,” she says. “I told you that last night. Anyway, there was a picture in the paper. The resolution online was surprisinglyterrible, considering we aren’t in the Stone Age anymore, but I liked what I saw.”
I sigh.Oh, friend. Don’t start shipping us already.
“I’m trying to arm you with information,” she says.
“You aren’t arming me with information by saying you think he might be good-looking.”
“That was a side benefit. I didn’t pull it up to see if he was hot. I was searching for red flags. But, again, I have a vested interest in you not dying.”
“Again, I’m not going to die.Andif I wanted to know what he looked like, I could’ve asked my mom. Or Maggie. Or I could’ve looked at Maggie’s social account because she posts pictures of her kids. She’s a very grandma-y type, you know?”
The cornstalks give way to a farmhouse in the middle of an extensive lawn. The siding is white, and a porch wraps around the corner by the driveway. Plants hang from hooks in the rafters, and the landscaping is tidy.Very pretty.
A bubble of excitement mixed with equal amounts of nerves fills my stomach. Although I brush Calista’s fears off—and despite knowing that the Marshalls are great people—a thread of uncertainty about working for a man I haven’t met in person exists.
