Page 17 of Her Devoted HERO

This shit needed to stop, and it needed to stop now. She bit her lip as she re-read Dex’s e-mail. She couldn’t even think of him as SailorBoy anymore. He was Dex. She toggled over to the picture that had come with the original e-mail. He was so damned handsome. She stood up and moved across the room then picked up the wedding picture of her parents. Her father had been wearing his dress whites. He had short hair like Dex.

A Navy man.

Honorable.

That was the reason she had responded to him, and she hadn’t responded to any other man who had ever e-mailed SNMP.

Admit it, he’s hot as hell.

“Down girl!” she said to the empty room.

Kenna only had one lover in her entire life, and she’d had the bad judgement to get knocked up and marry him. All because she had thought he was the most handsome boy in school. She swore to herself years and years ago that if she ever broke up with her vibrator, it was going to be for a homely man. What was she thinking?

He’s funny.

He’s nice.

He says the nicest things!

“Three good reasons to question whether he’s for real, or if you’ve gone insane!”

Time to nip this in the bud.

She sat down at her computer.

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Dex,

I am so sorry I ever responded to you. Thanks for being such a good guy, but this just isn’t going to work. You need to find someone else, someone else who will make you laugh. Trust me, you’d get sick of my attitude and neurosis. You need someone with less baggage. Think of it this way, you got away before you had a chance to be burned by the crazy chick. Who needs crazy, right?

Thank you so much for brightening up the last few weeks for me. It meant a lot. I’m shutting down my account now.

Good luck finding someone sane. You deserve it.

- Kenna

Kenna spent the next thirty minutes deleting her profile from the dating website. It should have been faster, but she went to google to make sure that she was doing everything correctly so that every trace would be gone. She’d set up the profile a year and a half ago when she’d been feeling pretty good about herself. Austin had just turned fourteen, and her mom and Rosalie had pushed her to think about dating. So, she had put herself out there. They’d been right, men had been sending her responses ever since she had uploaded.

She got up and took down a wine glass and poured herself a half glass of a nice red. She looked at her fingers, then her hands. For just a moment, she imagined her hands running through Dex’s hair. Then she gave a sad laugh.

“Look at them, you don’t even have the nails painted,” she said to herself.

She took a sip of wine and then, carrying the glass, went to look in the hall mirror. It wasn’t a good night to be looking at herself. Her hair was in a messy ponytail, no make-up, and she was tired. Yesterday had been a Rosalie day, so she hadn’t gotten much sleep.

Her cell phone vibrated. She always turned off the ringer when Austin was asleep. She saw that it was Rosalie. That was odd. She rarely called her on her days off, and never this late in the evening.

“What’s wrong?” Rosalie demanded before Kenna could even say hello.

“What do you mean? Nothing’s wrong. Why are you calling?”

“I just got the notification that you took down your profile on CaliSingles. What are you thinking? You were in the top ninety percentile for hits in your age bracket.”

“Rosalie, what are you talking about?”

“I had Buddy checking your stats. You actually responded to someone. It was fabulous. What are you doing stopping now?”

“My stats?” Kenna looked at the wine sloshing in her glass and set it on the kitchen counter. “Rosalie, come clean immediately,” she demanded of her boss. “What do you mean stats? How did you know I sent someone an e-mail on the site? What did you have your grandson do?”