“Damn, Jakey boy. Your Dad is on fire tonight.” Marco messes up Jake’s hair, earning him a teenage-boy grunt. “So, Dee. Renee and I were wondering if you’d like to join us for ax-throwing next week.”
“Put the woman on the spot, why don’t you,” Jake mutters, earning a death stare from me. In return, he shoots me a smirk, telling me he’s having way too much fun with this.
Dee grins. “Said woman is sitting right here.”
Our eyes lock and she quirks a single brow.
“What do you say, Rhodes? Want to make it a double date? I mean, Marco did bring us together, not knowing I’d already kind of asked you out.”
“What?” Marco says. “You didn’t tell me that?”
“In my defense, I thought Dee was being nice and offering me a meal to say thanks. It was me that made it a condition that she join me.”
Jake stands, looking first at Dee and then me before throwing his hands in the air with a loud, “Ugh. I give up. I tried. I really did. Adults these days!” Then with a muttered, “I’ll be in the car,” he walks away, still shaking his head, leaving the rest of us to laugh at my son’s antics.
“We’re heading off. Do you want to come with us?” Marco asks. “Or do you want us to take Jake and you’ll find your own way home?”
Smooth, Marky Mark. Real smooth.
“Actually, I’d better be heading home anyway. I’ve got a staff meeting and ordering in the morning, and since Mom and Dad took Harvey home with them, I now don’t have a ten-year-old to manage. So I’m thinking I’ll go relax and enjoy the serenity and have an early night.” Dee downs the last mouthful of wine and stands.
“Yeah. We’ve got an early start too,” I say, not wanting the night to end but knowing my twenty-four-hour shift will drag if I don’t get a good sleep.
“We’ll meet you in the car.” Renee hooks her arm in Marco’s elbow. “Nice to meet you, Dee.”
The two women grin at each other. “You too. I’ll get Rhodes to let you know about next week.”
Renee’s smile widens before she waves and walks away.
“So . . .” I say, turning to face my not-so-blind date.
“So . . .”
“You sure you want to come on a double date?”
“Well, it will be a hardship, but Marco and Renee seem nice enough,” she says, unable to keep a straight face.
“You’re one of a kind, aren’t you?”
She sighs dramatically. “It’s hard to be this awesome, but I try.”
“You do it well.”
Her gaze softens, and she smiles. “Nice to know I made a good impression.”
“You made that the other day. Tonight just confirmed I wasn’t wrong.”
She scrunches her nose in what is a quirk of hers that I really fucking like. The only problem is every time she does it, I want to kiss the confusion away. Slowly does it, Rhodes.
Dee reaches out and grabs my phone off the table before pressing the home button and holding the screen up to my face to unlock it. She enters her contact details into my phone—even going as far as to take a photo of herself blowing a kiss and adding it to her info—before reaching around and sliding said phone into my back pocket. The blood in my body diverts south, and central, other parts of me threaten to get their hopes up.
Then she puts a hand on my shoulder, lifting on her toes and brushing her lips against my cheek. “Call me, Rhodes, and we can arrange our winning ax-throwing strategy in person.” After shooting me a smile so dazzling it reaches inside and rocks my world, Dee turns and walks into the house, leaving me standing there, eyes on her ass in those tight jeans..
You’d like her, Lily, I think, closing my eyes and imagining her watching with a smirk from heaven.
And in my head, I hear her replying, . I already do, Ro. I already do.
Chapter 6
Dee
I’m sitting in my office at the restaurant, buried under a mountain of supplier invoices on Wednesday afternoon, when my cell rings. “Hello, this is Dee.”
“Hey, it’s Rhodes.” Just the sound of his deep, raspy voice in my ear provides an instant cure to my mid-week monotony.
“Well, you certainly took your time, mister,” I muse, earning an even more arousing chuckle.
“A man can’t seem too eager. Apparently there’s a specified timeframe in which a man must wait before calling a woman. Well, according to Firehouse 101’s self-appointed love guru. Supposedly, I’m his new pet project.”
I lean back in my chair and lift my ankles to rest on my desk. “Is that so?”
“So I’m told. In fact, didn’t your video today ask the same question of your subscribers?”
I giggle at that. At the end of my vlog about best first-date foods, I asked people to comment on the current dating rules surrounding time to wait before calling. Or if the girl is allowed to call if she doesn’t want to wait for the guy. I thought for sure I would get trolled for having non-food related content but was pleasantly surprised at the varied and mostly positive responses I received. “And is the person sharing this wisdom with you single or attached?”
“He’s very single . . . No, Scotty, you can’t talk to her. Yes, I’m dating her. No, you can’t talk me up. Goodbye,” he says, and I bite my lip, trying not to laugh. “Sorry. That man is like a dog with a bone.”
“So tell me, how did you decide on the right moment then?”
He huffs out a laugh. “To be honest, I couldn’t wait any longer.”
“Right. Well, you just scraped in there before the deadline.”
The phone falls silent. “Wait . . . there’s a deadline?” He sounds genuinely surprised.
I take pity on him. “Nah. Although, Harvey does keep asking if the firefighter has called me.”
“Funny that. Jake has been hounding me to call as well.”
“Smart boy, that son of yours.”
“Too much so sometimes.”
“I don’t know. He seems to have a good head on his shoulders.”
“Yeah, he does,” Rhodes’s voice softens with obvious pride. “I can’t take all the credit. His mom was the intelligent one. He got it from her.” Then there’s rustling down the line before there’s a faint “shit” in my ear. “Sorry, I guess it’s not good dating practice to mention my late wife when calling to ask another woman out.”
By god that thoughtfulness makes me swoon. “Hey. I won’t hold it against you as long as you don’t hold Flynn against me.”
“Flynn?”
“Ex-husband, baby daddy, best friend . . .”
“Oh right. I’m messing this up, aren’t I?”
“What could you mess up when you haven’t even asked the question yet?” I tease.
“I’m a bit out of practice with this stuff.”
“That makes two of us then.”
Rhodes’s relieved sigh makes me smile.
“Let’s make a deal. You don’t censor yourself around me, and I’ll do the same. Then, neither of us has to mull over what is right or wrong to say. We haven’t had a date yet, and I’m really looking forward to doing that, so how about we wait to agonize over mentioning important people in our past, or better still, don’t agonize over it at all.”