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  “Girlfriend! Christian, you didn’t tell me … oh, Jennifer, he’s so bad! My son has told me absolutely nothing about you. Come on, honey, let me introduce you to some friends and then you can tell me all about yourself.”

  I clung to Christian’s arm, but she wrestled it away and wrapped her manicured fingers around mine. I shot him a glare over my shoulder and mouthed ‘help me’, but Christian just shrugged helplessly. Mrs. Carver propelled me toward one of the refreshment tables and I lost Christian in the crowd.

  “What a lovely girl you are, Jennifer,” she said, patting my hand affectionately. “Not Christian’s usual type, but that’s all for the better, I’d say.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Carver.”

  “Now, now, honey, you can call me Donna. And these are my friends, Twila, Bess, and Millie.”

  Three women in designer cocktail dresses smiled at me and each shook my hand. Twila had a tiny sliver of a nose that looked like it had been shrunk within an inch of its life by a plastic surgeon, and blonde extensions going down her back. Bess was heavyset with a friendly smile, but a very unfortunate sense of fashion; big hair and floral print—so 80s. Millie was a total cougar—a redhead with a voluptuous figure. Unfortunately, she was stuffed into a dress better suited to a sixteen year old. Her face had been lifted within an inch of its life and her smile was frozen on her cheeks.

  “This is Christian’s girlfriend, Jennifer!”

  They converged on me as if I were a carnival sideshow, peppering me with questions from all sides. I spent forty-five minutes answering some questions and dodging others. Yes, Christian and I had just started dating. No, it wasn’t serious. I am studying Nursing in school. No, I do not plan to quit being a nurse once I got married. No, I would not drop out of college if Christian asked me to marry him.

  By the time he came back to rescue me, I was ready to tear my hair out and chuck Chloe’s shoes at them. At least I could take out two of them and then have a decent chance at escape.

  “Christian!” Donna gushed as he elbowed his way toward me, two glasses in his hands. “Jennifer is such a sweetheart. The girls just love her, don’t you, girls?”

  The three nodded, their heads bobbing like bobble-head dolls.

  “Adorable,” Millie murmured.

  “A sweetheart,” added Bess.

  “Of course she is, that’s why I’m dating her,” he said with a charming smile. “Can I have her back now?”

  Millie pouted, her red lower lip jutting out ridiculously. I didn’t miss the way her eyes traveled over him with interest. Gross. “You treat her nice, Christian,” she said, slapping at his muscular bicep playfully. Christian shifted uncomfortably under the attention. For a guy who got so much attention from girls, I wouldn’t have expected it. Luke would have smiled and charmed her socks off.

  “I will,” he promised. “Jenn?”

  “It was nice to meet you,” I said to the four ladies before practically running into Christian’s arms. Without giving them a chance to respond, we made our getaway. Once we were clear, Christian turned to me and handed me one of the glasses.

  “Drink,” he said. “Breathe.”

  I took a sip of sparkling water, glaring at him over the rim of my glass. “Don’t you ever do that to me again.”

  He grinned sheepishly. “Sorry. I know she’s a bit much to handle.”

  “Apparently,” I snorted. “Just, don’t leave me alone here. I feel like I’m on display.”

  “You came with me, you are on display. Come on, you want to go meet some friends of mine?”

  My eyebrows shot up. “You have other friends?” I asked in a mockingly hurt tone.

  Christian laughed. “More like acquaintances through my parents’ friends. Still, it’s better than hanging around and waiting to meet my dad. He will compliment your body and say inappropriate things.”

  I shuddered. “Ugh, yeah let’s make a run for it.”

  Christian steered me toward the stairs leading down to the yard. I nearly tripped in Chloe’s shoes going down the embankment toward the boat dock, but Christian grabbed my elbow and steadied me.

  “Stupid shoes,” I grumbled as we came to more even ground. I was too busy trying not to twist my ankle to pay attention to the people standing near the water’s edge. However, when we got close, I looked up and that’s when it happened.

  I saw him.

  The most beautiful guy on God’s green earth.

  Chapter 3

  His name was Dain. Blond hair cut close and glittering green eyes set off a perfectly chiseled face. His smile was white and magnetic, and he gave off an air of cool confidence. Dressed to the nines, he stood near the edge of the water looking like some sort of Armani-wrapped cookie. I couldn’t stop staring. I also couldn’t make my mouth move to form intelligent words. After ‘my name is Jenn’, I pretty much lost my grip on common sense.

  He kept smiling at me—no, smirking, really—secretively, as if he and I were in on the same private joke. I couldn’t tell if he thought I was amusing, or if he thought I was cute. Considering the fact that I was gaping like a fish, I’d have to say amused.

  “So,” said a girl named Amber. She and her friend Tiffany had been chatting with Dain when we walked up. “How long have you two been dating?”

  She was asking Christian, but stared at me as she did. Her eyes were twin chips of ice. She obviously didn’t like me as much as Christian’s mom. Christian lowered his voice.

  “Jenn’s just a friend. I asked her to come to get my mom off my back.”

  Dain laughed. It was raspy and deep. Sexy. “Your mom actually bought that?”

  Christian shrugged. “She’s happy and so am I. Problem solved.”

  Amber smiled, reaching for Christian’s arm. “Well then,” she said, her voice a low purr, “maybe you should give me a call tonight.”

  Christian went into playboy mode. Clear out of his mother’s sight, he turned up the charm. “Maybe we should forget about the phone call and talk right now.”

  I lowered my eyes to Chloe’s expensive shoes, feeling like I was seeing something I shouldn’t as Amber leaned into him with an undoubtedly practiced, girly giggle. I was afraid he’d go off with her and leave me alone with Dain. As much as I feared it, I was also kind of hoping for it.

  They whispered in low voices for a while and I fidgeted nervously, my hands clenching around my clutch.

  “It sucks when your pretend date ditches you for a real one.”

  I looked up to find Dain in front of me, blocking Christian and Amber from my view. He was so tall I had to crane my neck up to look at him. I didn’t mind; the view was spectacular. I shrugged. “Yeah, but what are you gonna do?” I said, my tongue finally coming unglued from the roof of my mouth. He smiled and my insides quivered. “It’s okay, we’re roommates. I’ll just do gross things to him while he sleeps.”

  He laughed again and I smiled in response. “You could do that. Or,” he leaned in, so close I could smell his cologne, “you could get even.”

  My mouth fell open. I was a fish again, gasping for air and flopping around for something witty to say. Instead, he got, “Get even?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. You know, find some wildly attractive guy to be your new date and piss him off.”

  “That’s a good idea,” I said. “Know any wildly attractive guys?”

  “If you’ll settle for extremely witty and tall, then there’s always me,” he said.

  Him. On a biscuit. Or covered in chocolate. Or running shirtless, drenched with sweat. Or … I swallowed past the lump in my throat.

  “I guess you’ll do,” I said with a shrug.

  “Good. Why don’t you tell me about Jenn?”

  “Um, okay.” He placed his hand at the small of my back, turning me toward the little dock jutting out over the water. A sleek speedboat bobbed on the surface. I concentrated on trying not to trip as we stepped out onto the dock. “Well, I’m a Nursing student. I’m in my junior year and I want to be a Pediatric
nurse after I graduate.”

  “Pediatrics, huh? You must like kids or something.”

  I nodded. “Everybody likes kids.”

  “So you must want to have them someday.”

  “Doesn’t everybody?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe someday. I’m more focused on my career right now than anything else.”

  “What do you do?”

  “Well, I just graduated with a business degree last year,” he said, stuffing his hands into his pockets. “I just started an entry level position at my dad’s company.”

  “Wow,” I said, eyebrows raised. “Color me impressed.”

  He laughed. “Not that impressive. It’s grunt work in the mail room, but you have to start somewhere. My dad started there and now he’s CEO. I could have gotten a job higher up, but I wanted to take my lumps like everybody else. Couldn’t have everybody whispering behind my back that Daddy did it for me.”

  I wasn’t lying about being impressed. A guy who could have gotten any job he wanted through his dad, choosing to work his way up from the bottom. This guy became more intriguing by the second. “That’s ambitious,” I stated. “More so than Nursing.”

  “Hey,” he said, his hand coming out of his pocket to touch my bare shoulder. That touch caused my blood to sing in my veins. Electricity arced across my skin. “There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be a nurse. It’s a hard, noble job. Besides, someone has to hold the little brats down while they get their shots.”

  “You are so not funny,” I replied, but I was laughing all the same.

  “No, but you are,” he said. “Look at you all mad at me. It’s cute.”

  I could feel my face getting hot. Cute? I’d take it. For him, I’d wear cute like a badge of honor. This was going well. I was flirting without making too big a fool of myself. Dain was smiling, and not a fake, forced smile either. He kept touching me—my arm, my shoulder.

  Things were going perfectly.

  Until I took a step backward and went plummeting off the side of the dock.

  ***

  By the time Christian got me home, I was only slightly damp, though shivering from the slight chill. The temperature had dropped below sixty, which was only bad if you’d just been pulled, sopping wet from a lake. Luckily, when I fell, I left Chloe’s precious Louboutin’s on the dock. It made the walk of shame from the car to the front door of the apartment a little less shameful.

  Still draped in a towel from the Carver’s guest bathroom, I trailed Christian into the house. Kinsley and Aaron were still in the living room, a half-eaten box of pizza on the coffee table in front of them. Chloe was in the kitchen washing dishes. Her mouth fell open when she saw me and she dropped the plate in her hands with a loud ‘clang’ into the sink and dashed toward me.

  “What happened? Oh my God, are they okay? I mean, are you okay?”

  I rolled my eyes and held up her precious shoes, which were clutched safely in my hand. “The Louboutins made it out unscathed,” I said, shoving them at her. “As for me, I took a little dunk in Lake Travis.”

  Kinsley turned around, peering at me over the back of the couch. “How did that happen?”

  I pulled the towel closer to my body and shivered. “I literally walked off the edge of a dock.”

  Chloe sighed and left her shoes on the kitchen counter. She put an arm around my shoulders and led me toward my room. “Come on, spaz. I’ll help you blow dry your hair.”

  Half an hour later, a hot shower, warm pajamas, and blow-dried hair had me feeling much more like myself. Kinsley left Aaron long enough to come check on me, and found Chloe painting my toenails. I let her, too busy daydreaming about Dain to care about the bright fuchsia color she’d picked.

  “So, how’d you end up in the lake again?” Kinsley asked, plucking a weird shade of mustard yellow polish from Chloe’s basket and cracking it open.

  “Well,” I said, slowly, “I was talking to this guy—”

  “A guy?” Chloe paused, head popping up as she narrowed her eyes at me. “You mean, a guy, guy? Not Christian?”

  I sighed, thinking about Dain’s deep green eyes. “Definitely not Christian.”

  Chloe squealed. “Ooh, details! What’s his name, what’s he like? Is he cute?”

  “He’s gorgeous and his name is Dain. His parents are friends with Christian’s parents. Christian was flirting with some skank—”

  Kinsley snorted. “Typical. It is so against the rules! Especially when you were pretending to be his fake girlfriend. Jerk.”

  I shrugged. “Anyway, we were standing on the dock talking and … I don’t know, I wasn’t paying attention. I took a step backward and fell right out of Chloe’s shoes and into the lake.”

  Chloe face-palmed herself and sighed. “Ugh, girl, you are like a magnet for disaster. This kind of stuff just happens to you.”

  My mouth fell open. “It does not.”

  “I hate to break it to you, Jenn,” Kinsley said, “but it does. You’re always tripping, falling, and getting hit with flying objects. Your head is like an orbit for stuff. You have your own gravitational pull.”

  I wrinkled my nose at her. “Whatever.”

  “So,” Chloe began, going back to painting my toenails, “you meet a cute guy and hit it off with him. He was checking you out, wasn’t he? You looked too good in that dress for him not to.”

  I smiled, remembering his hand on my shoulder. He touched me several times, and not in a ‘let me get that strand of hair out of your lip gloss way’. It was more like a ‘your skin is soft and smooth and I want to kiss you kind of way’. Or, at least in my mind it was.

  “He was,” I admitted. “We were hitting it off.”

  Chloe rolled her eyes. “Then you spazzed out and ruined it.”

  “Actually,” I said, glaring at the top of her head, “I didn’t.”

  Kinsley’s face lit up. “Oh my God, what happened? Did he jump in after you?”

  I nodded. “Shoes and all. He pulled me out.”

  That had been the good part. Aside from the mortification that came with falling into a lake in front of people, I felt elation when I came up out of the water and found myself in Dain’s arms. His biceps were hard and his forearms taut, his hands strong. Water had sluiced down the planes of his face, which was knit into an expression of concern as he waded toward land.

  “He carried me back up to the house,” I told them. Kinsley sighed. Chloe paused again, nail polish dripping to the carpet from the brush suspended in her hand. She barely noticed as I continued my story. “Once we were inside, he sat me down and pushed the hair out of my face.”

  Chloe gasped. “Yes.”

  I nodded, grinning even wider now. “Then, he sent someone for a towel and wrapped it around me. He dried my hair.”

  Kinsley pretended to swoon. I’d just about swooned too by the time he was done. His fingers had lingered on the ends of my hair as he placed the towel around my shoulders. He’d rubbed my arms up and down vigorously. “I don’t want you to get cold,” he’d said. However, I could barely feel the cold. By then, I was completely oblivious to the fact that I was dripping all over the Carver’s carpet.

  “What about you?” I’d asked him.

  He’d shrugged. “I’ll be fine.”

  “Please tell me you got his number,” Chloe said.

  “I gave him mine,” I answered. When he’d asked, how could I refuse? What if he was the one? I was only on day four, but so far things were looking up. I barely knew Dain, but a guy who jumps into a lake after a girl can’t be all that bad. When I think about how tender he was when he touched me, I know he’d be the same way in bed. Considering my anxiety about the whole thing, a tender touch is just what I need to keep me from freaking out.

  “He’ll call,” Kinsley said. “He’d be stupid not to.”

  Chloe nodded. “Agreed. He’s obviously the kind of guy who likes a spaz. You’re a gangly, awkward damsel in distress and he’s got a hero complex.”

&nbs
p; For once, I didn’t care about Chloe’s comments on my lack of grace. For once, being socially handicapped had its advantages. Who would have thought there are guys out there that like that sort of thing?

  Chapter 4

  Day 8

  He still hadn’t called.

  I kept telling myself I was being ridiculous. I had way too much to worry about; Dain should not have been a concern. I had midterms coming up and a term paper due. He had a full-time job and a life I knew nothing about. For all I knew he was waist deep in corporate mail at work. Or doing charity work for blind kids and puppies. Or on a date with his leggy, blonde girlfriend.

  To top it all off, my dunk in the lake had made me sick. I’d been fighting a cold all week, but by Wednesday morning, I’d lost. I barely made it through my Ethics in Nursing class before I retreated back to the apartment and my bed, skipping out on my only other class of the day. Kinsley left me a stack of magazines before heading off to class and Chloe told me I looked like crap before doing the same.

  I did look awful. Puffy, watery eyes, red nose dripping goo … not a pretty picture. At this point, I didn’t want Dain to call. He’d be able to hear my stuffy nose through the phone. I was lying in bed, having a Vampire Diaries marathon with a box of tissues, when Luke poked his head into my room.

  “Hey, feeling any better?” he asked.

  My answer was a round of sneezes that undoubtedly turned my nose even redder. Luke winced and stepped into the room. I noticed for the first time that he was holding a bowl in his hands. Steam wafted from the bowl.

  “I cooked. It’s my mom’s recipe for chicken soup. She always made it when I was sick, so …” He trailed off, walking into the room and setting the bowl on my tiny nightstand.

  I sat up, propping my pillows against the headboard of my bed and leaning against them before taking up the bowl. “Thanks, Luke,” I said, surprised as I sniffed its contents. It tasted even better than it smelled. “Wow, this is good. I didn’t know you cooked.”