The Happy Ever After Playlist - Abby Jimenez Page 0,25
and then realize he was a real person with nice smells and a bed.
Jason had come up behind me, and he leaned into the room with his hands over his head on the door frame. “Look, I got you in my bedroom on the first date,” he teased, and I glanced over my shoulder and shot him a look.
“Is that where Tucker sleeps in his little dungeon?” I pointed to a crate wedged between the bed and the wall.
He chuckled. “I wonder how he’ll take being back in his crate now that he’s been spoiled by sleeping with a beautiful woman for so long.”
I turned to him. “Are you just going to flirt shamelessly with me now that you’re on this date that you wanted so much?”
“Of course.” He grinned.
The room was small, and with him hanging in the doorway, I was backed up to the mattress. With his hands over his head like that, his arm and chest muscles pushed against his T-shirt.
He had the most amazing body. He wasn’t bulky. He was lithe and toned and he stood easily a foot taller than me. He filled the room with his presence, even from the door.
My eyes flickered down. The bottom of his shirt had ridden up, and I could see a line of hair running down the middle of his stomach into the top of his jeans. My breath hitched, and I looked back up at his face quickly, hoping he hadn’t noticed my wandering eyes.
His amused expression told me he had.
It didn’t escape me that an hour ago I had been completely opposed to meeting him anywhere other than Starbucks, and now, if he took half a step forward, I’d have to sit on his bed.
I cleared my throat. “So, what if I hadn’t agreed to this date?” I asked, looking up at him.
He gave me a mischievous eyebrow. “Then I was going to go with my backup plan.”
“Which was what?”
“Same as my original plan, only with more subterfuge.”
“Subterfuge?” I tilted my head.
“Yeah. I was going to take you on the date anyway, let you call it an appointment, and never tell you it was a date the whole time.”
I laughed.
He nodded over his shoulder. “Come on. Let’s go eat.”
* * *
Jason wanted me to pick where we went, so I took him to a hole-in-the-wall Mexican place I liked down the street from my house. A red-boothed, small restaurant with trumpet-heavy ranchera music playing over the speakers and paintings of matadors on the walls. They gave us a quiet booth in a corner at a table with a sombrero hanging above it.
“I figure you haven’t had Mexican in a while,” I said. “Australia probably isn’t known for its carne asada.”
A busboy slid two ice waters in front of us.
“We don’t have very good Mexican food in Minnesota,” he said. “It’s one of my favorite things about LA.”
“What else do you like about California?”
“Well, the dog-sitters are hot,” he said, winking at me over the laminated menu.
I narrowed my eyes at him playfully as I pulled my vibrating cell phone out of my pocket. “Oh no,” I said, looking at the screen. “I have seven missed calls from Kristen. Hold on, it might be about Oliver.” I must have not felt it going off when I was in Jason’s truck. I pressed the phone to my ear. “Kristen? Is everything okay?”
“Please tell me that you googled Jason.”
“What?”
“You did google him, right? You know who you’re on a date with?”
My stomach dropped. Oh my God. I’d sent Kristen a picture of Jason’s ID. She’d obviously found him online. Was he a registered sex offender? A felon? I looked up at Jason, who eyed me from across the table, looking concerned.
I cleared my throat. “Um…I need to take this. Excuse me for a minute?” I slid out of the booth before he could reply. I practically ran to the ladies’ room and locked myself in a stall.
“Okay, I’m alone. What did you find? He wouldn’t tell me his last name unless I told him mine, so I couldn’t google him!”
My heart pounded. What had I done? He knew where I lived and everything. I’d given this stranger my address like an idiot! I paced inside the stall. I almost deserved to be murdered, I was so stupid.
“You’re seriously telling me you don’t know who he is? I thought you guys talk like twenty-four seven. How did this never come up?”