She turned to him wide-eyed. “But there shouldn’t be any talk, not about dating. You don’t date at all. I don’t date you. I just explained what happened.”
“And they’re obviously not buying it,” he said, impulsively taking her hand snugly in his. “Let’s just go with it.”
“Go with it,” she repeated, her eyes widening with alarm. “What does that mean, go with it?”
“It means tonight you and I are on a date. We’ll think of it as an experiment. Maybe I’ll discover that I’ve been wrong to forego a social life since moving to Serenity,” he added, though he suspected the opposite was more likely. All the talk might very well reinforce his conviction that he was better off alone.
Laura already looked uneasy. She swallowed hard at his assertion. “This is a bad idea, J.C.”
“Not to worry,” he consoled her. “Tomorrow we can break up. Happens all the time.”
“Not to me. Not in this town.”
He winked at her. “Then I’ll be your first.”
Something in the way she blanched at his choice of words set off alarm bells. No way, he thought. It wasn’t possible, was it? Could Laura Reed possibly be as innocent as all that? It should have terrified him, but suddenly he found himself more intrigued than ever.
5
Laura had spent most of the night wrestling with the covers and her confusing thoughts after spending the evening with J.C. To her surprise he’d fit right in with her friends from school. Once the teasing remarks had quieted down, they’d all cheered themselves hoarse as Serenity had managed to prevent a tying touchdown in the final seconds of the game.
Outside the stadium, he’d offered her a ride back to her car, but she’d insisted that Nancy could drop her off. He’d looked vaguely disappointed, which had surprised her after his insistence earlier in the evening that she wasn’t to construe his dinner invitation as anything other than a chance to discuss Misty and the problems she was having at school.
On the way to the parking lot by the medical practice, Nancy had had a million questions, which Laura had managed to sidestep fairly deftly, she thought.
“The man just offered to bring you over here himself. What is wrong with you?” Nancy had asked, regarding her with dismay. “I know his company has to be far more scintillating than mine.”
Laura had laughed. “Despite what he said at the game, we were never on a date, Nancy. Scintillating doesn’t enter into it.”
“Well, it should,” Nancy told her. “He’s the most available bachelor in the entire town, a doctor, no less. The competition has been fierce for years, and you’re the first woman I know of, at least locally, that he’s been out with.”
“Well, I happen to know for a fact that he has a date with a nurse practitioner in the morning,” she said, hoping to silence any more uncomfortable speculation about the two of them. J.C. might be a mystery she wouldn’t mind unraveling, but it simply wasn’t in the cards. One bit of wisdom she’d taken from past experience was an understanding of when to cut her losses.
“He told you he has a date tomorrow?” Linda asked. “What kind of man brags about a date when he’s out with someone else?”
“The kind of man who wants to make it clear he isn’t on a date with me,” she told her. “Do you get it yet?”
Nancy shook her head mournfully. “Well, I say it’s just sad. You looked cute together, and there were sparks. I could feel them.”
“Because you have a vivid imagination. It’s all those romance novels you read.”
“True, I want sparks like that,” Nancy admitted wistfully. “I have this sinking feeling, though, that I’ll never find them in Serenity. You know what slim pickings there are in this town. There are a few decent guys our age, but finding the whole package—intelligence, a sense of humor, good looks and a solid career—that’s all but impossible. Those guys get snapped up the minute they cross into the city limits. And now you already have the last man standing in your clutches.”
“Will you quit saying that?” Laura begged, though she couldn’t argue with Nancy’s premise that exciting, stimulating men were hard to find in Serenity.
“Only if I never see the two of you together again, which, if you want my opinion, would be a crying shame.”
“Thanks for the input, and for the ride,” Laura told her, quickly climbing out of the car. “See you on Monday.”
Unfortunately, even though she thought she’d managed to curb Nancy’s wild imagination for the moment, once she was curled up in bed, she couldn’t seem to stop herself from daydreaming about all sorts of scenarios that could play out between her and an intelligent, thoughtful, compassionate man like J.C. He was everything Rob Jefferson hadn’t been. Of course, Rob hadn’t really been a grown man when Laura had fallen for him. He’d been an irresponsible bad boy, which had been the allure for the quietest girl in school.