Convincing Cara (Wishing Well, Texas Book 2) (12 page)

Score!

“Actually, I think I’m done with the blind-date thing. I appreciate you and Harm setting me up, but I think I’ll take a shot at it.”

Okay, so, if she wasn’t talking to my sister, then she must have been on the phone with the third in their trio, Destiny.

“Yep. As a matter of fact, I’m going out with him after work Monday. When I agreed to coffee, he asked for dinner. I guess that’s the litigator in him.” She laughed, and the sound hit me like a punch in the gut.

I wanted to be the one making her laugh.

“I insisted on a drink, not dinner. I learned my lesson. As much as I enjoy getting to know new people and eating, first dates are strangely not the best environment for either of those things,” she said with a chuckle.

First a doctor, now a lawyer. Apparently, she had a type, and I wasn’t so sure cowboy fit into it.

“No, you didn’t wake me up. I was up, I promise. I haven’t been sleeping that well.” Cara balanced the phone with her cheek as it rested on her shoulder. Then she leaned forward and lifted her garage door.

Join the club
, I thought as I took in the amazing view her current position provided. This new visual of Cara bending over in Daisy Dukes was going to cause some tossing and turning for quite a few nights to come.

When she straightened and held her phone once again, her posture stiffened. “No, I was awake. Really, don’t apologize. But it doesn’t matter if I had been asleep. Seriously, Destiny—call or text any time you’re up. I don’t care what time it is. Believe me, I know how it feels to be the only one awake and feeling miserable.”

My heart might’a sunk like the Titanic when Cara had sung her date’s praises, but hearing her talk about being lonely and miserable made me feel like someone had reached in my chest and was squeezing my heart like an almost empty bottle of Ketchup. Thinking of Cara lying awake, sick, scared, and alone, ripped me to shreds. The painful reminder of her past served to do two things. First, it showed me again what a fighter and a survivor she was. Second, it spotlighted the fact that she deserved every happiness she could possibly experience, including dating Peter the Prick, who’d shown her his prick, the hot doctor she’d had no sparks with, or the lawyer she was only having drinks with.

If it made her happy, who the hell was I to stand in her way? The last thing she needed was for me to complicate things by dumping a decade’s worth of pent-up feelings on her.

“Okay. I’ll come by this afternoon to check on you. Love you.” Cara disconnected the call and put her phone in the back pocket of her shorts as she grabbed a bucket and a sponge from the garage.

I couldn’t count the number of fantasies I’d had starring Cara in cut-off shorts or a bikini, washing my truck. It had to be in the hundreds. As much as I’d have loved to watch my fantasy play out in front of me in real life, I wouldn’t have just been dipping my toes into stalker waters if I did. I’d have been belly-flopping into the creeper pool.

I needed either to leave immediately or let her know I was there. The decision was not difficult to make.

Clearing my throat, I started up her driveway. “Hey. You want some help?”

“Ahh!” she screamed as she spun around, dropping the bucket, which crashed to the ground.

“It’s me. Sorry. I didn’t mean to sneak up on you.” I rushed to her.

Within a second, I was directly in front of her.

She proceeded to slap me with the rag she was gripping for dear life. “You scared me!”

“Sorry.” I couldn’t help but laugh as I ducked away from her assault.

Her hand flattened against her chest as it rose and fell in her attempt to catch her breath.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

I motioned towards the barn. “I had some work to catch up on.”

“Oh.” She nodded before a wrinkle formed at the bridge of her nose. “Wait. But what are you doing
here
?”

Shit.
I could tell her the truth, that I’d come to make sure she had been home after her hot date last night and then I’d stayed to listen to her private conversation, but somehow, I thought that would go over as well as a pregnant pole vaulter. If I went with that story, I might have had to duck a hell of a lot more than a rag.

Thankfully, I’d always been good at thinking on my feet. It had gotten me and my brother out of more trouble more times than I could count.

“I forgot my key, so I was coming to grab the extra one.”

Colton kept all the extra keys for his house, the equipment, the storage unit, and the barn in Cara’s garage because, if he kept them at the main house, no one would ever be able to find them. Cleaning was not Colton’s strong suit. Cara, on the other hand, was somewhat of a neat freak. I’d always known that about her, but I hadn’t been aware of the extent until the night I’d brought her home from the bar.

In her drunken state, she’d insisted on me getting a shirt she’d wanted to sleep in for her out of her drawer. It had taken opening a few for me to find the one she had been talking about. In my search, I had seen that all of her clothes were folded perfectly, like they were on display at the Gap. And the cherry on top of her organizational sundae was that they were all color coordinated.

It was adorable.

“Oh, right. Keys.” She snapped her fingers and spun around then crossed to the back corner of the garage. Looking over her shoulder, she asked, “What do you need?”

“You.” The word slipped out before I could catch it and pull it back in.

“What?” Her hand froze in midair as she stared at me, her blue eyes as wide as saucers.

“You to help me wash my truck. Travis and I took it four-wheeling and it’s caked with dirt. I was thinking I could pull my truck around and we could wash ’em both together.” Maybe I wasn’t as quick on my feet as I’d thought. “You’re washing your Jeep, aren’t you?”

“Oh…yeah…” Shaking her head slightly, she smiled. “Sure. We can wash them together.”

Well, that had been a close one.

“Let me go grab my truck,” I said.

As I jogged down the path towards the barn, I thought about this situation, which was getting stickier than duct tape with each day that passed. I knew a couple of things to be true. First, I needed to do a much better job at watching what I said. And second, spending the morning with Cara in wet jean shorts and a tank top was going to be a trial by fire of finding out if I could do just that.

Cara

“He thinks the sun comes up just to hear him crow.”

~ Dolly Briggs

T
he saying ‘third
time’s a charm’ was being quickly disproven by this date. Unless your definition of
charm
was
worst
, then yes, the third time was definitely a charm. We were only fifteen minutes into this train wreck disguised as casual drinks, and I was already counting the seconds until I could make my escape.

If I were more assertive, I would have politely excused myself and told him that I didn’t think this would work out. But, since I was about as assertive as a wet noodle, I listened to Derek talk about the women he’d dated and how impressed they all had been when they found out who he was, which apparently happened to be the heir to a large pharmaceutical company.

Seriously? I just can’t get away from medicine
.

“So that’s when I knew she was just a gold digger. I mean, before she finds out who I am, she wants nothing to do with me. Then, after, she’s all over me? Come on. No tits in the world are perfect enough to put up with that shit.” Derek smirked.

And I wanted to throw up.

“Here you go.” The cocktail waitress placed our drinks on the table, and I was so happy to see her that I could have kissed her. “Let me know if you need anything else.”

Two words came to mind
: the check.

I returned her friendly grin as she left and promptly lifted the beverage to my lips. The silver lining to this cloudy situation was that I could slam my cosmo since I’d taken the train to work and would be taking an Uber home from the station tonight. After one gulp, my silver lining turned out to be the outline of the gray cloud—I started choking. My transportation might have dictated that I could down this sucker, but my lightweight drinking capacity had something else to say about it.

“Whoa. Slow down there, tiger.” Derek laughed as he patted my back. “I didn’t know you were such a party girl.”

I’m not.
I would have thought that that was obvious—I clearly couldn’t do more than
sip
my cosmo without choking. It took me longer than I’d hoped to regain my composure. When I was breathing normally again, I wiped the moisture beneath my eyes away.

“I’m not a party girl,” I corrected him. I wasn’t sure why I had. It wasn’t like I cared what he thought about me. I didn’t.

Derek’s hand covered mine as he lowered his voice and leaned forward, a knowing glint in his eyes. “I can imagine you probably want to blow off steam after getting the good news.”

“Good news?” I was fairly certain he was talking about my new position at the magazine, but the way he’d said it had had a much more intimate tone than that. Like he was privy to information he couldn’t have easily overheard in the elevator.

“I know all about it.” He winked. “And don’t worry. I’m not holding it against you.”

“You know what, exactly?” I asked slowly.

A smirk appeared on his face. “All of it. You don’t think I’d have accepted this date without doing my research on you, did you?”

“
Accepted
this date? You were the one who asked me out. Repeatedly.” Snatching my hand back from beneath his, I sat up straighter, squaring my shoulders.

“I might have thrown out the bait, but you definitely bit hook, line, and sinker.”

My jaw dropped. Literally. I had a million things flying through my head that I wanted to say, but I couldn’t manage to spit them out. I just sat there, mouth agape. I could not believe the things that were coming out of this guy’s mouth. It just went to show that you really didn’t know someone—until you did. Never would I have guessed that Derek was an arrogant, condescending jerk. He’d seemed nice whenever we ran into each other in passing.

“Anyway, you should be happy. I know all about your past and I’m fine with it.” He tried to place his hand over mine, but this time I moved faster.

Despite the fact that I was sure I was not going to like the answer—and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, considering I never planned on seeing this man outside the office building we shared—I still heard myself asking, “What exactly do you
know
and are
fine
with in my past?”

“You know.” He winked, like that was going to clear everything up.

“No.” I slowly shook my head as I took another drink—one I was likely going to need. Thankfully, this one went down much smoother than the last. “I don’t know.”

His forehead wrinkled as his eyebrow rose. “You know… The
cancer
.”

He’d whispered the C-word.

Since my initial diagnosis almost a decade ago, I was still surprised at how differently people behaved when confronted with the serious illness. Some people refused to acknowledge it at all, some people wanted to talk about nothing else, while other people had treated me as if it was contagious. This response was new. Derek was treating it like a dirty secret he’d uncovered.

When I didn’t speak, he continued his idiocrasy as he assured me, “I’m totally fine with it, even if it means you might be damaged goods.”

If my jaw could have unhinged and hit the floor, it would have. Any shock I’d felt before was child’s play compared to what Derek’s last comment sent surging through me. I’d grown up hearing the saying that he or she was “spitting mad” thrown around. But I’d never experienced that level of fury until this moment.

After taking a deep breath, I calmly clarified, “Damaged goods?”

“Yeah, you know. You might not be able to have kids because of all the chemo. I’m fine with it. Kids can be adopted, but you… You’re a triple-S threat. Smokin’ hot. Smart. And a sweetheart. A triple S is like a unicorn. And that’s a lot harder to find than a working uterus.”

Working uterus?! Wow. That’s it.

I was done.

“Goodnight, Derek.” My entire body was vibrating with anger as I stood.

There was no way I was going to waste one more second of my precious time with this chauvinistic pig. Life experiences were one thing; being a masochist was another.

“Hey, come on. Why are you leaving?” He stood and held his hands out. His face scrunched in what looked like genuine confusion. “That was a compliment.”

“The fact that you consider what you just said a
compliment
is the reason I’m leaving.” I did my best to control my temper as I put a ten-dollar bill on the table. I wasn’t going to let this man buy my drink. No way in hell.

As I weaved through the bar, which was packed with the happy hour crowd, I heard him bark in laughter behind me.

“Women!” he declared loudly. “You all claim you want honesty, but when a real man lays his cards on the table, you get scared and run away.”

A very large part of me wanted to turn around and tell Derek exactly what I thought about his assessment of women, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if he wasn’t trying to “bait” me again. No, thank you. I had no plans of biting “hook, line, and sinker” again.

So many thoughts were jumping up and down in my mind, competing for attention. They felt like kernels of corn popping and my head was the bag that was about to burst. I did my best to maintain my composure as I walked the two blocks back to my office to pick my bag up before catching the train that would take me back to Wishing Well. My heels clicked on the cement, and the sound reminded me of the effort I’d put into this date. Not only had I brought a change of clothes with me to work, but I’d even bought brand-new nude heels to go with my thigh-length lavender dress.

I considered changing out of my dress and new heels, back into the slacks, the button-up, and the flats I’d worn into the city today, but when I caught my reflection, I decided against it. I looked pretty dang good, and this was the
last time
I would be dressing up like this for a long time, so I figured I might as well get as much mileage as I could out of it.