to approach you. That went out with corsets and stays. The rules of the dating game are in your hands.
Her shaky, sweaty hands.
Sweet.
She looked around the bar. It was so dim. She wasn’t sure how anyone was supposed to tell how attractive the people around them were. Though, maybe that would work in her favor. Whilst she’d followed the “How to Get a Smokey Eye in Three Easy Steps” guide religiously while getting ready, she was privately afraid she looked like she’d been punched in the face.
So maybe the dim lighting would work in her favor.
The guy across the bar was actually pretty nice looking. He was wearing that standard blue business shirt, collar open, his tie probably ditched in whatever fleet car he drove. A company car, she was willing to bet. He had an eight-dollar haircut. That she was sure of. She could see the razor tracks from twenty feet away, but that wasn’t so bad.
He probably sold something. Insurance maybe.
So maybe she could get a little ego salve and a good rate on a policy for her motorcycle all in one night. That would kind of rock.
She stood up and started walking toward him before she could overthink it. Before she could think at all.
A wall of cheap body-spray scent greeted her when she got within five feet of him. She nearly gagged. They needed serving-sizes on that crap. She’d banned it in her offices. The young male interns completely believed the commercials that promised random ménages with strangers and seemed to bathe in the stuff before work. It gave her a headache.
It was giving her a headache now.
That didn’t bode well for the flirting.
She really would like it if she could manage to stun a guy with her witty repartee and stunning beauty. If she could get a guy to ask her to come back to his place. Partly because she was trying to figure out how successful her app was, and partly because she really needed the boost to her self-esteem.
The loss of Jason the Ass, and the fact that he’d been sleeping with another woman, had dented her confidence. A little male interest would go a long way in fixing that. Not all the way to the bedroom, mind you.
She couldn’t even imagine that being worth it. In her memory, sex had never been so hot, in spite of rumors to the contrary.
It had been a long time for her. Even longer since sex had thrilled her in any capacity.
Jason had been boring in bed. There. She’d admitted it. And yes, she was probably a little bit boring in bed, too, but that man hadn’t made her toes curl in years, and even then, he hadn’t made them curl with any consistency.
Someday, she would investigate if the toe curling was real. If the panting and sweating and things that her friends always talked about, that the magazines said were possible, were in fact possible.
Her entire sexual career boiled down to one man who seemed to think foreplay was a golf term.
It was partly her fault. Because she’d been seventeen and a virgin the first time she’d been with him, and she’d basically just kept being with him because she hadn’t known what else to do. They’d followed each other through life. Through college and their first apartment. Their first jobs. And then her quitting her job to develop apps. And her ensuing success.
Success, which had, apparently, made him feel neutered and had forced him to seek greener pastures. And by greener pastures, she meant another woman’s vagina.
Bastard.
The thing that sucked, really sucked, was that when she’d come home from her office to find him with his head between another woman’s legs she’d been pissed about two things.
The first being that he’d said he didn’t like that. Always. He’d tried it on her once, and said he hated it. And he’d never done it again. So, there he was after ten years with her, doing it for another woman with an enthusiasm she’d never seen from him before.
Yeah, that had pissed her off.
The second thing was that she wasn’t brokenhearted.
The realization that she didn’t love him anymore either was a hard one to swallow. Because in some ways, even though she was angry, she just felt free.
Free to move his things out. Free to tell him to leave. To tell him to enjoy life without his meal ticket. Free to put on music he hated and dance in her panties and go to bars to pick up men who got her much more excited than Freaking Jason.
It had made her angry because it was ten years of her life, poured out on a guy she couldn’t even cry over.
Her most righteous and frightening anger was at herself. Six months she’d had it stewing on the back burner. She hadn’t wanted to date. She’d barely wanted to look a guy in the eye because it just made her a little stabby.
Her poor interns.
Then she’d gotten the offer to do this app for Flirt. And that had plunged her into research on dating, hookups and sex. Which was why she had sex, and toecurling, on the brain when she’d successfully ignored the concept for quite a few months.
She’d already compiled a profile for herself in the app. The things she would need, with her personality and experience level, to pick up a guy.
Now, it was time to see how it worked. In theory, at least. All she needed was for him to indicate he wanted to hook up, and then she’d know that her app was a success. And that she actually had a snowball’s chance in hell of having another relationship someday.
“Hello,” she said, moving to where the guy was sitting. “Evie, Evie James.” She stuck out her hand and stood, waiting for him to reciprocate.
He did eventually, but he had that look in his eyes that her sisters usually got whenever Evie was trying to explain something techie to them.
“Brent.”
“Nice to meet you, Brent,” she said, smiling broadly. She mentally went through the list again. “A drink,” she said. “I’d like to buy you one.”
“Okay,” he said.
Damn this was awkward.
But she was pressing on. She had her Flirt profile all set. She had “10 Tips to Land a Guy,” and she was going to do just that.
* * *
Caleb Anderson had watched the thin, awkward redhead approach three different men and bomb out in the last ten minutes.
It was like watching an overeager puppy try to make friends with cat people. Sad. It was sad.
Of course, he was a thirty-five-year-old man in a bar on a Friday night hoping to pick up a stranger for sex, so he imagined he was a little sad, too.
But his chances for success were much higher than hers. So there was that.
He could hear her voice carrying over the music. She was loud. Everything about her. From her steps in her stilettos to her laugh, was damned loud.
“These heels are making me blister.”
Oh man. She was so awkward.
“Really, I never wear shoes like this.” She was still talking about her feet. And now bending down to pull a shoe off. She was wobbling, but caught herself on the bar before she face-planted onto the glossy marble floor.
The guy she was talking to seemed willing to overlook the awkward. At least for now. Probably because the girl had a fine rack on her, at least it seemed that way from his vantage point.
Might be one of those lying gel bras. False advertising at its most insidious.
And now her shoe was off. And her weirdness officially trumped her rack. The guy she was talking to was zoned out now, his gaze on the blonde across the room.
Caleb had assessed the blonde already. She was boring. She