Page 71 of The Dating Charade

They’d give up early, find a place to eat dinner. Take a stroll.

All a perfectly good plan, except he wanted to be with someone who made him sweat. Someone who knocked him over—not flirtatiously but as someone who cared less about him at that moment and more about the ball. Someone who didn’t mercifully pretend not to see the coffee spilled all over his shirt but pointed directly to it, chortling loudly. Someone who ducked down with him in the middle of a crowd. Someone who wore Nutcracker Toms.

He wanted Cassie.

It was time to tell her the truth.

Tomorrow night he would explain it all.

Tomorrow night he would know what the future held.

19

Cassie

The ball rolled across the concrete court, landing at his sneakers.

“Forty-three, twenty-eight, hot shot. I’m gaining on you.” Cassie slapped her hands together, breath clouding and swirling from her lips. She sniffed and rubbed her frostbitten nose with the back of her hand.

Jett bounced the ball once, the yellow light from an overhanging streetlamp lighting their small court. Headlights from a couple of oncoming cars lit up the road beside them. Otherwise, it was dark—so dark they’d lose the ball if it flew out of hands and into the grass. “Tell me again why you prefer playing in eighteen degrees when we could be playing in the luxury of a fifty-year-old high school gym?”

Cassie leapt forward, bouncing the ball out of his hands.

“Hey, hey, hey!” he called, watching her dribble the stolen ball and shoot it into the basket.

“Two-point penalty for small talk and two points for the shot. Forty-three, thirty-two.” Cassie grinned wickedly as she threw the ball to his chest. “And to answer you, this is about home-court advantage.”

“You mean hypothermia advantage.”

Her grin widened as she put her hands out in false apology. “It’s not my fault you forgot gloves.”

“Because I didn’t need them,” he shot back, “seeing as I expected to be inside before you called on the way here with your ‘great idea.’”

Despite the weather and the cold, sweat ran down the back of Jett’s neck as he dribbled toward the basket.

Cassie lunged, her right thigh taut as she reached forward before he slipped past. Fingers gripped, then wrapped around his T-shirt. It was an illegal move, she knew. But they liked to play illegally.

Still, there was little resistance on the shirt. He could’ve planted another foot forward and been out of her grip easily.

And yet, Jett stopped. His feet stumbled back unnecessarily.

And now here he was in her face, her nose inches from his neck.

“Whoa, now. Am I going to have to call a foul on you, Miss Everson?” He gave a crooked smile.

She liked that look. She liked that look so much she found her mind forgetting how to answer, her already speeding heart rate raising another ten miles per hour. Where was her quick wit now? Her lips opened, searching for words to match his rhythm. Some vague idea of a referee was forming, but her scattered mind couldn’t finish it. His blasted chest kept rising and falling in front of her, so close that at each peak, the ball at his side touched her waist.

She looked down at her feet, out of bravery or cowardice she couldn’t tell.

She took a step back, and the magical, tenuous bubble popped.

Before going a second further, she had to tell him. Now.

There was a question in his eyes as he clearly saw the struggle she held with herself. “What?” He smiled lightly, though there was a seriousness about the brow. “You have a thing about fouls?”

“No, I, uh . . . I wanted to see . . . wanted to revisit that conversation about . . . kids.”

She swallowed and felt as though she had ingested a golf ball. Three and a tenth dates in, and horror upon horrors, she was bringing up kids. In romantic comedies, this was the shot just before the guy’s fork clattered loudly to the ground and he ran outside for a taxi.