Going for Four: Counting on Love, Book 4 (6 page)

“Ditto, by the way. Clearly this guy’s a jackass.” He signaled the bartender. “You drinking a margarita?”

Olivia shook her head. “I got stood up for the first time ever.”

He nodded. “Me too.”

“I think that calls for more than a margarita.”

“Whatever you want.”

“You’ll call us a cab?” she asked the bartender.

“I have my car here,” Cody said.

“Me too. But we’re not going to be in any shape to drive home,” she told him. She turned to the bartender. “Four tequila shots. To start.”

The bartender grinned. “You got it.”

“Tequila?” Cody asked, watching the guy pour. “You do remember tailgating at the Nebraska football game with tequila?”

Olivia picked up a shot glass and swiveled to face him, holding the glass up. “Actually no, I don’t.”

“Exactly. We didn’t even make it into the stadium. You were passed out in the backseat within thirty minutes.”

“Sounds good to me.” She toasted him with the shot, then tipped it back.

Cody smiled and shook his head, watching her. Well, it wasn’t a
bad
idea. It was Friday night and neither of them had to work the next day. The bartender would be sure they had a cab. Why not? They’d both been stood up by blind dates.

He took one of the shots, shuddering as it went down. He didn’t love the taste of tequila, but he did love the effects.

Thirty minutes later—and three shots in—they both felt a lot better.

“I’m not upset,” Olivia said. “I mean, I don’t even know him.”

“And he’s a jackass,” Cody said, for at least the fifth time. Though he meant it more each time. What guy stood Olivia Dixon up? Even without seeing her, she was a catch. Perfect Pick didn’t have a better girl. He knew. He’d looked all over that site.

Part of him desperately
wanted
to find a girl that he’d look forward to seeing as much as he did to seeing Olivia. He’d finally settled on someone who came close. They shared many of the same interests. She even had the same top five favorite bands. He’d actually made himself admit that this date could be a good thing. He’d convinced himself that he was interested in meeting the woman on the other side of the profile he’d read.

And he’d gotten stood up.

Karma was such a bitch.

“You’re better off never having met him,” Cody declared with as much sincerity as the tequila would allow.

He wasn’t drunk. He was just buzzed enough to not fully think through everything he was saying before opening his mouth. But this was Olivia. There wasn’t anything he couldn’t say to her. That was the thing about best friends.

“You’re awesome,” he told her, lifting a lime slice to his mouth and biting down.

“Thanks. You are too. Completely, totally awesome,” she said, also with tequila-enhanced-sincerity. “Your Perfect Pick is an idiot. A shallow, stupid…” She seemed to be searching for a word. Finally she said “idiot” again.

Cody grinned. “Thanks. I try.”

“What I don’t get,” Olivia said, blinking at the shot glass in her hand, “is why someone would even sign up for a dating service if they didn’t intend to show up? I mean, he didn’t have to agree to meet me. Which would also be stupid, though, I guess. If you choose to be part of the Love Is Blind program, then you know you’re going to be set up on
blind
dates. It’s right there in the name! You’re on a dating service to get set up on dates, right?”

“Or to, you know, keep from ravishing your best friend,” Cody said.

She turned to look at him, and he waited for her to chastise him. It didn’t help to talk about it. They’d learned that.

Instead, she started laughing. Laughing so hard he took the shot of tequila out of her hand before she dumped it all over the bar. This was a nice place and they were drinking top-shelf booze here. If he was picking up the tab, all of the expensive liquor was going to be
inside
one of them.

“What’s so funny?”

“You’re here to keep from ravishing me, and here we are sitting together getting drunk.”

He set the shot glass down, trying to brush her comment off. “We’ve sat together and gotten drunk before.”

“And we’ve almost kissed every time.”

It was true. And probably not a good topic of conversation right now.

“Do you remember the first time?” she asked.

The first time they’d been alone together with a bottle of liquor? Uh, yeah. It was also the first—and only—time he’d ever actually kissed her.

He’d never forget it.

“Maybe we should switch over to water.”

He raised his hand to signal the bartender, but Olivia grabbed his wrist. He looked at her.

“Do you remember?” she asked again.

“Of course I do.”

“You were comforting me that night too.”

Yeah, yeah, he remembered. She’d gone out with a guy a couple of times and then she’d seen him somewhere with another girl. Cody had gone over to her place to pick up a cooler that Conner wanted to borrow. He’d found Olivia working out her frustrations in her kitchen. She’d been trying to come up with a unique Christmas cookie recipe for a local charity backing contest. There hadn’t been any mistletoe in sight. But there had been peppermint schnapps.

That had been the night she’d discovered he could bake.

And they both discovered that the chemistry they
thought
they felt was real.

The sight had been adorable—at first. Her ponytail was hanging half out of the elastic band and she was muttering and swearing as she mixed. She wore an apron and powdered sugar and red icing and green granulated sugar and a bunch of other ingredients on her clothes, skin and lips. That last had been the problem. When she’d turned to face him, cheeks pink, and he’d focused on her big blue eyes and the smudge of chocolate on her lips, the sight went far beyond adorable.

He remembered asking, “You okay?”

And she’d told him about her idiot boyfriend and his new girlfriend and the whipped cream they’d been buying together and ended with, “What’s wrong with me?”

He’d rushed to assure her that there was nothing wrong with her. That she was amazing and the guy was a jackass.

A lot like tonight.

While he rescued a bowl of innocent caramel mocha cookie dough from her and gave suggestions for the eggnog cookies she was trying, he had to keep reminding himself that the gorgeous woman bending to put cookie sheets in and out of the oven, who smelled like vanilla and sugar, who kept
licking
things, was
Olivia
. Olivia was the little sister of his best friend. The best friend who would
never
be okay with Cody dating his sister.

Then she’d told him that she wanted to kiss him.

He’d reminded her it was a bad idea.

But he was only human. And he’d made a mistake.

He’d said, “You’re gorgeous and sexy and sweet and any guy would be a damned fool if he didn’t kiss you every chance he got.”

She’d looked him straight in the eye and said, “Prove it.”

So he had. He’d put her up on the countertop and kissed her. And he would have done a hell of a lot more than that if her sisters hadn’t come in. Thank god they’d come in the front door or they would have seen Cody feeling their little sister up.

They’d met the next day at a busy, public mall food court where there was no chance of romance or kissing. They decided that being friends—good friends who would never make the mistake of thinking the with-benefits-thing could happen without complications—was the way to go.

“You made me feel a lot better that night, Cody,” Olivia said, still holding his wrist.

Uh-huh. He hadn’t even done half of the things that could have made her feel—

He shook his hand and pulled his hand away. God, the girl was like a drug. He became flat-out stupid around her.

“Have another shot,” he said, pushing the shot glass in front of him over to her.

She licked the salt, drank the tequila and bit into the lime slice. Then they sat quietly for a few minutes. Olivia had her chin propped on her hand, and she traced the rim of her shot glass with a finger. “I had to go get more shaving cream for tonight. That might be what ticks me off the most,” she finally said.

“What?”

Her eyes were still on the empty glass. “I shaved one leg and ran out of shaving cream. So I had to rinse off, get dressed, go get more and then get home and back into the tub to shave the other leg. That was a lot of hassle for nothing.”

She looked almost sad and Cody sighed. He knew this woman. “You’re not disappointed because you wasted your time getting more shaving cream.”

“I’m not?”

“You had this all built up in your mind,” he said. “You were intrigued by the idea of some guy picking you based on interests and personality only and you were excited to walk in here and wow him with the visuals too.”

She sat up straighter on the stool and looked at him. “I—” Then she must have remembered who she was talking to. “Maybe a little,” she admitted. “I’m not naive. I know that the chances of this guy being Mr. Right were slim, but yeah, okay, maybe while I was doing my hair it occurred to me that I might be on my way to meeting…” She trailed off and her cheeks got pink. “Someone special,” she finished.

He chuckled. Yeah, he knew her. “You thought you might be on your way to meet your future husband.”

God, he hated that idea. But he loved how sweet she was. Even more, he loved that the guy hadn’t shown up.

She sighed. “I know it’s so stupid. I know. But all the husbands and wives out there had to first meet sometime, right?”

“That’s true.”

“And I know that Amanda met Ryan and Emma first met Nate and had no idea they would end up together—but I remember when Shane met Isabelle. It was so obvious he was smitten from the first minute.”

Cody grinned. “Smitten?”

She smiled too. “It’s a great word. It fits Shane perfectly.”

Cody couldn’t argue. Shane Kelley had no problem making an ass of himself over the love of his life.

And maybe that was exactly how it was supposed to be.

It was how Olivia wanted it to be, he knew.

He should have seen this coming. They all should have. The woman who was all about true love and Prince Charmings had watched the three women she was closest to experience their versions of the fairy tale. Now Amanda and Ryan were getting married. Of course this would have pushed all of Olivia’s I-want-some-of-that buttons.

“You want a guy who acts like Shane?”

Olivia shook her head quickly. “Shane’s…a bit much,” she said.

Cody couldn’t argue there either. Shane was the kind of guy who could exhaust even the most extroverted person.

“But,” Olivia went on, “I want a guy who feels like Shane so obviously does. And how Ryan feels and how Nate feels.” She sighed wistfully. “I guess I’ve always been a romantic, but seeing it happen up close with my sisters showed me that all of those movies and stories can come true.”

Cody wasn’t sure that everything in those relationships had been Hollywood-worthy, but he admitted that those three couples seemed to know how to be in love. They were happy. No question. And it was the kind of happiness that made everyone around them want a little bit of it.

Putting that kind of love in front of a woman who had made Valentine’s Day her own personal holy day was just asking for a renewed sense of earnestness to find it for herself.

“You’ll have it too, Liv. I know it. This guy wasn’t it, but that doesn’t mean anything. And,” he said, finally allowing himself to look her up and down, “you look amazing. You are, without question, the whole package.”

Didn’t he know it.

“Thanks,” she said. “I do work hard on my ass.”

He snorted. “What?”

She nodded solemnly. “I work hard on my ass. I’ve always run, but I’ve been taking this butts-and-belly class at the gym and I’m
firm
.”

Holy crap. The naked thing the other day and now they were going to talk about how firm her ass was? Sure, this was a great idea.

“Good for you,” he said slowly. What did a guy say when a woman commented on her own ass?

She pivoted to face him, her knees knocking against his. “Are you telling me that you’ve never noticed my ass?”

“When I’m with you, I specifically work on
not
noticing things like that,” he said with all seriousness. That wasn’t easy either. Olivia was curvy in all the right places and he saw her every day. He was a damned saint for keeping his eyes on only appropriate body parts. “Unless, of course, you step out of a room naked,” he couldn’t help but add.

She gave him a half smile. “But then you only saw the front of me.”

And every gorgeous inch of her front flashed before his eyes with that reminder.

“Really, you have to check this out.” She slid off the stool and turned. “What do you think?”

What did he think of her ass? He’d have to look at it to tell, and he felt the need to make one more protest before he looked.