Tomboy (The Hartigans #3)(76)

All he could hear in his head was the sword-wielding guy from his mom’s favorite movie talking about how that word didn’t mean what the bad guy thought it did. “Except for the fact that I’m lying about who I am.”

“There’s a price to be paid if you want to reach any goal,” his mom said, using the one phrase she said to him growing up almost as much as she told him she loved him.

She wasn’t wrong. He’d made sacrifices to get to the Ice Knights. Someday, his body would expect payment, and he was okay with that. All of this publicity stuff made his stomach churn. This whole thing just kept getting more and more fucked-up.

“So how do they match people up?” he asked.

The grin on his mom’s face should have warned him of a fresh, new hell. “So glad you asked.”

She reached over and clicked on a question mark icon. A new tab opened filled with—he scrolled down and down and down—at least a billion questions.

Kill me now.

“You fill out those, the app will match you with a few possibilities, and then I’ll pick out your new girl.”

That buzz saw in his ears? It turned into mortar fire, deafeningly loud and almost certain to fuck up his world. He looked at Lucy and Coach Peppers, desperate for another option that wouldn’t put his mom in charge of his dating life. When they met his gaze without blinking, he turned back to the woman way too happy to have her control-freak fingers all up in his life.

“Whoever you pick, I’m not going out with her past date five,” he said. “This is a publicity stunt only. Nothing more.”

“No one is saying you have to or that you should,” Lucy said. “The point of this little exercise is to change the narrative and clean up your image. What is more wholesome than a boy’s mother helping him pick out a date?”

Had he fallen into a parallel universe where it was the total opposite of reality? His mom was in charge of his love life? “That’s not wholesome. It’s creepy and wrong.”

“Well unless you have a better plan to fix this disaster,” Peppers said from his spot across the room. “Then you’re stuck with it.”

Having his balls dipped in battery acid sounded like a better idea to him at the moment, but he had no real alternative plan to offer. This parental guidance–type date looked like the best option.

His toes itched as bad as that time when he’d skipped using his shower shoes at training camp, and his headache went from rumba throb to death-metal hammering.

He turned to Coach and Lucy. “And you guys are behind this plan? Really?”

“Seeing you dating a woman your mom picked out is a story that will grab the media’s attention away from that video,” Lucy said.

Okay, surely the one other man in the room would see the implausibility of all of this. “Coach?”

The older man shook his head and gave him a pitying look. “You got yourself into this pickle. You gotta get yourself out of it.”

Translation: You are so screwed…so very screwed.

He couldn’t agree more.

…

Zara Ambrose was no longer on a first-name basis with tequila, and the damn worm could call her Ms. Ambrose, too. It should have been calling her Mrs. Gatsley, but then that turd Kevin had jilted her six months before the wedding. She’d made the mistake of a three-day girls’ weekend where she and her besties had fallen in with a wild crowd with names like Patrón, Jose Cuervo, and Cabo Wabo. She wasn’t sure which tequila shot had landed her at the Hummingbird Bistro a week after that bender, but she cursed it all the same.

Her gaze went between her closest friends, Gemma McNamara and Roxy Hamilton, as the three of them sat at a corner table with a view of the hostess stand, and she let out an annoyed huff. “I can’t believe you guys made me fill out that stupid dating app questionnaire.”

“Made you?” Gemma snort-laughed. “Oh, honey, you practically tackled me before tearing the phone from my grasp and filling it out yourself.”

Okay, that part might be true. She remembered Gemma mentioning that a friend of a friend was looking for beta testers for the app’s soft launch. After that it was fuzzy, but she could still remember locking her arms around Gemma’s waist—which was as high as she could comfortably get, since at five-ten her best friend loomed over her by almost a foot.

Still, Zara wasn’t ready to go down alone on this one. “One of you should have stopped me from being so pathetic.”

“You mean honest about your five-foot-nothing-self’s needs—someone to reach the stuff on the top shelf at the grocery store and dust the cobwebs from your vagina?” Roxy asked at her normal not-even-kinda-quiet volume.

Zara sank down in her chair. “Don’t say that so loud.”

“Girl,” she said, raising an eyebrow and her glass of red wine. “You’re the one that typed it and sent it out for God and every horny fuck-boy on that app to see.”

She covered her face with her hands and sent out one more prayer for a fire-breathing dragon to incinerate her on the spot, because that’s exactly what she had done. She’d read it so many times—her horror growing each time—that she had the damn thing memorized.

Assholes Need Not Apply

I don’t expect fairy tales, but are a few not-self-made orgasms with a guy who makes my heart flutter really just a pipe dream??? My shithead of a fiancé dumped me after I supported him (including rent) while he went through medical school and finished his residency. My life was on hold for him, and now I’m ready for a little—really, a lot—of fun with the kind of guy who isn’t a total asshole. Too honest? Too bad. Life is too short for jerks with combovers and dudes who don’t know their way around a lady garden.