Page 58 of Friend Zone to End Zone

A half-smile slipped onto my lips. “I meant the car.”

25

Arianna

“Where did your car go?”I asked Cole when we walked outside to where a brand-new white Maserati MC20 was parked in the spot where his Land Rover had been.

“It’s right there.” He gestured at the fancy sports car.

“What?” I asked as I gawked at the vehicle that probably cost more money than I’d made in the last several years combined. “Did you, like, rent it or something?”

Cole may have just plopped down a huge chunk of money in the boutique, but for having millions in the bank, he was actually pretty frugal most of the time.

In football, you never knew when you’d get an injury that might end your career, and so he’d never put himself in a position where he wouldn’t have enough money to support himself and his lifestyle if it all got taken away tomorrow.

So thishadto be a rental.

But instead of telling me he’d only rented it for the night, he unlocked it with the key fob he pulled from his pocket. “I’ve been thinking about buying one for a while. So this one is actually mine.”

My jaw dropped. “What?”

He shrugged, as if suddenly having a suuuuper fancy car was no biggie. “If I’m going to start going on lots of dates, I need a hot date car, right?”

“You bought a car just to go on dates?” Was he crazy? “If this is what you think you need to do to find a girl to date you, you’re going to burn a hole in your pocketbook in no time.”

“I’m not going to buy a new car for every date.” He shook his head and chuckled. “And I really have been looking at this for quite a while. I just got lucky that the dealer was able to get this in yesterday so I could have it for our date.”

“But you still just spent like $7,000 on me back there.” I pointed my thumb over my shoulder. “If you do that for all your dates, you’re going to end up with a gold-digger.”

“Are you critiquing me again?” He raised an eyebrow. “Because I think we were going to save those kinds of comments for the end of the date.”

“I’m just saying—“

But he put his finger to my lips before I could finish and stepped closer to speak next to my ear. “This is a special case,” he whispered, and the heat of his breath on my skin sent tingles racing down my spine. “I have my own reasons for doing things this way tonight. So don’t worry about me. I’m just asking you to use your special dating coach skills to tell me if there’s anything I’m doing inherently wrong that will turn away a prospective future girlfriend.” He removed his finger from my lips, took half a step back to give me a little space and studied me. “Now, is there anything that I’ve done so far that would make a woman immediately dislike me?”

“Well, no…” I said. Because I didn’t think I’d ever met a woman who would be turned off by a man basically making her feel like a princess for the night.

“Good.” He dipped his head down to meet my eyes. “That’s all I need to know.”

And the way his deep brown eyes gazed into mine in the late afternoon sunlight caused my heart to flutter.

Which was not something that typically happened around him.

Maybe it was just a random heart palpitation? Because I couldn’t remember my heart ever reacting to him like this before.

Well, that was a lie. There wasonetime that it had happened. But that was just a whole different scenario and things didn’t count from that night.

“Now that we’ve gotten that straightened out—” He opened the passenger door and gestured for me to climb inside, breaking me away from my thoughts. “—if you’ll get in the car, we can move on to the next portion of the evening.”

Deciding to figure out the heart palpitations later, I gathered my skirt in my hands and stepped forward to lower myself into the car.

When I sat on the luxurious brown leather bucket seat, the skirt of my dress fell to the side to reveal a healthy amount of leg. And when I looked up and caught Cole raking in the bare skin with hungry eyes, the fluttery feeling was back in my chest.

Why did that keep happening? Was it a weird case of heartburn?

Was something changing between us tonight? Or was it just the fact that we were on a practice date that was making me notice all these things?

He’d always complimented me when I had taken special time to get ready before, but it had always been in a platonic, best-buddy sort of way—but the look in his eyes right now was definitely not one I would consider a “we’re just friends” sort of look.

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