Page 21 of Holidate Fail
She could kiss him.
“Two votes for each.” Heath looked around the restaurant, the large group of people keeping the hostess and wait staff busy. “Let’s decide what to do outside.”
Heath waved off their attempts to pay their own bills as he took money out of his wallet and put it on the table. “It’s cool. I can expense this.”
“But this isn’t a work function,” Dahlia said.
Heath paused. “Ah, right. We’ll figure it out later. Let’s go.”
Dahlia tried again once they were by Kelly’s SUV. “Why would it be a tri-county event if they’re sending us to a part of the state that’s in a completely different county?”
“Look,” Heath said. “Let’s think of it as going on an adventure, and not about who’s right and who’s wrong. Okay?”
Great. Now if she protested, she’d be boring old Dahlia again. She glanced at Kelly, who was looking back at her. He gave one dip of his chin, leaving it up to her.
“Okay.” Her mind fought with her mouth, but her mouth won. “An adventure.”
Chapter 6
“We should have bought the lollipop,” Kelly whispered to Dahlia from the backseat of his own car. After being at the wheel all day, he’d given it up to Lacole, letting Heath navigate. Now they’d been driving for another two hours with no end in sight. The sun had set a while ago, and the country roads didn’t have much by way of light. All he could tell was that they were surrounded by trees. He wasn’t even sure they were on a paved road anymore, with all the bumps and ruts the SUV went over. And his phone battery had finally died.
“I heard that,” Heath muttered from the passenger seat.
“I know,” Dahlia whispered back to Kelly.
“We’re almost there,” Heath said. “I know the coordinates are here somewhere.”
Kelly’s last update from Vin said they had the next couple of weekends booked. That alone gave him some relief, but while on the scavenger hunt, he had found something unexpected. Or re-found something unexpected, as the case may be. He took in Dahlia and her Georgia Adventures t-shirt, her braids crossing over her head, her delightful body so close to his, her spirit alive and enthusiastic.
“I didn’t think it would be this dark when I finally got you here. But you guys are gonna be eating those words when we get to the coordinates,” Heath said.
“Like we’d eat a lollipop?” Kelly asked.
Dahlia snorted, then laughed as she covered her mouth.
Kelly grinned, pleased at himself for finagling his way to sit next to her. It hit him that he’d been forcing the dating issue, trying to find a woman who fit. Turns out, the connection he wanted didn’t come from someone who understood the hours it took to run a business. Someone who accepted he’d be away a lot. Kristy had been that, and he’d become the cliché when she traded up to one of her lawyer colleagues.
He’d take a nerdy and cute hydrologist that made him laugh over any of that.
Even if she was his best friend’s sister.
She frowned out the front window, her eyes following the tree line as the car rambled on. “Was that a…”
Kelly looked out the window with her, but didn’t see anything unusual. “Was that a what?”
“There are a lot of river trees out here for coordinates that aren’t supposed to be near water,” she mumbled.
Dahlia’s hand was braced by her side, and he grasped it in his. She whipped around to look at him, at their joined hands, and then him again.
“Stop the car!” Dahlia commanded.
The SUV lurched and then stopped, sending Dahlia and everyone else reeling forward until their seatbelts snapped. “Geez, Lacole, you didn’t have to slam on the breaks like that.”
“I didn’t.” Her hair whirled around her as she turned to face Kelly in the back seat. “The car’s stuck.”
***
A light rain fell, hitting the canopy of leaves above them like a soft percussion ensemble before making the already wet ground even wetter. Dahlia used the car’s headlights to identify the trees and brush that surrounded the muddy road.
