Page 21 of Blind Date with a Werewolf
She’d been thinking she wanted a quiet place where she and her “platonic Internet conversation partner” could talk. It was quiet here, for sure. Only as she was sitting at a small table set with illusionary privacy in a dark corner with soft music playing in the background did she realize how intimate, how romantic, this restaurant was.
This kind of awkward misjudgment is one of the reasons why you have no social life, she told herself. She had no love life—she’d just dumped her last boyfriend two weeks earlier—and no friends who weren’t coworkers. She sighed and sipped the very good wine she’d ordered so she wouldn’t feel guilty about taking up a table a half hour before her not-date was supposed to start.
The no-friends thing probably had more to do with her job than her famously awkward moments (like bringing a not-date to what was probably the most romantic restaurant in Spokane). If she wasn’t at work, she was asleep. Even her last boyfriend had been someone she met at work—social worker meets police officer—and hadn’tthatbeen a train wreck.
What was she doing here? Who needed the Internet to find a friend? This was really stupid no matter what the people in her favorite Facebook hangout said about the new service for people who wanted to talk about gardening with other like-mindedpeople. Platonic Plantophiles had sounded so hopeful, a not-dating site. Someone to talk to who wasn’t a client and didn’t work with her—and was not interested in a romance in any sense of the word. She’d had enough of romance for a while.
In a fit of optimism, she’d input her information and waited.
The first reply had come from Spokane. They had been instructed to use a single name only (preferably your actual first name, but usernames were acceptable) for safety’s sake. Over half a million people lived in and around Spokane, and there were probably a dozen Phoebes. But the Phoebe she knew loved lilacs and owned a business downtown. Tami would rather stab herself with a fork than spend an hour talking tothatPhoebe.
If it was that Phoebe, Tami trusted that she would never connect Tami who loved herbs with the Tami who’d headed the team that fought successfully to build a series of new homeless shelters in the downtown area—where they were the most needed. Tami hadn’t returned Phoebe’s email.
The second email she’d gotten a week later had been from Carter in Billings, Montana. Billings was more than five hundred miles away. They’d exchanged a few emails, found no real connection to make spanning the distance worthwhile, and ceased communicating.
She’d looked up profiles herself after that, determined to get the most out of the three months of service she’d paid for. She’d found there were clusters of people in Florida and Southern California. But other than Phoebe, Carter in Billings was honestly the closest person signed up on the site.
She chalked the whole mess up to experience and put it behind her. The next day, Moreno (she assumed it was his lastname), a rose lover who lived in an unspecified small town in Montana but often found himself in Spokane on business, contacted her.
She’d checked his profile, but there was very little other than what he’d told her in his initial email. There was no date of birth; “not quite as old as dirt” wasn’t much of a clue, though it left her with the impression of someone who was past middle age. His profile picture was a Black Baccara rose held between two fingers. His fingers were in shadow and told her nothing about him.
With those few hints, she made up a story about him in her own mind: an older man, Hispanic from his name, and well educated from his emails. He raised roses in the snowy mountains and needed someone to talk to. He would come, laugh about the atmosphere of the restaurant—shehadtold him that she could be awkward in social situations, and she could tell that he had a sense of humor from the emails they had exchanged.
She heard a sound behind her and turned to see a man murmuring to the host who had seated her. The host glanced in her direction and smiled. The man looked over and up and met her eyes. If she had had any doubt, it was extinguished by the Black Baccara rose in his hand.
Instead of the older gardener she had dreamed up, she was getting…something else. He looked dangerous and expensive, gorgeously dressed in a bronze fitted shirt that showed muscle without clinging too tightly and formal black slacks.
His face was the color of teak, but he wasn’t Native American, African American, Hispanic, or any other race she could pinpoint. None of that mattered, though, because he was the single most beautiful man she’d ever seen in the flesh.
Wow, was her first thought.
Her second thought was,There is no way in hell this man needed a dating site to find someone to talk to.She’d been set up. Maybe Phoebe had connected the Tami from the site to the Tami from the homeless shelters. Maybe one of her coworkers had figured out that she was registered on a not-dating site.
She straightened herself in her chair and pulled on her professional mask to cover her anger. Her hand reached up to grab her mother’s pendant necklace for reassurance, and she forced it down to rest on the table in front of her.
This was supposed to be something she was doing for fun, damn it.
The woman’s face grew grimmer the closer Asil got to her table. She glanced at the rose in his hand, folded her arms, and looked away.
Amusement fought with pique—he had dressed carefully for this “date” his Concerned Friends had arranged for him from the Platonic Plantophiles—A Meeting Place for Friends Who Garden site. His shirt was silk, yes, but it was a dusty brown a few shades lighter than his skin, a most ordinary color. Nothing romantic. The shirt a friend would wear going to dinner with another friend.
Maybe she hadn’t wanted a platonic friend? The restaurant was more romantic than he had expected. But he thought that even in a brown silk shirt he wouldn’t make a bad date. Her reaction reminded him of…the very first of these dates, actually.
Ah, of course. The problem was that he was too beautiful. That response was something he was used to dealing with.
He sat down, thanked the host, set his rose down gently, then folded his hands on the table and waited. It was better to make her speak first. He took the opportunity to look at her.
The dim light didn’t hinder his sight except that it made colors a little harder to determine. Her hair was light brown and her eyes another light color—blue or hazel. She had a face that showed signs of smiling a lot, which he liked. Her jaw was stubborn, which might be mostly a result of the current situation, but he liked that, too. She appeared to be somewhere in her early thirties.
“You are Mr.Moreno?” she asked.
“I am,” he responded. “You were expecting someone different?”
“Yes.” She considered him, her body stiff. “No.” She finished the dark wine in her glass and said, “Did Phoebe set this up?”
“No,” he told her. “Who is Phoebe? And why would she want to set you up?”
She ignored his question, and instead waved a hand in his general direction and said, “Why wouldyouneed a dating service?”
