Page 41 of Sweatpants & Sweet Tea

Not Dini. She was more dog than cat. She came when you called her. She would follow commands such as sit, stay, and rollover. She meowed on command when you told her to speak.Now that I thought about it, she was probably the reason I hadn’t missed having a dog in my life. Dini filled the dog-sized hole in my heart. I kissed the top of her head, and she snuggled under my chin.

Who is gonna fill the Daphne-sized hole in your heart?A voice sounded in the back of my head, but I ignored it.

After brushing my teeth, I opened my bedroom window to let the night breeze in, and my eyes automatically shot to the attic across the field to the Moore farmhouse. Tonight, of course, it was dark. There was no light in the attic. Daphne was out at Southern Comfort, which Billy Comfort owned. Her first kiss.

Thankfully, Billy was off the market. He was happily married. But I was sure there were other guys lining up to talk to her. Not to mention the guys she’d be going out with over the next few weeks.

“It’s not real. The show is not real.”

Why had she made that distinction to me? I ran my hands through my hair before plopping down on my bed. My back had barely hit the mattress before Dini curled up in the nook of my shoulder and purred against my neck. The mini-kitty was blissfully unaware of my torment.

I stared up at the ceiling and listed all the reasons why I needed to steer clear of the honey-blonde city girl with mesmerizing eyes, curves that made me sweat, and a kiss that was softer than the clouds in the sky.

She lived three thousand miles away.

She wasn’t interested in a relationship, long-distance or otherwise.

She had made it very clear that she didn’t want anyone to know that anything had happened between us.

If my feelings were logic-based, those facts would make a difference. Unfortunately, they weren’t. I liked Daphne. A lot.Too much. And I wasn’t sure there was anything I could do about that.

I closed my eyes and willed myself to fall asleep, but my mind was racing with all of the developments that had come to light. One thing that I kept coming back to was Daphne mentioning that the show she was shooting was a segment she had done forPulse. I wondered if there were clips of it online.

Even as I reached over to the nightstand to grab my phone, I knew this was a bad idea, but apparently I was a glutton for punishment. I typed in Daphne’s name and the title,Dating in the City. Over a dozen YouTube clips came up, and I pressed play on the first one and then the second and the third.

One after the other, I watched as she was wined, dined, and went on helicopter rides with various men. They were all objectively attractive, and they all seemed genuinely interested in her. I couldn’t say the same for Daphne. Not the attractive part, obviously. Daphne was a modern-day Aphrodite, to me anyway. But my contemporary goddess did not appear to be interested in any of the men who she sat across from or beside on her dates. There was no connection. She was guarded. Her walls were clearly up.

I’d seen the softer side of Daphne Moore, the sensitive side, if you will. None of these men even came close to bringing that out. There was no flush of her cheeks, no licking her lips nervously, no tucking her hair behind her ear, no indications that there was even a shred of chemistry between the people on the screen.

It wasn’t fun witnessing her dating different men, but it would have been worse if she’d shared with them what I felt we shared. Which, from what I saw, was not the case.

I wouldn’t say it gave me hope, but it was enough—for now.

19

DAPHNE

“Areyou sure you don’t mind us using the farm as home base? Mrs. B said we were more than welcome to use the boarding house.”

Aunt Rhonda tsked as she shook her head and dried her coffee cup. “Vera has more rules than an all-girls Catholic school. She wouldn’t approve of men traipsing in and out at all hours.”

“Men?” I questioned.

“You said you were having meetings for men to be on the show.”

“We’re holdingauditionsat Southern Comfort.”

Aunt Rhonda’s expression dropped.

“Is that why you said we could use the farm?” I asked.

She lifted her shoulder in a shrug. “Nothin’ wrong with a front row view of eye candy.”

My lips curled in a grin. Aunt Rhonda was brutally honest with no shame. Something I’d always appreciated and was told she’d inherited from Granny Moore.

“Do you want me to see if Ms. B would be okay with?—”

“No, no, no! You and your friends are more than welcome here.”

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