Page 18 of Catching Mr. Right

And yet I am. Thinking about her. Fantasizing about her. Imagining her with me instead of that guy, right now, while I talk to my sister about all the reasons I will never let on that I do. Christ, she has that affect though. She’s like an earworm, getting inside my brain no matter how much I pretend I’m deaf to her. I’ve never met anyone quite like her. Actually, that’s probably a good thing, because I don’t think the world could handle more than one Mandy Pearce.

“Seriously? Do you know how judgemental and—and ridiculous you sound?” Summer huffs. “Do you realize how much you sound like our mother?”

“Take that back.” I mock growl at the phone. “I may be a lot of things, but I am nowhere near as bad as Sasha Sweets, exercise junkie and queen diva. I never make you eat salad.”

Summer chortles. In the background, Dylan asks what’s so funny. “Okay, I’m going to hang up and leave you to your sulking. Come ‘round for dinner tomorrow night. You won’t even have to cook.”

“Sure. Wait, what? I’m not sulking.”

“Of course you are,” Summer says. “I can hear it in your voice. Anyway, I’ve got to go. Bye.”

She hangs up on me while I’m still wondering why she thinks I’m brooding. There’s nothing to brood about. At least not when it comes to the subject of our conversation. No, I’m not moping over Mandy’s sudden desertion for another guy. That’s for the best. I’m perfectly content, actually.

Except I still have to make that call to Josef about the restaurant. And I still have to work out how I’m going to explain to him that I’m done with his daughter. Once I figure out how to break it off with her first. All without losing my job. If I’m brooding over anything, it’s whether I’m going to have a life to go back to when I head home to L.A.

Not Mandy.

Nope, Mandy is just a girl who doesn’t hold my thoughts hostage at all.

***

Breathe in. Breathe out. Keep going.

Thud, thud, thud.

It’s practically an oven outside already. It never cools down in this godforsaken place. My T-shirt sticks to me. My footfalls echo on the path that winds around the lake. Thirty-six years old, and my knees aren’t what they used to be. They creak and pop far too much. I push harder until my muscles start to burn. Oxygen bursts out of my mouth and gets pulled in through my nose. Unlike Summer, I don’t mind exercise.

Most of the time. It’s not clearing my mind the way it normally does though. I had an email from Josef about changes to the fit out. Some of them are things I signed off on yesterday, and now have to order the contractors to rip out and change. Not that the men I’ve been overseeing are going to care if it means an extra few dollars in their pockets, but it’s the added hours, the extra time that has to go into the project before D-day that makes me antsy. Top that off with images of Mandy whirling through my mind, and I’m screwed.

I come to a stuttering halt, bend forward and plant my hands on my knees while I drag mouthfuls of air into my lungs. It’s been ten days since the last time I saw her. I know this because that’s how many times I’ve woken up hard and leaking jizz like a teenager. Slammed into awareness with my imagination still hung up on her naked body straddling mine. Or running past me in the tiniest pink shorts with the word juicy across the butt, her silvery ponytail swinging against her shoulder while she blows me an air kiss over her shoulder.

Wait. What?

I straighten as she turns to focus on where she’s going. I’ve been running this track now for almost two weeks and this is the first time I’ve seen her. I didn’t even know she ran. I had no idea she ran fast. It takes me a few minutes to catch up with her. It’ll probably take me less time to fall behind. “Hey.”

She snubs me. No, not ignores me. There are wires from earbuds, so I raise my voice and try again. “Hey.”

She swivels her head, pulls out an earbud and slows down. “Hey. I thought you were finished. Otherwise, I would have offered to run with you.”

Thank God, she reduces her speed. My heart rate slows a little, and I can breathe a bit more easily. “You don’t run here normally.”

She raises an eyebrow, and yes, I did sound like I was accusing her of something now that it’s out there. “I like to switch it up every now and then. It’s only the last two weeks that I haven’t run here at least twice a week.”

“Sorry,” I say. “I didn’t intend for it to sound like—”

“You were accusing me of stalking you? Or that I took up running because I wanted you to chase my kitty?”

“Uh, no.” She’s dating that guy now so clearly… “Isn’t that guy too old for you? He’s what, mid-thirties?”

“So?” She halts abruptly, both hands gripping her waist as she stares at me. “You’re in your mid-thirties.”

“Yeah,” I mutter, feeling fucking old with my inability to keep up with her as easily as I once would have been able to. “And that’s still more than a decade older than you. What is it with you and old men? Do you have daddy issues?”

“Hard to have daddy issues when you never had one.” She shrugs and drops her gaze to the tip of her pink running shoes. “They’re more like anti-daddy issues.”

“I don’t think that’s a thing.” I walk a circle, trying to keep my desire to throttle her from getting the better of me. “I don’t understand you and Summer. Is old age the new orange, or purple, or whatever it is?”

“It’s black, or maybe in my case pink.” She grins and bites her lip. “And no. Why are you so hung up on it anyway?”

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