Page 3 of Single Dad's Hot Nanny

As I stared at the text, my lips twitched with amusement, but I folded them to contain my smile. Messages from Jane always made me want to smile.

Me:A dairy fight club… Only you could come up with something like that. My day is great so far. FYI I think a “yogurt clash” sounds much more entertaining than yoga.

Jane:Are you low key implying that we should engage in a yogurt clash for our first official date?

I stared at my phone, pondering Jane’s question. She’d been hinting at wanting to meet, but I’d been skirting around it.

“What was that?”

I looked up to see Lincoln watching me through squinted eyes.

“What was what?” I asked.

My friend tilted his head and studied me with curiosity. “Did you almost smile?”

The suspicion and disbelief in his voice almost brought out another smile, which was apparently a spectacular phenomenon by the way he was acting. “So what if I did?”

He made a dramatic show of checking his watch. “You don’t smile before the end of a workday.”

I shot him a withering look, and he smirked as he picked up his glass and drank. I was used to my friends teasing me about my typically serious attitude. My solemn demeanor didn’t mean I was an unemotional ogre, although many people thought so.

“Usually,” I noted as I glanced at Jane’s amusing message again. I wondered if I should tell Lincoln I’d been interacting with someone I’d met on that ridiculous dating app he talked me into trying. Since I’d been chatting up a mysterious woman who never failed to brighten my day with her humor on said app, maybe it wasn’t that silly after all…

“Alright, don’t laugh,” I said, giving Lincoln a pointed stare.

He looked at me straight-faced. “Not making any promises.”

I glanced around the upscale bistro that Lincoln favored. Our schedules were hectic, but we tried to meet up at least once a week for lunch. Lincoln and I had been tight since college. We were two ofthe five… I forgot who started calling us that. The five guys who met at Harvard over a decade ago and maintained close relationships to this day. We were all spread out now. Lincoln and I lived in Los Angeles, so we interacted more often.

“I signed up for that dating app you told me about,” I grumbled, barely wanting to admit it because it felt so unnatural. Whatever happened to going out and meeting someone face-to-face the conventional way? Oh, wait, I didn’t go out and socialize like normal people, which was why Lincoln recommended a dating app…

“No shit!” He put his glass down and grinned. “Thanks for giving it the time of day. I promised a friend I’d get as many customers as I could for his startup. It seems to be going great. Evenyou’vehad success with it.”

I hunkered down in my seat and frowned.

His eyes sparkled with laughter. “Wait, why do you look so ashamed?”

“Because I can’t believe I actually met someone I like on the stupid thing, okay?” Admitting that I met someone on a forum calledBlind Connectionssounded absurd.

Lincoln threw his head back and roared.

I glowered at him. I knew he’d laugh.

He’d badgered me for weeks about trying the app, so I joined out of sheer annoyance. He insisted it was time for me to “put myself back out there” and start dating again, and a dating app was the best way to go for a man like me. I guess by that he meant a super busy single parent who had no time to dive into the conventional dating pool.

Just to prove him wrong, I signed up. I thought after a couple of weeks I could throw the failure of using the app in his face. The joke was on me. I clicked on the first profile that popped up, and it happened to be Jane Roberts’.

The description in her profile snagged my curiosity and made me laugh. It said “I’m a terrible cook and a true romantic who thinks long walks on the beach are annoying as fuck with all that sand getting between your toes.”I knew right off that bat that she had a sense of humor, and maybe I needed that to counter the tightass ways I’d heard I had.

This app wasn’t like some others that allowed you to see a picture before you swiped left or right. It was a blind dating site. Therefore, I had no idea what Jane looked like. We connected on an intellectual level before actually meeting… very non-superficial.That aspect appealed to me because usually whenwomen found out who I was, it was hard to tell if they were genuinely into me or my bank account. I hated to admit it, but I liked Jane… at least what I perceived about her from our conversations, anyway.

Lincoln finally stopped laughing to give me an approving look. “I’m proud of you for at least giving it a try. Was it her that made you almost smile? Not many can achieve that feat.”

Although I gave him a seething look, I admitted, “Yeah, it was her. We’ve been chatting for a couple of weeks. She’s… fun… I guess. I mean, we haven’t met.” Still, just through texts alone, I could tell Jane was exuberant, and her humor was infectious. I found myself giving her a taste of my humorous side, and as Lincoln mentioned, that wasn’t something many people got to see.

“Are you going to meet her?”

I sat back and swirled the water in my glass. “No… I don’t know. It’s probably not a good idea.”

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