Page 12 of From Our First

My stomach lurched at that, and I did my best not to frown. “I see. The girls are really going to work through their list?”

An odd look crossed her face, and then she smiled. “Of course. I’m the last part of the pact. It’s their turn to find me the perfect date.”

“And I’m not it,” I said dryly, starting it off as a joke. But when her eyes filled with hurt for an instant, I immediately regretted the words.

Instead of saying something, not knowingwhatto say at all, I lifted my glass in cheers. “To you finding your perfect romance.”

She clinked her glass to mine, her face carefully blank.

“And for it not to be you.”

“Ouch.”

“A final barb. And now, the truce is on.”

I sipped my wine and hoped like hell I knew what that meant.

Chapter 3

Myra

“What doyou mean it didn’t work out?” Paris asked, and I pinched the bridge of my nose.

“It’s what I said. I know you all had good intentions, but how about we go through the rest of the list and ignore anybody related to the Bradys?”

Hazel frowned, took out her notebook, and crossed off a few names.

That made me blink. “Why are you crossing people off?”

“You said nobody related to the Bradys.”

“Are there cousins I wasn’t aware of?” I asked, a little weirded out.

Hazel tilted her head as she studied her notes. “Yes, but that’s beside the point. There are also non-Brady ones, and since Arden has a boatload of cousins now through Liam, some of whom aren’t married, even though the rest of them seem to have all been paired off recently, I assume you don’t want those either.”

“How about we go with no one connected to your love lives at all?” I asked, doing my best to take deep breaths so I wouldn’t stress out. It wasn’t their fault that I wasn’t handling this well. It wasn’t their fault that I had no idea what I was doing or what I wanted.

The primary thing was that I needed to get Nate out of my mind. And to do that, I had to date someone else. I had already said that I would try so I wasn’t alone. This was simply an extra incentive to do so. It didn’t need to be the end of the world.

“Okay, so no Montgomerys or Bradys. I think there are probably a few other single men that our guys might know, though,” Dakota said, looking down at her pad of paper.

“How about we draw the line at people not related to the Bradys? Your men can know of them,” I said, knowing a headache would be coming along at any moment. That, of course, made me think of Nate, and I pressed my lips together. I couldn’t believe that he’d gotten so hurt, and I had no idea. It shouldn’t have surprised me that he’d had major life moments without me, but the idea that he’d almost died from what sounded like a horrible accident, and I’d never even known, made me feel something that I wasn’t sure I was ready to deal with.

“That’s a good caveat,” Paris added. “Mostly because the guys seem to know a lot of people. And we don’t want to cut off the entire Boulder area because of your arbitrary rules.”

I narrowed my eyes. “I don’t know if you’re making fun of me or agreeing with my rules,” I said slowly.

Paris shrugged, looking at her big planner and the notebook she had stuck in there with some magnetic clip thing that I didn’t understand. The woman had gone full tilt into the planner world, and I had a feeling if Paris ever changed her career, she could probably have a planner empire.

“It can be both.” Paris smiled.

That made me laugh. “I went on one date. I guess that counts for something.”

“Of course, it counts,” Dakota said.

“You and Hazel didn’t have to go on multiple dates with different people.”

“Ours were special circumstances,” Hazel added. “Plus, I never actually met the guy I was supposed to go on a date with.”

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