Page 19 of After Tonight

“It does?” Riley wanted it to. She didn’t want anyone getting their hearts broken, but she also didn’t want to sound like some kind of lunatic who thought she should get to say who did and didn’t date Derek. Even if she told herself she was doing a good deed for the nice women of Sapphire Falls, she realized that her concern was actually a by-product of two things—the fact that she knew Derek too well and couldn’t quite forget what an idiot he’d been over the years, and the fact that she had way too much time on her hands to sit around thinking about all of this.

“Sure,” Lucy said, with a nod. “He likes the idea of a relationship, but he doesn’t understand the reality. And I wouldn’t be a good person to teach him about dating.”

“You wouldn’t?” Riley thought, on one hand, that Lucy could teach Derek a lot about class and sincerity and, well, stuff that didn’t have anything to do with panties.

Lucy gave her a small smile. “I don’t know much about dating myself. How could I teach him?”

Teach him.

Yeah. That’s actually what Derek needed. Someone to teach him. To try out dating a nice girl, he’d have to, well, date a nice girl. And that nice girl would then be at risk for heartbreak. Riley didn’t really want any nice girl going through that. But someone needed to show him what it was like.

She looked over at Derek. Then back to Lucy. Then back to Derek again. He was laughing at something Mitch Dugan, the contractor working on expanding the Come Again with pizza ovens, had just said. She suddenly flashed back to many other times when he’d laughed. And made those around him laugh. It was a regular thing.

And he looked good doing it.

“So you’re not interested in Derek?” Riley asked Lucy flat out.

Lucy shook her head with a soft laugh. “I like Derek. I appreciate all of his help all the time. But I don’t think Derek and I have much in common.”

Okay, so that made this easier. Lucy wasn’t interested in dating Derek. But Derek thought he was interested in dating Lucy. There was really only one thing Riley could do here. At least now that she’d convinced herself that the honorable thing to do would be to keep Derek from breaking any nice-girl hearts. Honorable was good.

Torturing Derek Wright a little was too.

“Hey, I’ll be right back,” she told Lucy, shoving her chair back and standing before she could think better of her plan.

“Okay. I’ll get everything pulled up.” Lucy shifted forward in her chair and reached for Riley’s laptop.

Riley was using her master’s degree in computer science to update various websites for people in Sapphire Falls. It was slowly killing her. But at least it was something to do.

And hey, reforming Derek Wright was also, if nothing else, something to do.

* * *

“Ineed to talk to you.”

Derek turned as Riley walked up, grabbed the sleeve of his shirt, and started for the kitchen.

She was damned bossy. “Uh, I’m kind of talking to Mitch,” Derek pointed out. They were talking about whether jalapeno peppers ever belonged on pizza, but still.

She didn’t stop walking…or dragging him along.

“What?” he asked when the kitchen door had swung shut behind him.

She dropped her hold on him and turned, crossing her arms. She watched him for a moment, and he felt how a used car might feel when someone was taking their first good look.

“I have an idea.”

He felt a definite sense of trepidation at those four words. But trepidation had never held him back before. “About what?”

“You becoming a better guy.”

He lifted his eyebrows.

“Or, more specifically, you deserving to date nice girls. Like Lucy.”

“I have to deserve it?”

“Yes.” She didn’t even hesitate a second.

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