Page 67 of Four Steps to the Perfect Fake Date

The movements of Calvin’s hand on her foot stilled. He frowned at her. “He said that?”

She nodded. “I don’t think he’s entirely wrong. Up until a couple of weeks ago, I didn’t take any risks at all.”

“What changed?”

A gust of wind blew rain against the living room windows. Daphne stared at the darkness beyond the glass, watching the raindrops slicing through the cone of yellow around a streetlight. “I’m not sure. Maybe I got sick of feeling like my life was passing me by.”

“For what it’s worth,” Calvin replied, his hands beginning to massage again, “it sounds like your ex was an idiot.”

She snorted. “He wasn’t that bad.”

“Even after he did that to you, you defend the man?”

“Maybe I still think he was right.”

Calvin’s jaw tightened. He focused on the movement of his fingers as he said, “I don’t.” His thumb swept around her anklebone. “I don’t think he was right at all. But I guess that’s his loss.”

Not knowing how to answer, Daphne sat there and stayed silent. Calvin slid her other sock off and began to massage her healthy foot. His fingers were strong as they dug into her arch, his thumb moving to run down between the bones at the top of her foot. Daphne sank down into the couch cushions, letting the tension of their conversation drain away.

No one had ever made her feel the way Calvin did. Not the way he poked and needled at her and made her crazy, but the way hebelievedin her. He didn’t see a square peg when he looked at her. He didn’t see an accountant who belonged in a sad cubicle with her soggy lunchtime salad and her precious spreadsheets. Daphne wasn’t quite sure what he saw, but she knew she liked the way it made her feel.

In the silent house sheltered from the rain and cold outside, with his hands stroking her skin, Daphne wondered if, under different circumstances, things between them might have evolved into something real. Something without a ticking clock and a secret heist. Just honesty and attraction and connection.

It was Calvin who broke the silence. He looked at her and said, “You don’t need to make yourself fit into the box these people make for you.”

“‘These people’?”

He lifted two fingers off her ankle in a dismissive flick. “Your ex.” He paused. “Your family.”

Heart thumping, Daphne met his gaze. It felt wrong to agree with him when her family was so important to her. When she believed, right down to the very core of her, that they were good people. “I’ve always felt like I never quite belonged in my family,” she finally admitted. Even though it was obvious, it was a secret she’d never said out loud, and it felt like handing him a piece of her.

His hands kept moving on her foot, the weight of his arms heavy across her shins. As if he could sense that she’d just bared a part of herself to him and he wanted to give her something in return, Calvin said, “I was horribly jealous of you in high school.”

Daphne tucked an arm behind her head, her lips curling into a grin. “What for?”

“I thought your family was this perfect unit. Thought you had it all. I’d lost my dad when I was eight and then been left to my own devices by my mom. I mean, she was young too. They were high school sweethearts, and she got pregnant at seventeen. She didn’t grieve my dad like I did. I think she felt trapped by—by me. By her marriage to my dad. Being single after he died was her first taste of freedom.”

His brow was furrowed as he concentrated on the movement of his hands over her foot, and a bit of the old ache in Daphne’s chest unfurled. She’d never met a man who could read people like Flint could. Who could readherlike Flint could. His pain was evident in the tightness around his mouth and eyes, but he still managed to speak about his mother’s mistakes with empathy.

Emotion crowded Daphne’s throat. It made it hard to speak. “Still,” Daphne said. “You needed her.”

His smile wasn’t much of a smile at all. “I learned to do without.” He stroked her ankle for a moment; then his eyes took on a distant look. “And then you were this beacon of a healthy family, bright, successful, pretty ...” He shrugged, his gaze returning to the movement of his own hands. “It almost felt like a slap in the face.”

“Is that why you hated me?”

When he glanced over at her, his expression was rueful. “I never hated you, Daphne.”

The sound of her name on his lips was sweet and tender and intimate. She wanted to crack herself open and let him in, but that would mean opening herself up to the kind of hurt that could kill her. She gave him a flat look instead. “Bullshit.”

He grinned, his hands moving from her foot up to her good ankle. He pushed her jeans up so he could massage the meaty part of her calf. His touch was firm but soft, and it made Daphne want to melt into a puddle of goo.

“I saw you as a worse version of all the things I resented in my sister,” Daphne admitted. “A rebellious guy with a chip on his shoulder who went out of his way to try to be bad. Someone who had no consideration for how their actions affected other people.”

“That’s exactly what I was.”

She traced the line of his clean-shaven jaw with her eyes, looked at his neat haircut, his tidy home. This man stood on his own and exuded strength and competence. When she was with him, she felt like nothing could go wrong. She’d been nervous to interview Jerry Barela, but his faith in her had never wavered. He made her feel like she could do anything.

This wasn’t the boy she’d known all those years ago.

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