Page 17 of All Dressed Up

They’d traded numbers, and he’d promised to text her tomorrow.

And he planned on it. He fiddled with his Sirius stations. It was worth exploring a second date. He’d see what she was doing later in the week. Maybe she’d be up for a movie at the Majestic Theater or a hike to the falls this weekend.

Placing his hands on the steering wheel, he tapped his fingers to the beat while his thoughts drifted to where they hadn’t gone once all night... to Rachel.

Was he really moving on?

His chest tightened at that thought. Frustrated, he gripped the wheel. Of course, she’d pop into his head.Seriously,dude? You just had a date with a beautiful woman. Stop thinking about Rachel.

Reaching his cottage, he turned his car into the driveway, his headlights shining bright on a vehicle parked in front of his garage.

And he recognized the car immediately because he’d worked on it a few times at the auto body shop and had seen the University of Rochester bumper sticker on the back.

Why was Bethany’s black Nissan parked in his driveway?

His pulse quickened, and he slammed his car into park, hopping out. Bethany was Rachel’s best friend. Was Rachel okay?

It took him seconds to reach his deck to find Bethany sitting in one of his outdoor chairs, head down and texting on her phone.

“Bethany?”

Bethany jumped out of the chair. “Will! What are you doing here?”

“Um...” That was a weird question. He shoved his hands into his shorts pockets. “I live here.”

“Of course, you do. Uh... this is your home.” She looked over her shoulder, but then quickly snapped her head back in place. “You live here.”

He cocked his head to the side. Something wasn’t right about this conversation. “And you’ve come to visit me, I see.”

“Yeah... uh... well, not really visit.” She ran her fingers through her hair. “I was bird watching. I saw this really big crow.”

“A big crow,” he repeated, cracking a smile. She was lying for some reason. He’d go with it.

“Yeah, up on the road. It flew down here, and I wanted to get a picture of it for my nature collection.”

Okay, that was plausible. Bethany was a professional photographer after all. However, there was something missing to her story that he was pretty sure made it a fictitious one. Time to bust her. “Where’s your camera?”

Bethany blinked, looking like the cat that swallowed the canary. “I used this,” she finally said, holding up her phone.

“Can I see it?”

“See what?”

“The picture. This crow sounds incredible if you spotted him at night.”

“I didn’t get the shot. It started making these crazy noises... Ca! Ca!” she screamed.

He barely could keep a straight face. Was she really crowing like a bird? No wonder funnyman Adam Reed was in love with her. With bird impressions like that. “Wow. That must have been a sight.”

“Yep. It was.”

“Did the bird fly into my house and turn on all those lights, or was it a five-foot-three blonde with a quick tongue who loves flowers?”

Bethany heaved a sigh. “You know Rachel’s in there?”

“I kind of guessed.” The real question on his mind: why? “What’s she doing in there?”

“I’d rather not say,” she said and sat back down on his chair.

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