Page 26 of Hound Dog
I shrugged and took another bite of my cupcake, almost finishing it.
“And you thought eating one of those cupcakes would help your case?”
I giggled and wiped a bit of buttercream from the corner of my mouth. “They’re kind of hard to resist.”
Enzo’s warm smile matched my own. “I thought I liked you before… but now Ireallylike you. So, does this mean you’re going to be around for a while?”
“Probably most of the summer. At least until Aunt Meryl’s back on her feet.”
Enzo beamed at me. “Well, then welcome to Maple Grove. You should come out tomorrow night to Bombshell’s. It’s my friend, Addy’s bar. We meet there every Thursday at seven for karaoke.”
Hell, it would be nice to have friends for the summer and not be beholden to hanging out with Aunt Meryl every night. I grinned and popped the rest of the cupcake into my mouth. “Oh, I’m in. You had me atkaraoke.”
“As long as you don’t mind hearing some really monotone versions of Whitney Houston and Tiffany, you’ll have a blast—aha!” She interrupted her own thought, her eyes going wide and focused on the screen.
“What?”
“I think I solved the issue. Can I borrow your phone really quickly? I need to test this out on someone who doesn’t have the app downloaded.”
“Oh, you’re an app developer?”
She held out her palm, impatiently and nodded. “Yep.”
I scrambled, digging through my purse until I found my phone and dropped it into her palm.
Man, if I thoughtIwas anything but casual, then I’d met my match. Enzo was intense with a capital I.
After a few minutes of playing around on my phone, a huge grin spread across her face. “Yes! Thank you, thank you!” she said, handing me my phone back.
“You fixed it?”
She scooped up her laptop, shutting it and shoving it into her bag as she stood. “I think so! I need to go make a call, but seriously, tomorrow night. Bombshells. I’ll see you there?”
I nodded. “I wouldn’t miss it.”
I already felt better knowing I’d made a friend for the summer.
I opened up the box of cupcakes and peeked inside at the variety of animals in cake form. The dogs and cats were adorable. And the unicorns/horses would suffice. I smiled, chuckling quietly to myself at the memory of Finn popping the horns off the cupcakes and tossing them over his shoulder.
Now, I just had to get my butt to the animal rescue and beg and plead with them to take my aunt’s dogs off my hands.
Chapter Five
Finn
Some daysreally like to kick you when you’re down. And today was sure as shit one of those days.
I put my truck into park, squeezing the steering wheel with a white-knuckled grip. “What do you mean the app crashed?”
I heard the tell-tale clacking of fingers against her keyboard as Enzo spoke. “It means exactly what I just said. The app crashed. It—”
“How?” I interrupted her. “You said you’d worked all the bugs out weeks ago in our testing stage…”
Her sigh echoed from the other end of the line. “Yeah. Because you had estimated a much lower number of users in your launch week. Finn, this is agoodthing. It means tons of people are using it.”
“But…” but that didn’t make sense. The app had been Enzo’s idea to help us book clients while keeping my anonymity. And yeah, I had a lot of clients booked for the coming couple of weeks, but this wasn’t adding up. “There aren’t even that many single people in Maple Grove. Let alone ones who need my services…”
“Don’t get mad,” Enzo said. “Even though you said to wait, I programmed it to be a more general dating app, like Tinder, but for dog lovers. Then from there, I advertise to clients for your matchmaking services who are within a radius of Maple Grove.”
