Chapter 3
1526 Words
3
Emma
I’m all but bouncing with excitement as I approach Sweet Rush Café, where I’m supposed to meet Mark for dinner. This is the craziest thing I’ve done in a while. Between my evening shift at the bookstore and his class schedule, we haven’t had a chance to do more than exchange a few text messages, so all I have to go on are those couple of blurry pictures. Still, I have a good feeling about this.
I feel like Mark and I might really connect.
I’m a few minutes early, so I stop by the door and take a moment to brush cat hair off my woolen coat. The coat is beige, which is better than black, but white hair is visible on anything that’s not pure white. I figure Mark won’t mind too much—he knows how much Persians shed—but I still want to look presentable for our first date. It took me about an hour, but I got my curls to semi-behave, and I’m even wearing a little makeup—something that happens with the frequency of a tsunami in a lake.
Taking a deep breath, I enter the café and look around to see if Mark might already be there.
The place is small and cozy, with booth-style seats arranged in a semicircle around a coffee bar. The smell of roasted coffee beans and baked goods is mouthwatering, making my stomach rumble with hunger. I was planning to stick to coffee only, but I decide to get a croissant too; my budget should stretch to that.
Only a few of the booths are occupied, likely because it’s a Tuesday. I scan them, looking for anyone who could be Mark, and notice a man sitting by himself at the farthest table. He’s facing away from me, so all I can see is the back of his head, but his hair is short and dark brown.
It could be him.
Gathering my courage, I approach the booth. “Excuse me,” I say. “Are you Mark?”
The man turns to face me, and my pulse shoots into the stratosphere.
The person in front of me is nothing like the pictures on the app. His hair is brown, and his eyes are blue, but that’s the only similarity. There’s nothing rounded and shy about the man’s hard features. From the steely jaw to the hawk-like nose, his face is boldly masculine, stamped with a self-assurance that borders on arrogance. A hint of five o’clock shadow darkens his lean cheeks, making his high cheekbones stand out even more, and his eyebrows are thick dark slashes above his piercingly pale eyes. Even sitting behind the table, he looks tall and powerfully built. His shoulders are a mile wide in his sharply tailored suit, and his hands are twice the size of my own.
There’s no way this is Mark from the app, unless he’s put in some serious gym time since those pictures were taken. Is it possible? Could a person change so much? He didn’t indicate his height in the profile, but I’d assumed the omission meant he was vertically challenged, like me.
The man I’m looking at is not challenged in any way, and he’s certainly not wearing glasses.
“I’m… I’m Emma,” I stutter as the man continues staring at me, his face hard and inscrutable. I’m almost certain I have the wrong guy, but I still force myself to ask, “Are you Mark, by any chance?”
“I prefer to be called Marcus,” he shocks me by answering. His voice is a deep masculine rumble that tugs at something primitively female inside me. My heart beats even faster, and my palms begin to sweat as he rises to his feet and says bluntly, “You’re not what I expected.”
“Me?” What the hell? A surge of anger crowds out all other emotions as I gape at the rude giant in front of me. The asshole is so tall I have to crane my neck to look up at him. “What about you? You look nothing like your pictures!”
“I guess we’ve both been misled,” he says, his jaw tight. Before I can respond, he gestures toward the booth. “You might as well sit down and have a meal with me, Emmeline. I didn’t come all the way here for nothing.”
“It’s Emma,” I correct, fuming. “And no, thank you. I’ll just be on my way.”
His nostrils flare, and he steps to the right to block my path. “Sit down, Emma.” He makes my name sound like an insult. “I’ll have a talk with Victoria, but for now, I don’t see why we can’t share a meal like two civilized adults.”
The tips of my ears burn with fury, but I slide into the booth rather than make a scene. My grandmother instilled politeness in me from an early age, and even as an adult living on my own, I find it hard to go against her teachings.
She wouldn’t approve of me kneeing this jerk in the balls and telling him to f**k off.
“Thank you,” he says, sliding into the seat across from me. His eyes glint icy blue as he picks up the menu. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“I don’t know, Marcus,” I say, putting special emphasis on the formal name. “I’ve only been around you for two minutes, and I’m already feeling homicidal.” I deliver the insult with a ladylike, Grandma-approved smile, and dumping my purse in the corner of my booth seat, I pick up the menu without bothering to take off my coat.
The sooner we eat, the sooner I can get out of here.
A deep chuckle startles me into looking up. To my shock, the jerk is grinning, his teeth flashing white in his lightly bronzed face. No freckles for him, I note with jealousy; his skin is perfectly even-toned, without so much as an extra mole on his cheek. He’s not classically handsome—his features are too bold to be described that way—but he’s shockingly good-looking, in a potent, purely masculine way.
To my dismay, a curl of heat licks at my core, making my inner muscles clench.
No. No way. This asshole is not turning me on. I can barely stand to sit across the table from him.
Gritting my teeth, I look down at my menu, noting with relief that the prices in this place are actually reasonable. I always insist on paying for my own food on dates, and now that I’ve met Mark—excuse me, Marcus—I wouldn’t put it past him to drag me to some ritzy place where a glass of tap water costs more than a shot of Patrón. How could I have been so wrong about the guy? Clearly, he’d lied about working in a bookstore and being a student. To what end, I don’t know, but everything about the man in front of me screams wealth and power. His pinstriped suit hugs his broad-shouldered frame like it was tailor-made for him, his blue shirt is crisply starched, and I’m pretty sure his subtly checkered tie is some designer brand that makes Chanel seem like a Walmart label.
As all of these details register, a new suspicion occurs to me. Could someone be playing a joke on me? Kendall, perhaps? Or Janie? They both know my taste in guys. Maybe one of them decided to lure me on a date this way—though why they’d set me up with him, and he’d agree to it, is a huge mystery.
Frowning, I look up from the menu and study the man in front of me. He’s stopped grinning and is perusing the menu, his forehead creased in a frown that makes him look older than the twenty-seven years listed on his profile.
That part must’ve also been a lie.
My anger intensifies. “So, Marcus, why did you write to me?” Dropping the menu on the table, I glare at him. “Do you even own cats?”
He looks up, his frown deepening. “Cats? No, of course not.”
The derision in his tone makes me want to forget all about Grandma’s disapproval and slap him straight across his lean, hard face. “Is this some kind of a prank for you? Who put you up to this?”
“Excuse me?” His thick eyebrows rise in an arrogant arch.
“Oh, stop playing innocent. You lied in your message to me, and you have the gall to say I’m not what you expected?” I can practically feel the steam coming out of my ears. “You messaged me, and I was entirely truthful on my profile. How old are you? Thirty-two? Thirty-three?”
“I’m thirty-five,” he says slowly, his frown returning. “Emma, what are you talking—”
“That’s it.” Grabbing my purse by one strap, I slide out of the booth and jump to my feet. Grandma’s teachings or not, I’m not going to have a meal with a jerk who’s admitted to deceiving me. I have no idea what would make a guy like that want to toy with me, but I’m not going to be the butt of some joke.
“Enjoy your meal,” I snarl, spinning around, and stride to the exit before he can block my way again.
I’m in such a rush to leave I almost knock over a tall, slender brunette approaching the café and the short, pudgy guy following her.
- Writer
