My date, Benji, was a successful CEO of a multimillion dollar company. He was also a doctor in town and apparently very popular with the ladies.
His company was into bionics or something, and he was a ‘very busy man.’
Well, I was a very busy woman, and you didn’t see me standing up my date.
“Did you order hot wings?”
I looked up to find the waitress, the one who’d been giving me ‘sad eyes’ all night, holding out the hot wings that I’d literally ordered from her not even twenty minutes ago.
I looked at the hot wings and nodded.
“I did,” I confirmed. “Did you remember the ranch?”
Normally, I wouldn’t do ranch because it was so messy, but I’d wanted to try the ‘burn yo damn mouth’ ones the restaurant boasted as their ‘hottest flavor’ and thought I’d better prepare for them to actually be too hot.
It didn’t happen often—me finding a flavor that was actually too hot—but the waitress had already been extremely slow so I wasn’t putting her not coming back and me needing ranch to chance.
“I’m going for it now. I should have it out in a jiffy,” she said as she all but sprinted away.
“She totally forgot,” one of the men muttered.
I looked over at the table of bikers, but they were all staring at something across the way.
I turned my eyes in that direction, too, finding a very pretty brunette with long, flowing brown hair sucked up to some man’s side.
Just then, the door to the bar swung open and a very large, intimidating man filled the frame.
He was tall, way taller than my five-foot-seven and a half inches—that half was very important, so I never forgot it. He had very dark hair. So dark, in fact, that in the somewhat favorable bar light I couldn’t tell what color his hair was—brown or black. He had dark greenish-colored eyes and his skin was the color of light brown sugar.
He obviously had some Latino roots in his family tree, because that skin was born, not sun-bronzed.
“Oh, fuck,” I heard one of the men say.
But I didn’t have time to turn and look at them. My eyes were enraptured by the man that’d just filled the door.
He was… intimidating, to say the least.
He was also a man that I’d turned down for a date a few weeks ago when I’d first started my dating profile.
Why had I turned him down? Because he owned a pig farm.
Not that pig farming was a bad thing, but from the moment that I’d seen the man’s photo—even in profile—I’d gotten this weird feeling in my chest that I couldn’t explain.
So I’d done the smart, sensible thing—I’d told him no on his date. And I’d blamed it on his pig farm, because why the hell else would I feel this… irrational… over him?
And now I was kind of regretting that gut reaction.
Because just seeing him standing there, taking in the entire bar like a silent wraith, had things inside of me taking flight.
Like when I got to that really, really good part in the romance books that I loved so much. The pivotal parts where the hero and the heroine FINALLY admit their love for the other. Or when something really bad happens, and the man realizes that all this time he’s been denying what was right in front of his face.
Those parts of the books were my absolute favorites.
The man, Bruno from what I’d remembered, stepped over the threshold, his eyes on something by the bar. The brunette that the people at the table next to me were talking about earlier.
He saw her, registered who she was, and rolled his eyes.
Instead of stopping and confronting the woman like I thought he would, he walked right up to the bar just a few spots down from where she was cuddled up to the man she was talking to, and held up a finger.