Single Dad Seeks Juliet

Oh well, at least it’s not a secret wife, right? Now, that would be bad.

“Ah, okay. Well…hmm…okay.” I pause, tripping over my own words. On a quiet breath, I sink my head into my hands and find the strength to try again. “Do you know when a better time would be to reach your dad?”

“He’s, uh…” She pauses almost long enough to confuse me before continuing. “Pretty hard to get ahold of on the phone.”

Sooo…how am I supposed to get ahold of this guy? Literally all other forms of communication are escaping me right now. How can someone be hard to get ahold of by phone? Isn’t it surgically attached to his hand like the rest of us?

“All right. Hard to get on the phone…” Holy hell, this conversation has turned remarkably uncomfortable. “Should I…email?

“He doesn’t really do that either,” she says, and I internally snort. What’s left? A carrier pigeon? Are they even still working, or did some union put a stop to that?

“Is he of this world? Or a goblin of some sort?” I find myself asking sarcastically before I realize I’m shit-talking to a stranger. A stranger who just so happens to be the daughter of this year’s Bachelor Anonymous, mind you. I slap a hand over my mouth and bang my head against the desk.

Thankfully, she laughs.

“My dad isn’t a goblin,” she says through a final snort. “He’s one hundred percent a human man, and he’ll be at Coronado Beach tomorrow morning. He’s literally there every morning, just after sunrise. A bit of a creature of a habit, I guess you could say.”

“Coronado Beach?” I repeat and mentally calculate that it’s only a short drive from my house. Ten, fifteen minutes tops.

“Yep. You can find him there.”

And, what? I’m just supposed to stumble around the beach for a couple hours until I find him? Pretty sure I’m going to need a meet point that’s a little more detailed than an entire freaking beach…

“Maybe I should just give him another call ton—”

“No!” she says quickly, and I squint, curious as to her intensity. “He won’t be home. But I’ll let him know that you called, and he’ll be expecting to see you tomorrow at Coronado Beach. Right across from the Hotel Del.”

“But he doesn’t even—”

The line goes dead before I finish the rest of my thought, “know what I look like.”

Well, that didn’t go as planned…

I pull the phone away from my ear slowly before replacing it back in the cradle. I’m not sure what level of awkward I’d classify that conversation as, but it was definitely on the spectrum. Still, I guess being the daughter of a single man who’s entered himself in a bachelor competition has to be a little unsettling. I know I probably wouldn’t have known what to say or do in that situation either.

Which is exactly why you shouldn’t have given so damn many details at the beginning.

I cringe and offer up a silent prayer that my minor conversational fuckup doesn’t come back to bite me in the ass. The last thing I need is Mr. Bachelor threatening to sue the newspaper because I accidentally spilled the beans to his daughter.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

You’d think, at this stage in my life, I’d be better prepared for my blundering, but no.

My foot-in-mouth syndrome appears to be chronic.

Goodness, I really hope I didn’t traumatize his daughter with my slipup.

My dad had the good grace to be perpetually single after my mom passed. Don’t get me wrong, I want him to be happy—I’ve always wanted him to be happy, and I know a large part of that would be amplified by a companion in his life. But the interviews I’ve spent the last week doing in order to narrow the Bachelor Anonymous dating pool have been irrefutable proof that it’s scary out there in the open seas of desperate women.

I sigh, and when I look up from my desk, I come face-to-face with the only five women who seemed like it wouldn’t be an actual crime to make our nominated bachelor date. In the glass-walled conference room across the hall from my office, they sit, waiting for me to join them.

Damn, sometimes Dolly—one of the main office assistants here at the Tribune—is far too prompt.

I sigh again. I thought I’d be meeting with them after getting verbal confirmation of participation from our bachelor, but I was clearly a little too ambitious with my timing.

Oh well. The NDA I’ve had the legal team draft should be all-encompassing. Even if we had to make a change to Bachelor Anonymous at the last minute, it wouldn’t make a difference in the paperwork.

At least this part will be out of the way.

I shove my chair back with my hips and press the button on the front of my computer monitor to shut off the screen. The glass walls may have seemed like a good idea to the designer when they remodeled the Tribune two years ago, but I can tell you, they were not.