Other First Date Debacles
He was gorgeous. The stars were twinkling. He bought you dinner, a movie and flowers. You were wearing that little black number that makes you feel sexy. You’d shaved your legs. He asked you up for coffee—and you ended up staying for breakfast.
Heaven knows you’re not that kind of girl! But does he?
It’s understandable that you’re embarrassed, but what if you can’t avoid seeing him again—you work with the guy, he’s your neighbor or your best friend’s notorious playboy brother. So what do you do?
It all depends on how you feel about him. When the lust and the Long Island iced tea wore off, was he just another pretty face? If so, chalk it up to a lesson learned. But if there’s potential for a lasting relationship, don’t let the rapid pace of your first date kill any chance for a second. If he wants to see you again, go. And don’t feel like you have to be intimate again. But beware, some men are just so delicious you can’t resist going back for seconds….
Contents
Chapter One
Daisy Redford smacked Chance Foster a couple of times. Then she pushed him so hard he compressed into a lump of submissive clay.
“Take that!” she told the clay as it spun around on the potter’s wheel, perfectly centered.
Some internal demon had goaded her earlier into making a little bust of the man. She couldn’t capture the teasing light in his eyes, but, for a quarter-hour’s effort, it had been a creditable likeness of his strong face, full mouth and straight nose.
She’d felt a flash of satisfaction when she pounded him into oblivion. Now, though, the only evidence of her triumph was the neatly spinning lump, ready to be made into a pot, and spatters of wet clay that she could feel drying across her cheeks.
Another woman might have washed a man out of her hair. Daisy Redford had smashed him onto the potter’s wheel. If her actions stopped the images of their stolen night together from tormenting her dreams, she would be happy. More than happy. Ecstatic.
“Now all I have to do is find Mr. Right before my girlfriends match me up with yet another loser,” she announced to her empty studio. “Or before I find another loser on my own.”
It was ironic. Her two best friends, Phoebe and Elise, had set out months ago to find Daisy a mate so she could have a child before endometriosis made her infertile. Both had sworn they weren’t interested in men for themselves, yet along the way they’d fallen in love and gotten engaged.
Not Daisy. She’d met a guy she thought was terrific, only to learn that he was bad news personified. “And then some,” she muttered.
Uh-oh, she was talking to herself. Thank goodness her assistant, Sean, was off on Mondays, when Daisy closed her downtown Phoenix gallery, so there was no one around to hear.
Today no one wandered through the three exhibition rooms or the sales gallery, or examined the photo portfolio of other available works. Today the only activity was confined to one of the two storage rooms, which she had converted to a studio.
Mondays belonged to the artist side of Daisy. She never sold or displayed her own pottery, because she didn’t consider it good enough. But she loved making it, and often gave her creations to her friends and her mother.
Now, carefully applying pressure, Daisy drew up a vase from the wet clay on the wheel. Between her steady hands, the material assumed a high-shouldered shape. It was similar to several previously made pots, each about fifteen inches tall, that stood drying on a canvas-covered table.
The small room was crowded with the potter’s wheel, a shelf of glazes, several drying tables and an electric kiln. It was, however, well ventilated and well lit.
A faint pounding echoed through the room. It sounded like distant hammering, perhaps repair work at the Civic Center a few blocks away. Not until she stopped the wheel to remove the pot did Daisy realize someone was knocking on the gallery’s locked front door.
“Oh, great.” She hurried to scrape and scrub clay off her hands, then wiped them on a towel.
There was no time to change her stained canvas shoes or disreputable jeans. Normally, she might have ignored a visitor to the closed gallery, but she was expecting a shipment from one of her artists, and perhaps the driver didn’t realize he was supposed to use the alley entrance.
After wiping her feet on a mat, she hurried through the gallery, called Native Art because it represented local artists. Although some of the pottery and weavings did indeed show a Native American influence, the painting and sculpture were contemporary.
Sure enough, through the front window she could see a delivery van double-parked on the street. The man outside wore the uniform of a local trucking company.
Daisy
