and turning his smile on Karleen, who was doing her damnedest not to look awestruck. He knew it wasn’t fair, or right, to judge a person by appearances, but how many women like her had he run into over the course of the past several years? Pretty women who deep down didn’t trust that they really were, who never really believed their God-given attributes were sufficient unto themselves, who measured success by whether or not men found them attractive.
Women who seemed to forget that the flower never had to chase the bee.
Deliberately, Dale let his gaze sidle over to Joanna for a moment—who, as far as flowers went, was probably more like a Venus’s-flytrap—before returning it to her friend. “Thank you, Karleen,” he said, taking great pains not to cross the thin line between being polite and flirting, trusting that Karleen would know the difference. And that Joanna, who was discussing the play set with Jose, wouldn’t.
Of course, since she didn’t seem the least bit interested in what was going on, it would appear he was wasting his efforts. A realization that annoyed him far more than it should have. So he inched a hair closer to flirting with Karleen, resurrecting one or two old lines he used to be able to count on to make a gal laugh, all the while keeping one eye on Joanna. And Karleen did indeed giggle when she was supposed to, although not in quite as airheaded a manner as he might have expected, and her smile really was very nice and her eyes really were very pretty and her perfume wasn’t the kind that could knock a man over. So, all in all, he should have been enjoying himself.
Except the longer Dale stood there, drinking his tea and eating the little cakes and chatting up this pretty woman he didn’t want to be chatting up while the flat-chested, haywire-haired woman he did want to chat up seemed hell-bent on ignoring him, the more annoyed he got. By the time Joanna turned to him and asked how much longer he thought they’d be, he was startled to find himself next door to mad.
Not that he had any right to be. After all, he was just playin’ around.
“What do you think, Jose?” he said. “Another half hour, maybe?”
The older man nodded his agreement. “Good,” Joanna said. “I’ll call Bobby, let him know when to bring back the kids.” Then she took their empty tea glasses, stacking them inside each other, said, “Let’s not keep the guys from their work,” to Karleen, and started back toward the house, giving the blonde no choice but to call, “Nice to meet you!” over her shoulder as she went.
Leaving Dale feeling like he’d just been issued a challenge.
One he had absolutely no business accepting.
Chapter 4
“You are hopeless!” Karleen said the minute they were back inside. “Would another couple of minutes have killed you?”
Joanna shoved the patio door shut and marched her little overwrought self across the kitchen. “I never said I was playing along. Beside, I’ve got a party to set up,” she said, yanking out bags of Bob the Builder plates and cups she’d stashed in the cupboard where she kept the extraneous kitchen crap she’d accumulated over the years. “I’ve got no time to waste standing around watching the man slobber all over you. Especially as I’ve seen that act before.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“What? That I’ve never seen men drool over you? Not that it bothers me, I’m certainly used to it after all these years—”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Karleen grabbed a package of plates from her and attacked the plastic wrapping like a lion gutting a wildebeest. “Whose benefit did you think that was for? It wasn’t my attention he was trying to get, you idiot!”
For the tiniest sliver of a second, something totally insane and irrational—hope, maybe?—shoved aside the annoyance that was even more insane and irrational. “You know, you really need to start eating more. I hear the brain’s the first thing to go.”
Karleen grinned. “Somebody’s pi-issed.”
“I’d have to care to be pissed. Since I don’t—” she ripped open one of the other packages of plates and slammed them onto the counter “—I’m not. And wipe that smirk off your face.”
“Jo, Jo, Jo…don’t you know that flirting with one woman in order to make the other one jealous is the oldest trick in the book? How many of these suckers you want opened?”
“All of them. Okay…just for the sake of argument, let’s say that’s what he was doing—”
“Aha!”
“That was hardly worth an aha. Especially as I was about to point out this oh-so-mature behavior would attract me why?”
“Because he’s hot, he’s giving out all the right signals—”
“To you,” Joanna pointed out, unwrapping napkins.
“—and you’re deprived. And I told you, the flirting with me business was just a ruse. Since you had your back to him the entire time, you couldn’t see that he kept looking over to see if you were reacting.”
Joanna jerked up her head, which earned her one of Karleen’s smug smiles. Okay, so she felt about twelve, but she felt…kinda tingly, too. Alive. Like maybe there was something to look forward to.
Damn.
“Sounds like a perfect fit to me,” Karleen said, which effectively blew the tingly feeling all to hell.
“And in case you’ve forgotten—are there boxes of candles in one of those bags?—I was married to a man whose idea of a formal social event is a keg party. Why on earth would I be even remotely interested in somebody who would use one woman to get another one? Let alone someone who spent a good chunk of his life spitting, throwing a ball and adjusting his package? Activities, by the way, I don’t find particularly endearing in males over the age of three.”
“Never mind how incredible he looks without his shirt.”
“Yeah, well, if memory serves, Bobby looks pretty damn good without his shirt, too.” Joanna pulled the first of the two cakes Bobby’d dropped off earlier—one chocolate, one vanilla—from the bottom of the fridge and set it on the bar. “Trust me. After a while, it’s not enough. Even you know that.”
Marginally deflated, Karleen climbed up onto one of the stools flanking the bar and slit open a package of candles with one lethal hot-to-trot red nail. “Yeah, I suppose you’re right. You care how these go on the cakes?”
“Not a bit. And I know I’m right. On this, at least. Next time—if there is a next time—I’d really like a man, you know? Not an overgrown boy.”
“Aha.”
“What now?”
Karleen waved a peppermint-striped candle at her. “You know what your problem is? You see every guy you date as potential husband material.”
Joanna gave her a look.
“Okay, so I’m being theoretical. But I’m just saying, should the earth shift on its axis and you ever do date again, you’ve gotta go through at least one gap guy before you can even begin to think in terms of wedding
