“Where are you from? Originally, I mean.”
“Little bitty town in East Texas called Rango.”
Her eyes crinkled again. “Like the lizard in the movie?”
“Exactly like. It’s ’bout this size. Part of why I come over here once in a while is because Wishful reminds me of home.”
“What would you be doing if you were there now instead of in school?”
“Working at the feed and farm supply probably. Running cattle on the side.”
“That’s a big jump from architecture.”
Ah ha, so his mysterious competition—and when had he started thinking of this girl’s real date as competition?—was from MSU.
“Yeah, it is,” he agreed. It was the truth, in a general sense.
“What do you do on a cattle ranch in the fall?” As her bottle green eyes sparkled, Dillon could see she was imagining a Hollywood version of a dude ranch.
“This time of year, we’d be baling hay for winter. Making sure the herd is up to date on immunizations and such. It’s not glamorous by any means. Most folks who raise cattle have other jobs too. It’s hard to make a living at that on its own anymore.”
“My granddaddy raised dairy cattle forever, same as his daddy and granddaddy before him. But they had to close the dairy, before I was born. Now he farms. Soy. Corn. Cotton. It’s all a tough business these days.” She paused to sip. “So will you go home once you finish with grad school?”
Dillon shrugged. “I don’t know. Depends on how things unfold, I guess. Where I wind up getting a job. Whether it’s just me to think about or if I’m in a relationship when I finish.” And where had that come from? “Lots of unknown variables. What about you? Are you settled here for good?”
She smiled into her coffee and glanced back up at him through sooty lashes. “I am until somebody worth leaving for catches my eye.”
~*~
What on earth possessed her to say that?
As she looked down into her mug again, she caught a flash of Ross’s smile. Oh, yeah. That was why. He had a great smile—an inviting curve of lips that made you feel like you were sharing some kind of juicy secret.
He made so much better an impression in person than he did online.
“Why didn’t you have a picture up on your Perfect Chemistry profile?” She couldn’t resist asking and hoped it wasn’t a sensitive subject.
The oddest expression crossed his features. “It wouldn’t have been me.”
Huh. He hadn’t struck her as much of a philosopher in their previous conversations. “Well, I guess we do tend to place too much importance on physical appearance.”
“Why are you on one of those sites? You can’t tell me you have trouble finding dates.”
“Wishful is a little bitty pond, in case you haven’t noticed. Of the guys here in my relative age bracket, I already dated half of them in high school. The other half are either married, dated friends of mine long enough that it would be weird, or they just don’t ring my bell. We don’t get a whole lot of new blood, as it were. I’m sure your hometown is the same.”
“True,” he agreed. “In a town that size, we had to revoke the whole no dating your friends’ exes rule, otherwise nobody would’ve had anybody to date. Most folks either married their high school sweetheart or hoped to meet somebody in college.”
“Exactly. And since I didn’t do that while I was at Ole Miss, online dating helps…cast a slightly wider net. And it’s nice to theoretically have a system to match you up on some kind of criteria that suggests compatibility.”
“You think an algorithm or whatever can actually do that?”
“Don’t you?” she asked. He was on the same dating site, after all.
“I don’t think it’s a substitute for real, in person conversation. It might be able to match you with somebody based on—I don’t know—similar values or movie tastes or political views. And, sure, maybe you end up hitting it off. But I don’t think there’s any true substitute for a chance meeting where you feel that indefinable spark with a complete stranger—and you know they won’t stay a stranger for long.”
The moment stretched between them, pulling taut with awareness and unspoken things. Avery felt her skin prickle and thought if she reached over to touch his hand right now, she’d feel a snap of electricity.
The thump of footsteps on the stairs broke the spell. Avery glanced over to see an unfamiliar guy step into the room. Tall and exceptionally thin, he had a mug in one hand and what appeared to be a sketchpad in the other. She gave him a polite smile as he paused to survey the room, then moved to take a seat in a booth by the other window.