“Oh, dinner’s done. Everyone sit down.”
What happened next was a prime example of controlled chaos as people crowded into the kitchen and sat down at the table. She ended up next to Ford as the beaming Kate looked on. Everyone was pretty much elbow-to-elbow but no one complained, instead everyone just got to passing the platter of ham, a huge bowl of garlic mashed potatoes, trays of veggies, and more around the table.
“So, Gina darling, when did you two start dating?” Kate asked.
Embarrassed at being singled out, Gina lowered her gaze to her plate. “We’re not.”
“I knew it,” Frankie said with a teasing laugh as he poured gravy on his potatoes. “She’s way too normal for Ford.”
Okay, well, in the realm of descriptors that had been used to describe her looks, normal was one of the nicer ones. She pushed the peas around her plate and concentrated on keeping the expression on her “normal” face neutral.
“Remember Olive?” Finian asked.
Fallon cocked her head to one side and squished up her mouth for a second. “Is that the one who corrected everyone’s grammar?”
A collective groan filled the room. Frank Sr let out a disgusted snort mid-drink, which made the milk go down the wrong pipe. He started coughing hard enough that everyone was hollering at him to hold up his arms while Kate whacked him on the back until he told her that he wasn’t going into the dirt today and she could just calm down already.
“No, that was Patrice with the grammar,” Felicia said from her spot at the end of the table next to Hudson. “Olive was the one who hated hockey.”
“Better to hate hockey than to root against the Ice Knights,” Fiona said.
Gina turned to Ford. The tips of his ears were red, but he continued on eating his peas and potatoes as if he wasn’t getting the business from his family. It was good-natured, yeah, but still it had her tensing up on his behalf.
“Oh, like what’s-her-name who had a Cajun Rage tattoo?” Faith asked with a sneer.
Gina almost dropped her fork. A Rage tattoo? This was Waterbury. They were Ice Knights fans. The Rage were the Knights’s biggest rivals. For hockey fans in and around Harbor City, rooting for the Rage was like declaring you hated indoor plumbing.
“You dated a Rage fan?” she asked, looking at Ford like he’d grown a second head. “That’s just wrong.”
She thought back to the Ice Knights blanket she’d given him. That wasn’t just a blanket, it was a promise of loyalty. Ford turned to her, a chagrined expression on his face because he must have known that he’d done wrong by dating a Rage fan.
“It wasn’t my finest moment,” he agreed with a good-natured chuckle and then turned to his family. “But I’m not the only one here who’s had some crazy dates.” He looked at Finian. “Remember the woman who kept showing up at the firehouse in nothing but a trench coat?” His attention moved down to his sisters, who were giggling at how red Finian’s ears had turned. “Or the guy who told Fallon he didn’t believe in women having college degrees? Then there was the guy who took Fiona on a very romantic date to Chuck E. Cheese’s?”
By the time he got that last bit out, everyone at the table was laughing. Then the stories really started. Faith recounted how she thought she was going on a date and it turned out to be a vacation timeshare pitch. Frankie told a story about a woman who spent an entire dinner date talking about her love of sloths. Felicia and Hudson tag-teamed the retelling of how they’d gotten together because he was helping her land another man.
“How about you, Gina?” Frankie asked. “What’s your worst date?”
Still giggling a little, she went over her very limited dating history for some small disaster nugget she could share, and her gut dropped—because in that instant, she realized that she was probably the nightmare part of the date. Her smile froze, and her lungs stopped working. Then, she felt Ford’s hand on her thigh. He gave her a squeeze. It wasn’t sexual, it wasn’t a come on—it was reassuring, as weird as that seemed. The tension seeped out of her, but she still didn’t have any dating horror stories to share.