So. It was over. Over! From now on she’d leave Justin Case entirely alone.
THAT WAS NOT HOW HE WANTED his latest encounter with Candy to go.
Justin stared at his armful of mail, brain groggy. When was the last time he’d picked it up? Forget mail, when had he last eaten? Slept? The chapter on email, due at the publisher the next day, had taken over his brain. He and Troy had worried they weren’t on the right track, and after consulting each other and their editor, they’d decided to switch format and emphasis. Less on how spammers formulated their pitches and harvested addresses, and more on how to avoid clogged in-boxes, hijacked computers, identity theft and how to deal with those messes if avoidance came too late.
In short, a major rewrite for Justin, and new demos for Troy to work out for the ebook version, new links to finesse.
They couldn’t afford to make any mistakes now that would snowball—to use an appropriate seasonal metaphor—into later and later deadlines for subsequent chapters.
Which meant he’d needed everything in him just now to keep from running across the street to talk to Candy. That and because he wasn’t wearing shoes and would probably lose a few toes in the process.
He missed her. Could he miss someone he barely knew? He didn’t get the chance to find out with Angie, because once they spent that first night together at his friend’s party—the night they’d met—they were hardly apart. Before Candy, Justin would have said no, not after one date, impossible. Even now he was tempted to respond intellectually, scoff at his emotions and insist he simply missed having a girlfriend, missed the intimacy, missed California, maybe even missed Angie, though he’d like to think he wasn’t that masochistic.
The party with Troy had been postponed due to writer’s panic. Everything had been postponed due to writer’s panic, including any further research on Milwaukeedates.com, though Troy said his friend Brian’s boss at the Journal- Sentinel had expressed definite interest in whatever Justin turned up. Assuming he could turn up anything.
Once they got this chapter in, scheduling the party would be next on his agenda, and poking around the dating site some more. The faster he got to the bottom of the story, the sooner he could either dismiss Candy as another Angie or ask her out again to follow up on his instinct that she was a whole lot more.
One thing was for sure: he was not going to be such a screwup around her again.
Candy smiled and waved at Carl, driving away from her house with a cheerful double toot of his horn. She’d spent the afternoon with him on another Milwaukeedates.com date, this time as Child at Heart. The day after the storm had been fairly mild, and they’d gone to the Milwaukee Zoo, been roared at by lions, sneered at by camels, ignored by rhi-nos and entertained by apes playing in their indoor “forest.”
They’d eaten ice cream bars, munched popcorn, drunk hot chocolate and ridden the zoo’s miniature coal-burning train around the grounds, waving at visitors. It had been a great date, lots of fun.
His car went around the corner onto Capitol Drive and out of sight. Candy turned to go inside, still determinedly not glancing across the street at the house for which her eyeballs seemed to have developed magnets. She couldn’t feel for Carl even a tenth of what she’d felt for Justin. Why the heck not?
Was it mere chemistry or something deeper? Marie had wisely cautioned her that hormones weren’t the best way to choose a mate. But you had to sizzle at least some.
No sizzle today. None.
Her adolescence had been like this. The boys who liked her she had no use for, and the boys she liked had no use for her. Until Chuck. Their coming together had been effortless and angst-free, the way she always fantasized a relationship starting. From the beginning she understood he was into her, he understood she was into him, and they both moved forward knowing they’d be together until that changed, whether the change came that day, that week, or never.
Inside her house, she peeled off her royal-blue coat, kicked off the red ankle boots she’d tucked floral pants into and dug out her cell. Abigail was back from Jamaica as of last night.
Candy needed a girlfriend fix and Abigail would want the latest scoop.