Hard No: Secret Baby Enemies to Lovers Romance by Hazel Parker (fun to read txt) 📗

“Whoops,” I interrupt. “I’m home. Gotta go.”

“Call me later?” she asks, sounding disappointed. She obviously wanted to tease me some more.

“I’ll update you on the state of my underwear, yes,” I tell her, figuring that the statement is dirty enough to satisfy her at the moment, which it is. She hangs up happy.

As I get ready, I wonder again what, exactly, the evening will entail. I also wonder if Tira’s lewd suggestions might not be off the mark after all.

The last time Trent and I had had dinner together, it had metamorphosized into our first date so fast, I hadn’t had time to think about it. And I had slept with him, technically on that first date, which I never do.

Actually, since I haven’t dated at all in years, it feels like the fact that I slept with him so quickly almost is a moot point in terms of timing.

You’re just good at cutting to the chase, said the devil on my shoulder. You don’t have time for small-talk and slow-dancing, so you proceeded directly to “Go.” Nothing wrong with that.

Was there nothing wrong with it, though? On top of our bedroom shenanigans—living room shenanigans, you mean, the devil smirked—I was forced to consider my emotional state as well. Simply put, are things moving too fast?

I decided I would take Tira’s advice, handed out during one of our many conversations between last weekend and tonight, which was that I should live in the moment for a change.

“Stop overthinking and overplanning and just go with the flow,” she had advised me. “Enjoy the moment and don’t worry about what comes next.”

Even though that ran completely against the grain of my character, I resolved to give it my best try. I would go with the flow and see where it took me.

At the appointed hour, there is a knock at my apartment door. Trent is on the other side of the door, looking as out of place in my generic hallway in his charcoal Armani suit as a Martian. He is carrying a bouquet of pale pink tulips and white viburnum, as though he had carefully clipped a choice selection of springtime on his way here.

“Hi,” he says, offering me the flowers. “You look beautiful.”

“I’ll have a hard time keeping up with these,” I reply, indicating the bouquet. “Come in while I put these in some water.”

There is a small thrill that shivers up my backbone when he steps across my threshold. It’s the first time anyone’s been in my personal living space in a long time.

“This may take a minute,” I tell him. “I got a delivery a couple of days ago that severely depleted my supply of flower vases.”

I had tried to thin out the boatload of sunflowers by putting them into smaller, separate containers so they wouldn’t seem like so much of a Tuscan snowdrift in my small apartment. I didn’t want to evict any of them from their holders in favor of the newcomers, so I had to content myself with perching the tulips and viburnum in a glass bowl of water. They leaned dramatically to the left, like an exercise in Japanese flower arranging.

“I think I may have gone a bit overboard with the sunflowers,” Trent says, surveying the room.

“If your goal was to bowl me over,” I answer, “consider that objective accomplished.”

“Yes?”

“Yes, indeed—color me bowled. But why sunflowers?”

He hesitates. “At the risk of sounding cheesy—” he begins.

“Trust me; I don’t think there’s any cheese to be found anywhere in this.”

“The thing I remember the best about my first trip to southern France,” he says, “is this one particular field of sunflowers. I had been passing by farm after farm with fields of lavender and peonies, lots of whites, pinks, and purples. Then, all of a sudden, wham! The car goes by a huge crop of sunflowers, and it was like someone had spread out a slice of the July sunlight down there on the ground. Then it was gone, and the view went back to the monotonous whites, pinks, and purples again. They seemed positively washed out next to the flamelike yellows I had just seen.

“Just like everything looks washed out next to you,” he finishes.

I’m suddenly glad that I’ve got the flowers stowed in water on the kitchen table. I’m feeling so flustered by what he says that I would surely have dropped them by now.

“I’m surprised you didn’t show up with more of them tonight, then,” I manage to say.

He shrugs and smiles. “The florist is currently suffering a marked lack of sunflowers in their stock. I had to make do with something else.”

“Do I look all right for wherever it is we’re going?” I ask. “I was kind of dressing blind for the occasion.”

“I repeat, you look beautiful. And don’t worry, we aren’t going to be going far.”

This inflames my curiosity all the more. I know all of the places within shouting distance of my apartment building like the back of my hand. He must have figured this, so if we were going to one of those, then why was he being so secretive about it?

He sees me thinking on this and puts a hand on my upper arm. “Just entrust yourself to my care for the evening, okay? Everything’s taken care of.”

“Okay,” I say. I get my purse and he proceeds me out into the hallway. As I’m locking up, who should happen to come by at this moment but my neighbor, Mrs. McKinney, and her dog, Charlie.

“Hello, Stephanie,” she greets me. “On your way out?” She eyes Trent without embarrassment, then turns her gaze fully onto me.

“Hi, Mrs. McKinney…yes, going out to dinner. This is Trent Stone. Trent, this is Mrs. McKinney.”

Trent nods to her once with