by Cara Bastone
As always, a huge thank you to my family for being so unstoppably supportive. To my husband, thank you for pretty much single-handedly moving us to a new apartment so that I could have an office to write this book in. How much I love you is in every page of this book.
Thank you to Jeanne and Vivian, the two people who have taught me what it means to see beyond the obvious, the physical, the proveable. You two have made my world so much bigger. Fin would not exist without you!
And finally, thank you to the reader. For so long, I wrote without knowing you, without ever expecting you to be a part of my books. And now that you’re here, all I can do is step back, throw my arms out, and thank you for letting me into your life.
SPECIAL EXCERPT FROM
Read on for a sneak peek of Flirting with Forever, the third book in Cara Bastone’s charming, heartfelt and irresistibly romantic Forever Yours series. Available January 2021 from HQN Books!
Flirting with Forever
by Cara Bastone
MARY TRACE WAS one of those freaks of nature who actually loved first dates. She knew she was an anomaly, should maybe even be studied by scientists, but she couldn’t help herself. She loved the mystery, the anticipation. She always did her blond hair in big, loose curls and—no matter what she wore—imagined herself as Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest, mysterious, inexplicably dripping in jewels and along for whatever adventure the night had in store. Besides, it had been a while since she’d actually been on a first date, so this one was especially exciting.
“I was expecting someone...younger.”
Reality miffed out Mary’s candle. The surly-faced blind date sitting across from her in this perfectly lovely restaurant had just called her old. About four seconds after she’d sat down.
Sure, this apparent prince wasn’t exactly her type either, with his dark hair neatly parted on one side, the perfect knot in his midnight blue tie, the judgmental look in his eye. But she’d planned to at least be polite to him. She’d had some great dates with men who weren’t her physical ideal. She certainly didn’t point out their flaws to them literally the second after saying hello.
“Younger,” Mary repeated, blinking.
The man blinked back. “Right. You must be, what, in your late thirties?”
Mary watched as his frown intensified, his shockingly blue eyes narrowing in their appraisal of her, a cruel sort of humor tipping his mouth down.
A nice boy, Estrella had said when she’d arranged the date. You’ll see, Mary. John is a rare find in a city like this. He’s got a good job. He’s handsome, he’s sweet. He just needs to find the right girl.
Well, Mary faced facts. All mothers thought their sons were nice boys. And just because Estrella Modesto happened to be the kindest mammal on God’s green earth didn’t mean she didn’t have one sour-faced elitist for a son.
“Thirty-seven,” Mary replied, unashamed and unwilling to cower under the blazing critique of his bright blue eyes. “My birthday was last week.”
“Oh.” His face had yet to change. “Happy birthday.”
She’d never heard the phrase said with less enthusiasm. He could very well have said, “Happy Tax Day.”
“Evening,” a smooth voice said at Mary’s elbow. Mary looked up to see a fairly stunning brunette smiling demurely down at them. The waitress was utter perfection in her black vest and white button-down shirt, not a hair out of place in her neat ponytail. Mary clocked her at somewhere around twenty-two, probably fresh out of undergrad, an aspiring actress hacking through her first few months in the Big Apple.
“Evening!” Mary replied automatically, her natural grin feeling almost obscene next to this girl’s prim professionalism.
Mary turned in time to catch the tail end of John’s appraisal of the waitress. His eyes, cold and rude, traveled the length of the waitress’s body.
Nice boy, Estrella had said.
Mary knew, even now, that she’d never have the heart to tell Estrella that nice boys didn’t call their dates old and then mentally undress the waitress. Mary was a tolerant person, perhaps too tolerant, but there were only so many feathers one could stuff into a down pillow before it snowed poultry.
“Right,” Mary said, mostly to herself, as John and the waitress both looked at her to order her drink. How nice of him to pull his eyes from the beautiful baby here to serve him dinner. She turned to the waitress. “I think we need a minute.”
Mary took a deep breath. She asked herself the same question she’d been asking herself since she’d been old enough to ask it—which, according to John Modesto-Whitford, was probably about a decade and a half too long. Can I continue on? If the answer was yes, if she conceivably could continue on through a situation, no matter how horrible, she always, always did.
She pinched the bridge of her nose. The answer to that question was going to come in the form of what shoes he was wearing, which she hadn’t seen yet, as she’d arrived at the restaurant after he had.
In Mary’s experience, men who wore wingtips were a lost cause. Not to mention men who wore wingtips to go along with their perfect hair, perfect tie and mean eyes. Wingtip shoes were some sort of inscrutable, masculine symbol, she was sure of it. Members of the wingtip tribe probably communicated with one another in secret, smirky eyebrow lifts, effortlessly transmitting information about the women in their general vicinity. She hadn’t figured out the why of it; she simply knew it to be true. Men in wingtips were not compatible with Mary Trace.
She opened her eyes, ignored his coldly befuddled assessment of her behavior and flipped up one side of the tablecloth. Mary let out a gusting breath of relief. There they were, size-twelve glossy ocher wingtips, recently polished. Thank God. Now she didn’t have to worry about whether or not she was doing the right thing when she carefully folded her napkin and set it aside. The wingtips were a clear sign from the heavens that it was time for Mary to get the hell out of Dodge.
Still obviously befuddled, John stood when she did. The only point in his favor so far.
“Thank you for meeting me,” Mary said and meant it. The jerk could have stood her up, but he hadn’t. “But this is not going to work out.”
His eyebrows aggressively furrowed, changing his face from that judgmental smirk for the first time since she’d sat down. Now he just looked plain old mean. She paused for a moment, expecting him to say something. Anything. But nada, zilch, goose egg. His lips just pressed into a thin line as he glared at her.
“Have a nice night.” She reached for her purse.
“You’re just leaving,” he said flatly, his eyebrows still in that aggressive V over his cold eyes.
She straightened her purse over her shoulder.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he murmured, animating for the first time by tossing his large hands in the air. “What a freaking waste of time.”
A waste of time because she wasn’t going to sleep with him? Apparently, he’d gotten all dolled up, schlepped his way across town, and now he expected a cookie. Her cookie, to be exact. After he’d straight-up called her old.
She sucked in a deep breath and stepped closer to him, not wanting to cause a scene by raising her voice. He stiffened and pulled back from her as if age were contagious.
She didn’t want to be rude, but she’d stopped allowing herself to be bullied about a decade ago. Social niceties be damned. Mary tossed her hair back over her shoulders. “I’m not going to say anything to Estrella about this, don’t worry. But she was wrong. You are not a nice boy.”
John blinked at her, his face quirking up into an expression that told Mary that he thought she was a prize idiot.
She wasn’t an idiot, but she had learned a lesson. This was the last time she was letting a mother set her up with a son. Even if she was one of the best local artisans Mary stocked at Fresh.
She turned on her heel and sailed out of t
he restaurant.
Mary was just unlocking the door to her apartment when the worst part of what had just happened really hit her. It wasn’t the cruel and unnecessary commentary on her—apparently geriatric—age. It wasn’t the sneer of the mean-faced man as he’d eyed her across the table or the way he’d looked at the waitress.
No. The worst part of it was right now. This very moment, standing in her own doorway, when she couldn’t call Cora. Her best friend of all time. Whom Mary had only had ten short years with before Cora had been killed in a car accident. And that had been five years ago.
For the most part, Mary had found her peace. She’d done the requisite universe cursing, the wondering why something so useless and pointless and painful could possibly have happened. She’d had the drunken, teary nights with the other people who’d loved Cora. She’d cried the tears.
And most of the time, she was okay. But not tonight. Not tonight when she wanted to call her best friend so freaking badly. When she wanted nothing more than to hear Cora’s rude, snarky, biting tone over the phone. Cora would have hidden in the bathroom so her son couldn’t overhear her say something like “Give me that loser’s phone number. I’m going to tell him to sit on it sideways. I’m going to tell him that he just screwed up the best opportunity that he ever had. He had a date with Mary Freaking Trace and he screwed it up in the first sentence! What a moron. Don’t give him another thought, Mare, unless it’s to pity the fool.”
But was it even the mean-faced blind date that Mary wanted Cora to tell off? No. Because, really, Mary had done a good enough job of that on her own. She’d left the restaurant, hadn’t she? Wasn’t it this voice in her own head Mary needed help dispelling? This voice that sounded suspiciously like her own mother. Too old... Running out of time... You don’t want to die alone, do you? Thirty-seven and single and what a shame that is.
Her mother would view tonight’s debacle as comeuppance for Mary. Comeuppance for years of having the audacity to think that she had plenty of time to live her life before she looked for love. If she ever told her mother this story, she’d purse her lips and give Mary a look very close to an I-told-you-so.
Mary closed her apartment door behind her and locked it. All the lights in her apartment were still off, which always made Mary feel like she’d just walked into an exhibit in a museum that had closed for the evening. Behold: the life of Mary Trace. She viewed the lumpy shapes of her furniture, the blank geometric grace of the rugs on her floor, the frames on her walls. And then, across the way, the shadowed, ghostly version of herself in the hall mirror.
She ached for Cora.
I was expecting someone younger, the disdainful voice said again, popping up out of nowhere, threading in with her mother’s voice. How many times had her mother warned her that she was rapidly approaching an age when men would, in fact, wish she were younger? A hundred? A thousand?
“What an ass,” Mary huffed and flipped on the lights, tossing her home into bright, sharp focus. He was an ass who didn’t deserve her. An ass who’d sneered at all the years she’d lost just trying to say goodbye to the friend she couldn’t call tonight.
* * *
“TOUGH LOSS THIS morning, Whitford.”
John’s shoulders tightened as if his muscles were connected by a string that had just gotten half a foot shorter. He swiveled in his creaky chair, careful not to bash his knees on the filing cabinet he basically had to sit on top of to make room in his tiny office. And there was Crash Willis, leaning in his doorway, smirking like the royal asshole he was.
Willis was an assistant district attorney and John’s least favorite person in the borough of Brooklyn. Even within the confines of his own mind, John refused to refer to him as Crash. What kind of parents named their kid Crash, for God’s sake? Rich parents, apparently.
John let his eyes trace Willis from the top of his blond head to the tips of his teal leather loafers. Everything from the two-hundred-dollar haircut to the matching teal pocket square in the breast pocket of his suit screamed money. No one invested in teal loafers unless they had at least five other pairs of work shoes already.
“Wouldn’t count it as a loss yet,” John said, stretching his legs out and crossing them at the ankles, just because he knew his nonchalance would piss Willis off.
“Your girl gets indicted on all counts? Pretty big hit to the game plan, pal.”
John took a deep breath. It was true that one of John’s state-appointed clients—Hang Nguyen, first-generation Vietnamese-American, seventeen years old and officially tried as an adult in the state of New York—had been indicted on three different counts of solicitation and one egregiously heinous count of sex trafficking that morning. But that was to be expected. Everyone got indicted for everything in Brooklyn. But not everybody got sent to jail in Brooklyn, and that was where John’s job came in. He was a public defender and proud of it.
He considered it a matter of course to sneer at the ADA smirking in his doorway. Though defense attorneys and district attorneys tended to be cut from different cloths, there were plenty of ADAs that John respected, some who he even counted as friends.
Willis wasn’t one of them.
They weren’t enemies by nature, he supposed, but more by endgame. They were born into different worlds and wanted to end up in different worlds too. Crash Willis, with his pocket squares and butter leather shoes, wanted the prestige and notoriety of someday becoming Brooklyn’s DA. He chewed through cases as fast as he could, tough on crime and celebrating every indictment he could smooth-talk out of unsuspecting grand juries.
John just wanted to keep minors out of prison. Willis and John weren’t exactly bosom buddies.
Besides, Willis was one of those assholes who insisted on shortening John’s last name from Modesto-Whitford to just Whitford. John hated that.
In his mind, it was Willis’s way of intentionally reminding John of his father. A small way of insinuating that John’s crusade to defend the innocent rang hollow. At least in Willis’s eyes.
“Well, next comes the fun part,” John said amiably, knowing that Willis had come in here attempting to get a rise out of him. “The fun part” being the hours and hours of underpaid, stress-inducing, nail-biting research, writing, negotiating, coaching, performing and defending of a kid who, in John’s opinion, did not deserve up to thirty-five years behind bars.
“Hey, Crash,” Richie Dear said as he skirted around Willis in the doorway and entered the office he shared with John. “My grandma called—she wants her shoes back.”
John snorted with laughter, pulling his legs back to let Richie pass the eighteen inches he had to go to cram himself at his own desk.
Willis glared at both of them. “Whatever,” he grumbled, turning on his heel and stalking away.
“They don’t call me The Exterminator for nothing,” Richie gloated, leaning across the small room to slam their door closed. “I know how to get rid of pests.”
“Yeah. No one calls you that.”
They both laughed. Richie Dear—his God-given last name—was bottle blond, about a foot shorter than John and always a little bit disheveled. His files often found themselves in messy piles on John’s desk or chair. Two years ago, when they’d first started sharing this broom closet the state called an office, John had been positive that the very boisterous Richie Dear had been sent from hell to torture him. Now they were friends.
Plus, John had discovered noise-canceling headphones and that had significantly improved their working relationship.
“What was Crash doing here?” Richie asked with all the disdain of a thirteen-year-old mean girl.
“Just coming by to taunt me about my life choices. The usual.”
“Ignore him. He’s just salty that you have more courtroom charisma than he does.”
John’s cell phone buzzed on his peeling wooden desk, spasmodically sliding a few inches to one side. John gri
maced when he saw the name there and silenced it.
“Hiding from Mommy today?” Richie asked, eyeing John’s phone.
John loved his mother dearly, but the woman loved to chat during the workday. He’d call her back on his walk home from the train. Or...not. He had an unusually heavy stone of dread in his gut when he thought of talking to his mother this time. “She’s calling to find out about that date she set me up on.”
“That was last night!” Richie realized, nearly pouring an entire mug of tepid coffee all over his pants as he swung around to face John. “How’d it go? I’m guessing if you’re dodging your mother’s calls, it was a bust. Didn’t Estrella swear this was going to be a love match? Your future wife?” Richie slugged back half the mug of stale coffee without even a wince, something that all good public defenders learned how to do at some point or another.
“It was a waste of a swipe,” John grumbled, referring to the MetroCard fare for the two trains he’d taken to get to that ridiculous restaurant.
“Why?” Richie asked nosily, slugging back the rest of the coffee. “Was she boring? Rude to the waiter?” He leaned in and theatrically whispered, “Was she one of those horrible people who blow their noses into cloth napkins?”
John laughed and shook his head. “No. No. There was nothing wrong with her.” As far as he could tell. Actually, as far as he could tell, she was pretty much the most gorgeous woman he’d ever seen in his life. He’d spent the whole forty feet of her walk across that restaurant attempting to believe that she was actually there for him. It couldn’t be. Mothers didn’t set up their sons with movie-star beauties. And then that smile. Gah. His heart barely beat that hard when he went jogging. He’d considered it a miracle that he hadn’t upended his water glass onto his pants or something idiotic like that. No. He’d made a fool of himself in a different way. A considerably worse way. Him and his clumsy freaking mouth. Guilt lanced through him. “It’s just—Dating is a waste of time for me right now. I’m not in the position to...do that.”
