by Donna Alward
But that’s not the way it worked out, and she wasn’t one to dwell in the past.
Her best friend, Tina, was having a birthday party in two weeks on a Saturday night because that’s when normal people did things like have parties. Carly had to work—she always had to work. She pecked out her regrets on the tiny phone keyboard and promised that they’d get together for lunch soon.
She was feeling maudlin. She hardly ever got to see her friends, because they all worked office jobs with normal hours. She didn’t have anything that could be considered family, not anymore, and she hadn’t been on a successful date in…well, thinking about how long it’d been was even more depressing.
All she had was this job and the people who worked for her—as well as her regulars. It wasn’t a bad thing. During the three years she’d been married to Drake, she’d existed entirely at his whim. He was a professor and therefore, his wife should not be a waitress. As far as she’d been able to tell, his wife shouldn’t have been anything—except a cook and a maid. Which meant she hadn’t had any of her own money—which meant that leaving him was the scariest thing she’d ever done.
She was never going to be in that position ever again.
She could stand to get laid, though. Something fun, something easy, something without any expectations. Just two people making each other feel good. Very good.
At the thought, her mind turned back to Tommy, the far-too-young cowboy who couldn’t keep a girlfriend. Oh, who was she kidding? He was a nice—if safe—fantasy. She didn’t know how old he was—old enough to buy beer, but she was sure that he was still in college. And that was…too young. She was thirty-seven, for crying out loud. It would be like robbing the cradle or something. Still…
She ducked her head around the corner from where she was hiding behind the drinks dispenser and scanned the restaurant. Mr. Rodriguez’s glass of iced tea was three-fourths full. Mrs. Owens had pushed her plate aside and was working on a crossword puzzle. The other two tables were engaged in their meals instead of craning their necks around, looking for a server. This was as calm as Peachtree’s got.
Carly called up the NotMy1stRodeo.com page. It took three tries to get her password in, and each attempt made her feel even more ridiculous. The only reason she had signed up for the stupid site was because one of her former employees had met a very nice rancher who lived in middle-of-nowhere, Montana, on the site and been completely swept off her feet.
Carly had gone to the wedding nine months ago and stared at the hunk of shy cowboy who walked her friend Dee down the aisle as a married woman. Carly had seen a lot of people on a lot of dates in her time and listening to the cowboy stutter through his marriage vows had made one thing very clear to her—he would not have made a good first impression on a date. But Dee had met him online, where the two of them had gotten to know each other before he’d had to go public. Dee was over the moon with him—he was kind and thoughtful and caring and very good with his hands. Everything a woman could want.
A wedding was not the end-all and be-all of life and Carly had no desire to relocate to the middle of nowhere and once again exist entirely on the whims of a husband, but as she watched that cowboy gaze at Dee with unabashed love, she’d been jealous.
She signed up for the site the next day. Maybe all she needed was a shy and awkward cowboy—someone sweet, someone…nonthreatening. And she could definitely use a cowboy who knew how to work with his hands. Someone fun.
She hadn’t found one yet. The men she’d met through the site hadn’t worked for one reason or another. She hadn’t liked something about their profile or they hadn’t been able to work around her schedule or…or it just hadn’t been right.
She wasn’t asking for perfection. But she wasn’t about to compromise again.
However, given her schedule, she only managed to log into the site about once a week to check for messages and hat tips and whatever it was people were supposed to do. She usually did this on Monday or Tuesday, her days off. But today…
She had six hat tips and one message. She scanned over the names of the hat tippers. She didn’t recognize any of the names until she came to the last one. Tom.
Tom Tucker.
No. Way.
It couldn’t be the same Tommy Tucker, could it? There were no photos so it could’ve been anyone. There were lots of Toms in the world. And Tucker—like Tanya Tucker or someone right?
Then she read the message.
Does this count as something different?
She blinked down at the single line, her heart beginning to pound. It was him, all right.
What was she supposed to think about this? Every so often, a customer would get infatuated with her—it went with the territory. She smiled at people, she asked how they were doing, and for some certain groups of people—lonely men who didn’t get to talk to many women otherwise, that was an invitation of sorts. A few times, she’d come out of work to find someone waiting by a car with a bouquet of flowers. It was a delicate dance to get out of that situation without losing business, but also without being stalked.
But then, last night? When she’d been working? He hadn’t asked for her number. Hadn’t given his. And he had not been waiting by the car for her, although she wouldn’t have been one-hundred-percent surprised if he had been.
But he’d found her online. Was this creepy? Or was this flattering?
Only one way to find out.
Aren’t you a little too young for this?
She stared at her phone for a moment after that, afraid that he’d respond immediately and, oddly, just as afraid he wouldn’t. It was unsettling to realize she didn’t know what she was supposed to do. If he were still sitting in that booth right over there, she’d know exactly how to handle the situation.
She thought back to last night, when their interaction had gone above and beyond the call of duty.
Okay, so she’d almost known how to handle the situation.
But sending each other emails on a dating site?
If she hadn’t already known him, she would never have replied at all. But it was too late to take it back now.
She was going to go to hell for this.
She shut her phone off and grabbed the pitcher of iced tea. She was working. If she busted one of her servers hiding in a corner and texting a boy, there would be lectures, reprimands—and in cases where her warning went unheeded, occasional firings. She had to lead by example here and if that meant that she had to spend the next three hours not thinking about Tommy Tucker, then that’s what she had to do.
This was going to be a hell of a long shift.
Chapter Three
Tommy’s phone buzzed when he got the message. Somehow, he knew it was from Carlene—Carly. But he was sitting in the library, finishing up his ag paper, so he refused to allow himself to look at the message. Because if she were going to tell him to leave her alone, he wanted the bad news in private.
And if she wasn’t going to tell him to leave her alone, well…
Basically, he needed to be in private when he read her message.
Thus properly motivated, he managed crank out the conclusion of his paper on agricultural policy in record time.
His oldest brother, Mark, hadn’t even gone to college—he’d joined the Army. Nicky was the one who set the bar high, getting a double major in agriculture and business. He now worked for Dura-Tech, marketing hay balers and tractors online and in-person to farmers and ranchers all over the Great Plains.
Tommy hadn’t particularly wanted to go to college, but he hadn’t wanted to stay home either. College was the lesser of the two evils. By then, his father had been deep in the depression after losing his wife and Tommy couldn’t bear the thought of staying at home when it was little more than a crypt.
Besides, as much as he loved his dad, it was time to move on. He’d known even then that he wasn’t like the other Tucker men. He’d never had a girlfriend that he could reasonably call a high school sweetheart and he didn’t hav
e that drive to settle down on the same patch of land that his grandpa had bought after the Great Depression had ended. College was supposed to have given him the time to pick a career.
He emailed his paper to his professor and hurried back to his apartment. He managed to get to his room without seeing the any of his five roommates, thank God. He shut the door and pulled out his phone.
Aren’t you a little too young for this?
Tommy grinned. Her answer might not be a ‘yes,’ but it sure as hell wasn’t a ‘go away,’ either.
He sat there, staring at the message and wondering how he should reply. He didn’t want to come off as some overeager kid who couldn’t wait to get his hands down her pants—even if that was at least partly true. No, he had to play this cool. Carly was the kind of woman who did not suffer fools—he’d seen her in action on more than one occasion, when some customer got too drunk or too upset at whatever was happening on the bar’s television screens. She had a way of diffusing a situation, but there was no mistaking the fact that she could put people in their place.
Finally, he decided on what to say next.
Age is just a number.
He hit send and waited, but there was no immediate reply. Was she still at work? He didn’t know that much about her. Surely, she didn’t work only the one night a week.
He flopped onto his bed, feeling young for the first time in a long time. He was operating out of his depth here. Texting with women his own age usually didn’t stay just texting for long. And Carly had seen enough dates go south on him to know that he didn’t always say right thing at the right time.
But it was important to him not come off as an immature jerk here.
But he kind of was an immature jerk, so this was a bit of a challenge.
I didn’t realize you were the assistant manager. Should I take it as a compliment that you’ve always waited on my table?
He wanted to ask her out—which was insane, really, but it didn’t change the fact that that’s what he wanted to do. It was slowly dawning on him that maybe he’d wanted to ask her out since he’d first seen her all those months ago. He couldn’t even remember the name of the woman he’d been with—but he remembered Carly. And the next time he had a date with yet another young woman whose name he couldn’t recall, he’d gone right back to Peachtree’s and asked for the same table.
He had been taking dates to there for almost six months because he liked the food and the service was great.
What if that wasn’t the only reason?
What if Carly Hughes was the reason?
Tommy was no saint. In one respect, he was very much like all the other Tucker men. One of the reasons they all got married young was because they all liked women. Sex was good and the more you did it, the better it got. But Tommy was the only one who hadn’t fallen into the sex-equals-marriage trap. He liked sex—a lot. But he hadn’t found the one woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life having sex with.
He stared at his phone again. No reply. He wouldn’t send anything else. More than two messages would reek of desperation and desperation was rarely sexy. He had work to do, anyway. He forced himself to open his Ag Practices textbook and begin reading chapter thirty-six.
But he kept one eye on his phone. Just in case.
…
Carly was down to one server, Katy, and the bartender, Aaron, by eight-thirty. And Aaron was making himself quite busy with Katy. Carly got herself a Sprite and sat at the end of the bar. She didn’t bother with email and she didn’t check on Facebook. She went straight to NotMy1stRodeo.com.
She had messages. Her heart picked up a bit.
Age is just a number. I didn’t realize you were the assistant manager. Should I take it as a compliment that you’ve always waited on my table?
She grinned at her phone like a love-struck teenager. This was flirting, that much was clear—but it was a different kind of flirting than she was used to. It felt new and fresh and more than a little exciting.
I make a special exception for my best customers.
Seconds passed, and nothing happened. She had almost resolved to shut the window and go see what new controversy was all over Facebook, when a reply popped up.
I’m honored. Are you at work now?
Yes.
For a moment, she debated telling him to come join her at the bar for a drink. The restaurant was dead. They could converse in relative privacy.
But she quickly decided against that. Candidates for managerial positions did not have dates while they were working. For that matter, they didn’t have not-dates while they were working. By her own strict standards of conduct, she was already pushing her luck by messaging with him while she was on the clock.
She glanced around the restaurant again, feeling guilty. Aaron and Katy had already closed off to the extra sections and mopped the floor. There was no one else at the bar. If she didn’t tell them to get back to work, they wouldn’t notice that she was sitting here grinning like a loon at her phone, would they?
Is it busy?
No. Sunday nights can be slow. What about you?
The seconds between messages stretched into a full minute and she began to get antsy.
Let’s say I finished my work for the day.
Not that he could see it, but she notched an eyebrow at her phone.
Your work? What do you do?
Another very long pause.
I’m a senior at the University of Montana.
Before Carly could reply to that, though, another message popped up.
But I’m a very mature senior. :-)
She snorted so hard she hurt herself. Yeah, the smiley face screamed maturity.
Is that so?
Dear God, he was a college student. Which meant he was at least ten years younger than she was. Which meant that this entire conversation was wrong on at least six different levels—seven, if she thought hard enough.
I’d hate to see how many drinks immature seniors got thrown in their faces.
It’s a never-ending stream of laundry, it’s true.
This time, she couldn’t hold the laugh inside. She giggled out loud and then nervously glanced to where Aaron and Katy had their heads together, one on each side of the bar. They weren’t paying any attention to her, and it was starting to feel a little egotistical to think that they might. They were too busy making eyes at each other.
Are you seeing anyone?
Now it was serious. All right, it’d been serious the moment he found her online. If she were being honest with herself, she’d have to admit that it might have gotten slightly serious long before that. Before she could respond, another message popped up.
I only ask because you are on this website and you know what happens when you assume, right?
For the first time in a long time, Carly blushed. Obviously, she was not seeing anyone—she was on the dating website to find someone to see. But she decided not to answer the question straight up.
I might ask the same thing of you. I thought this was a website for people who have already been married.
He didn’t respond right away. Not that she could blame him. She felt a little bit like she was ratting him out, but to who? Who cared if he bent the truth?
It’s…complicated. But no, I’ve never been married. Not even engaged.
Yeah, suddenly, her life was getting a lot more complicated, too.
So why are you here? Not to be blunt, but are you stalking me?
There was no hesitation in his reply.
No. But I am interested in you.
She’d be lying if she said that that didn’t make her feel, well, good. He hadn’t said anything nearly as crass as “I want you” or “what color is your underwear” or any number of crude things she’d heard on a regular basis over the last twenty years.
He was interested in her.
It felt good to be interesting.
She got another message before she could reply to that last one.
I took your ad
vice. I was looking for something…different. I didn’t expect to find you here. But it was a nice surprise.
She stared at her phone, unsure of what the hell she was supposed to do with that admission, when she got another message.
Hello?
I’m here.
I hope I didn’t scare you off.
She snorted again.
I’m trying to figure out which part of this is believable.
It’s not believable? Even though it’s the truth?
She couldn’t help herself. She rolled her eyes. Tommy Tucker was good-looking and—at times—appeared to be quite a sweet talker. But really?
I’m flattered, but I’m too old for you.
Like I said, age is just a number.
Fine. You’re too young for me.
He took a long time to reply. Carly held her breath. She’d said the right thing. Age might be a number, but he was still a senior in college, that meant he was twenty-two or twenty-three or—and she shuddered at the thought—a very intelligent twenty-one-year-old. Like there was a huge difference between twenty-one and twenty-two. But it felt huge.
I appreciate your honesty.
Oh, that hurt. And the funny thing was, she wasn’t even sure why it hurt. It was simply the truth. But he’d clearly taken it as a rejection.
Because she’d clearly meant it as one.
If you change your mind, you know how to find me.
Carly’s heart began to pound faster. Okay, so he was way too young for her. But he was being surprisingly mature about this.
A thought occurred to her. She’d signed on for this site with some vague notion of a hunky cowboy who’d sweep her off her feet and look at her like he couldn’t wait to find a nice barn full of hay. She wanted something fun, something to bring her back into the swing of things. She wasn’t looking for another marriage—but she was looking to get on with her life.
