Dirty: The Complete Series (Secret Baby Romance Love Story) (112 page)

“Lead the way,” I said, spreading my hands
out in front of me and matching her smile. I had thought—once she gave into the
idea of the date—that she’d turn it into something that she thought would
irritate me like that. I was still determined to get her to pick something for
herself that I could buy for her, but I was willing to go along with her until
she started to get comfortable with the idea.

We walked towards the store that Natalie
wanted to go to first: she was right that I was less than thrilled to walk into
a store that carried nothing but clothes, toys, and games for young kids, but I
also knew that if I wanted to get her to think about herself, I was going to
have to let her think about Brady first. “Oh, Brady loves these,” Natalie said,
coming to a stop in the middle of one of the aisles. She picked up a toy,
turning to show it to me. It was some kind of construction toy with
stick-together pieces that apparently made a variety of different things.
“He’ll play with them for hours if I let him.”

“Well, obviously there’s a lot to get out
of it,” I said, looking at the different end products the pieces could be made
into. “Want to get him that kit?” Natalie looked at it and considered; I could
almost imagine her weighing the appropriateness of letting me buy something for
her kid.

“I think he’s already got this one,” she
said after a moment, putting it back on the shelf. I resisted the urge to
laugh.

We wandered around, talking about our
favorite toys from when we were kids. “I had this art kit that one of my aunts
got me when I was like…four or five, I think?” Natalie picked up and put down a
similar type of kit, smiling to herself. “It had these little blobs of clay in
it, and I made a huge, enormous mess of it. My parents were horrified.”

“Mine was an erector set deal,” I told
her. “I must have begged them to buy me the same kit at least five times
because I kept losing pieces. Of course, they kept turning up in the most
bizarre places.” She laughed and nodded.

“That I can definitely imagine,” she said
with a little grin. “I’m trying to get Brady in the habit of cleaning up when
he’s done playing, but if I don’t remind him to put his toys away, they just
stay wherever they were when he lost interest.”

“Sounds like a little boy, all right,” I
agreed. “I can at least comfort you with the idea that once he’s old enough to
start liking girls, he’ll figure out how to keep things neat.”

“Oh God, I don’t want to think about him
liking girls,” she said, shaking her head. “That is going to be an interesting
time in my life, I’m sure.”

I finally got her to let me buy a few
little things—some toy cars, a tee shirt, and a water gun—for Brady, and we
left the store together, walking out into the crowded mall. “I let you choose
the first place, so I get to choose the second one—that’s fair, right?” I held
her gaze until I could see the signs of her giving in.

“Fine,” she agreed. “But you can’t
actually make me let you buy me anything,” she told me tartly.

I steered her towards a store called
Lush—which I’d heard from Trevor was a sure bet for a date. I’d looked it up
before I’d committed to the idea of shopping there in my mind; it was a
boutique-style store with bath products, soaps, perfumes, and other things like
that. “Here we go,” I said, taking Natalie’s wrist and keeping her from
stopping short before we went in.

“This seems a little personal,” she said doubtfully
as we stepped into the tiny little shop.

“It smells nice in here, though, doesn’t
it? And it’s not like I’m going to expect you to use anything you buy here in
front of me.” I grinned at her and caught the attention of one of the
employees.

“Have either of you been to Lush before?”
Both Natalie and I shook our heads, and the girl—twenty-something, with
dyed-black hair and bright red lipstick—led us around the store, asking Natalie
about her skin type, her fragrance preferences, all kinds of questions that I
wouldn’t have known the answer to about myself, much less about anyone else.
She convinced Natalie to let her demonstrate some of the different products and
I hung back to watch, grinning to myself as the clerk did a better job of
convincing her to buy things than I possibly could have, no matter how long or
how hard I argued.

By the time we came out of the shop, I’d
bought $70 worth of products—shampoo, conditioner, a body scrub, and a “bath
bomb,” whatever that was, along with other odds and ends. “You totally set me
up with that one,” Natalie told me, idly stroking her arm where the clerk had
demonstrated some kind of lotion.

“Of course I did,” I told her, grinning.
“You can’t tell me you’re not going to enjoy having a nice bath with all this
stuff.” She rolled her eyes, though she was smiling just as much as I was.

“That’s if I get the opportunity to use
it,” she told me tartly. “Brady doesn’t give me a nice, long hour to myself all
that often.”

We moved on through the mall, going from
one shop to another. I wasn’t able to convince Natalie to pick anything out
from the shoe store we went into or the knickknack store we browsed, but we
talked about things she liked, things I liked. I noticed that we had a lot in
common while we were in a store that sold accessories—jewelry and handbags
mostly. I spotted a necklace on a display and made a mental note of it, even
while I stayed at Natalie’s side to watch her looking at earrings. “I know you
told me all about your qualifications,” I said, moving just a little bit closer
to her, “but you’ve got to have like—actual dating experience, right? I don’t
think we’ve ever really talked about that.” She looked up at me through her
eyelashes.

“I probably should have expected you’d ask
something like that,” she said, smiling wryly.

“Well, I mean—obviously you’re qualified,
I’m not questioning that,” I told her. “I’m just curious about how you got into
this line of business.”

She shrugged. “I got into this after my
divorce,” she told me, looking a little uncertain. I nodded, not saying
anything, trying to get her to say more than that. “You’re not going to say
that a divorced person probably isn’t the best source for dating advice?” She
raised an eyebrow.

“No—in fact, I think you’re probably a
better choice than someone who’s never been married,” I pointed out. “You know
what doesn’t work just as much as you know what does.”

“That’s a very enlightened viewpoint,” she
said with a little smile. “I always hesitate to tell any of my clients about
the divorce because a lot of them…” She shrugged. “They’d just say that it’s
proof that I don’t know what I’m talking about—I couldn’t even keep my own
relationship going.”

“It’s a two-way street, though,” I said,
frowning. “One person on their own can’t hold up an entire relationship.”

“But they can screw it up,” Natalie
countered. A look like regret flickered across her face and she shook her head
again. “Anyway, that’s my big, dark secret: I am a divorced single mom.” I
laughed and looked at the necklace on display again.

“Come over here with me,” I told her,
taking her hand and tugging her towards the display. “I want to see something.”
I looked at the clerk hovering nearby and gestured to the necklace I’d had my
eye on.

“Oh—come on, Zeke, no…” Natalie said, as
the clerk lifted the necklace off of the display and handed it to me. I held it
up next to her face and smiled.

“These are the same color—the exact same
color—as your eyes,” I told her, nodding at the clerk to bring the mirror
closer to us. “See?”

“That doesn’t—that’s not a reason…”
Natalie glanced at the mirror; the blue-green color of the stones in the
necklace was as beautiful, as clear, and as shining as her eyes.

“We’ll take this,” I told the clerk. I
handed it to the woman before Natalie could see the price tag on it; it wasn’t
the most expensive piece of jewelry I’d ever bought, but I knew that if she
found out the price, she would have argued even harder against me buying it for
her. I turned to look at her once more. “It’s my practice date, right?” I raised
an eyebrow.

“You’re not supposed to…” I shook my head,
still grinning.

“Your own boss told me that I can spend as
much or as little as I want on my dates with you,” I reminded her. “And, you
absolutely need that necklace.” Natalie took a deep breath and exhaled slowly;
I had to admit, it was exciting to see her so flustered, so out of her element.

“Fine,” she said after a moment. “But I’m
not promising to ever wear it—and you don’t get any bonus points for an
expensive gift.”

I laughed. “It would be a shame, but once
it’s in your keeping, you can do what you want with it.” She gave me another
long look and shook her head.

“Let’s go to the food court, before you
decide to buy the earrings and bracelet and outfit to go with that.”

Chapter
Fifteen

Natalie

I still felt shaken up by the time we got
to the food court, but I was mostly able to hold onto my composure. “I have no
idea how much you spent on that necklace, but I am buying food—and there is
nothing you can do to make me change my mind,” I told Zeke firmly.

“I’ll allow it,” he said, grinning with
that triumphant gleam in his eyes that was somehow both irritating and
endearing. I had no idea how much the necklace had cost, but I knew it had to
be expensive; it wouldn’t have been on a display like the one he’d found it on
if it was a cheap piece of costume jewelry.

We browsed the different selections for a
few moments before deciding to get a few tacos and chips at the Mexican stand,
and I tried to think of a way to get this particular date back on the rails it
had jumped the moment he had talked me into letting him buy things for me.

“So, since we talked about my dating
life,” I began as we sat down with our snacks, “tell me about yours.”

“Isn’t it in my profile?” Zeke paused to
take a bite of his taco and I shrugged.

“I’d like to hear from you—what you think,
what your experience has been, all that. Much more valuable than the dry
facts.” He chewed, swallowed, and laughed.

“There really isn’t a whole lot to say
about it,” he said with a sigh. “The last time I went on dates with anyone, I
was in college—good God, it’s been almost ten years!”

“That’s a long time to go without,” I
said, keeping my voice carefully neutral.

“I didn’t really…entirely…go without,” he
told me, shrugging slightly. “I mean, I had women who would go with me to
events or things like that—strictly in the professional sense—and sometimes
lines would get blurred, but I haven’t been in a relationship with anyone since
sometime towards the end of college.”

“Why do you think that is?” I snagged a
chip and dipped it into the guacamole.

“Things just never seemed to work out with
my college dates,” he said with another shrug. “I’d go on a date with a girl,
think it was going well, and then never hear from her again. Or it just wouldn’t
click somehow.” He took another bite of his taco. “So after a while, I decided
to just throw myself into my work, and deal with finding someone ‘later.’” I
smiled, I hoped sympathetically.

“Always more time ‘later,’ isn’t there?” I
started in on my own taco, chewing thoroughly as I thought about Zeke. It was
hard to believe that a guy like him—smart, talented, successful, and
objectively hot—would find it hard to get a date with anyone, but if he’d had
trouble with making anything stick, relationship-wise, I could see how he’d
eventually stop even trying.

“Always,” he said, grinning. “Until, of
course, you wake up and realize that you’re thirty and most of the women you
could comfortably date are already settled down.”

“Not most of them,” I countered. “Or at
least, they’re not settled down anymore.” I thought about my own situation; I’d
gotten married right out of college, had a kid within a few years, and then my
marriage had ended almost as quickly as it had started. “Lots more women like
me out there, who had one try at settling down and didn’t quite end up staying
with it.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that, though,”
Zeke pointed out. “You gave it a try—I haven’t even managed that yet.” He wiped
his fingers on a napkin and sat back in his seat slightly. “I’m just hoping
that I haven’t left it too late.”

“You’re thirty, not three hundred,” I told
him, shaking my head. “You’ve got plenty of time. Most people in our generation
are getting settled down later—career first, get themselves settled.” I ate another
chip with guacamole and considered. “You’re more the rule than the exception
these days.” Zeke chuckled and picked up his second taco.

“Thanks for the pep talk, coach,” he said,
grinning. I rolled my eyes.

“It’s not a pep talk,” I told him. “It’s
the truth.” He smiled even wider.

“Okay, okay,” he said finally. “I will
keep it in mind. Where should we go to next?” I looked down at the food we’d
picked out and realized that between the two of us, we’d managed to eat it all.
I took another sip of my drink and sat back, looking around at the rest of the
crowd in the food court.