Operation Date Escape

stand, she grabbed her phone from her purse.
    “Hello?”
    “Hey,” Kelsie replied on the other end.
    “Hey, yourself.” She shifted the phone to her other ear. “You all set for your date?”
    “As ready as I’ll ever be, I guess.”
    Her friend didn’t sound too excited and for good reason. The Cornelius fiasco would have made any woman gun-shy when it came to blind dates. At least it had all worked out for Kelsie in the end. She’d been rescued by a hunk. Better yet, she’d been kissed senseless by him, too.
    “ Well, good luck. Call me if you need rescuing,” Nanci teased.
    “You can bet I will. So wh ere are you?”
    “Grocery store.”
    “Shopping for men?”
    She laughed. “Some of us choose to be proactive when it comes to our love lives.”
    “Who are you trying to kid? You aren’t looking for love – just sex.”
    “Your point is?”
    “Never mind. Finding any prospects?”
    “ I thought I found one,” she said as Mr. Hot and his wife made their way past her. “But he’s already on a leash.”
    “Bummer. So what are you up to tonight?”
    Not what she’d like to be doing. “ I rented a couple of chick flicks and plan to kick back with a bottle of cheap wine and fantasize about some movie star hunk licking whipped cream off my naked body.”
    “Want to trade pla ns for the night?”
    “No way. No how ,” she said, shaking her head. “I prefer to choose my own men, thank you very much.”
    “I recall saying th e very same thing to you and my mother, yet the two of you keep trying to find men for me.”
    “ We’d do anything to see you truly happy again.”
    “Anything?”
    Nanci paused to think about that one. Kelsie was up to something. She just knew it. She sighed, sensing she was going to regret this. “Anything.”
    “Then l et me hang with you tonight?”
    “ But your date...”
    “ Won’t be a problem,” her friend said without hesitation. “I’ll just tell him my best friend is having a personal crisis and needs me.”
    Grinning, Nanci yanked a plastic produce bag from the roller above her and placed a couple of nectarines inside. “Another excuse for your book?”
    “Anything that ’ll get me out of this date.”
    She wanted to give in and get her friend off the hook for that night’s date, but knew that doing so wouldn’t help Kelsie out in the long run. It was time to practice some more tough love. “Sorry, chickadee,” she told her. “I’m going to have to change my ‘anything’ to ‘almost anything’. There’s no way I’m going to risk your mother getting mad at me for ruining the date she set up for you.”
    And that was the truth. Having been raised in foster home after foster home, her best friend’s mom was the closest thing to a mother she had ever known. And, while she had to agree Melinda Collins didn’t always choose the right men for her daughter, at least she cared enough to want to see her daughter happy. More than Nanci could say about her own parents who she hadn’t seen since she was twelve.
    “Some friend you are,” Kelsie sighed on the other end of the line.
    “So good that I’m even going to save some wine for you. You can swing by after your date and tell me all about it.”
    “ Better save me an entire bottle. Something tells me I’m going to be needing it. I’ll talk to you later.”
    “Have fun,” she told her and then shoved her phone back into her purse. Kelsie needed to let down her guard, at least a little, and start enjoying life again. Her friend had practically shut down since the divorce when it came to men and she couldn’t help but be worried about her.
    Thus, the reason she and Kelsie’s mother came up with their plan to fix Kelsie up with bad dates in the hopes she’d get tired of all the duds and start looking on her own for a good one. She hadn’t. Instead, she’d started writing her book on date escapes.
    Nanci curled her fingers around the handle of her shopping cart and gave it a shove, starting off down the aisle. Kelsie might be stubborn, but she was a hell of a lot more stubborn. S he would see to it that her best friend got past what her asshole of an ex had done to her. Somewhere out there was a man who was everything her best friend deserved, a man who could knock her Kelsie off balance with just a kiss. A man like Cole Maxwell.
    * * *
    Kelsie checked her watch for about the fifth time and then glanced across the dimly lit restaurant/lounge she had agreed to meet her mother’s