Page 119 of Accidental Blind Date

I swallow hard but the tears surface anyway. Honestly, I don’t really care. What I am feeling is real and she deserves to see that. “You know…my mom died when I was a kid too.”

Delilah looks up at me. “She did?”

“Yes,” I smile shakily.

“Do you miss her?” she asks.

My voice cracks. “Every day.”

“I miss my mom every day too,” she says sadly.

“But you know what? You have a great aunt who loves you very much. And your dad is the best.”

“He is,” she looks up at me. “So, are you going to go out with him?”

Poppy is back with a lollie in her mouth and one in her hand for her sister.

“I’ll think about it,” I tell Delilah. Outside the window I see Jenna waving, and I wave back. I wait until the girls are gone to let my guard down, plopping into one of the chairs.

“Oof,” Summer says as she walks up to me.

Yeah, oof.

“Are you going to open it?”

“I don’t want to. But I feel like I have to.”

“After all that? I’d say so,” she agrees.

And so, I open it.

Libby,

I want to start over. If that’s even possible. I want to take you out the way I should have in the beginning. No games. No lies. Just me showing you what you mean to me.

Dax

My mouth twists as I fight to hold it together and shove the card back in the envelope. Then I look at the flowers, and a tear falls from my eye onto one of the roses.

So much for romance being dead.

Chapter 44

Libby

As I sit at a small table at Tony’s Cantina I can’t decide how I feel about being here. It’s both bitter and sweet seeing as how the best date I’ve even been on was at a table just five feet away but also, it was a date that was never meant to happen the way it did.

Why Dax chose here hasn’t quite added up in my head. Yet here I am. Giving it another chance. And just to clarify, it’s not just for the girls’ sakes. I would never entertain something that I planned to pull the plug on simply to make them happy in the moment.

No. I came here because after rereading the card three, four, maybe ten times I realized that I want to believe in romance. As a bookshop owner, I always have. When you devote your life to showing people the magic of stories, it’s kind of implied that you believe in that magic. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous, especially since our date is at seven and it’s six fifty-six and he’s not here yet.

When I agreed to go out with him, I sent him a simple text. I watched as the status switched from delivered to read in a matter of seconds. Then the ellipses appeared, disappeared, andappeared again for a solid fifteen seconds before he responded with a time and location.

Wednesday. Tony’s Cantina at seven.

He wasted no time, probably because he was eager to make things right. And I accepted the twenty-four-hour notice because I have also had an anxious little animal eating a pit in my stomach for days now, and I need to know if I am going to have to live with it forever or not.

It’s seven-o-one and still no sign of him. If the man’s intention is to recreate our first date, he’s doing a bang-up job. I have a chip and salsa flight, a muddled gin and tonic and the tingling anticipation of whether or not I’m going to get ghosted or not.