Page 41 of Good Girl’s Guide to Love (Guide to Love #4)

linc

“I don’t care if this is real or fake, Lincoln Kincaid, this is the best first date ever.”

I laugh and sit back as Ainsley organizes the trays of food that were just delivered. “And here I thought a good first date would require me getting dressed up, picking a fancy restaurant, and eating a seventy-dollar steak prepared in sauces I’ve never heard of.”

“Nope,” she says. “Chicken tenders and sweet tea. This is the key to a girl’s heart.”

If this is what it’s like to date Ainsley, then this year is going to fly by.

I laugh as I watch in a little shock, and a whole lot of awe, as my prim and proper “girlfriend” brings a ranch-soaked chicken tender to her mouth.

Her head is tilted, as if she’s going to try and catch any dripping dressing with her tongue.

I’m also ignoring the fact that I’m slightly turned on by this. “Do you want a tender with that sauce?”

She shakes her head. “When it comes to chicken tenders and ranch dressing, the limit doesn’t exist for too much.”

“Agree to disagree,” I say as I take a tender of my own, but dip it in the correct tender condiment—barbecue sauce. “Barbecue is clearly superior.”

Ainsley feigns shock, and even adds her hand over her heart for added effect. “I don’t know if this relationship can continue if we have that kind of divide. I mean, Linc, how would we raise the children!”

The more time I spend with Ainsley, the more I realize just how funny she is.

She had me laughing that first night, but I figured that was the alcohol and the ridiculousness of the entire situation.

But every time I talk to her, I find myself laughing.

I didn’t expect her to have a subtle sarcasm.

Or the perfect one-liner. And to do it all looking hot as fuck in that sundress.

“Well, that’s easy,” I say. “We don’t have any.”

I don’t miss the way Ainsley’s face falls a bit before she quickly regroups. “Shit. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to come out as a dick thing to say.”

She shakes her head and takes a drink of her tea.

“No, it’s fine. It’s not like this is...

” She trails off to look around. But luckily, since we’re in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant on the outskirts of metro Nashville, it’s so packed no one can hear us.

“I just want a family, and usually I don’t date someone that doesn’t have that goal.

Doesn’t make sense to waste someone’s time, right?

But sometimes it’s easy to forget that we’re not…

I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have reacted like that. ”

“No apologies necessary,” I say. “But if it helps, and if anyone asks, I’ll tell them we want a litter. All the babies.”

She laughs. “You can stop at three. That’s my max.”

“Good to know,” I say before studying a french fry a little too intently. I normally do a pretty good job of keeping my sad childhood pushed aside, and I don’t know if it’s the actual talk of family, but suddenly those feelings are starting to uncomfortably bubble to the surface.

“Hey.” I feel Ainsley’s hand on top of mine, and when I look up, those blue eyes are pleading with me. “I’m sorry if I made things weird.”

I shake my head, pushing aside the thoughts of dead parents, passed-on grandmothers, and all the reasons I’ve come up with not to get close to anyone. “You didn’t. That was all me.”

I can tell Ainsley’s trying to give me an out. Because that’s the kind of person she is. And while I’m not ready to tell her all about my fucked-up past, I need to give her something.

I want to give her something.

“My grandma raised me,” I begin, not wanting to get into the dead parents quite yet. “It was just her and me for a lot of years. And then she passed when I was graduating college.”

The words trail off and I feel Ainsley’s hand holding mine tighter. “I’m so sorry, Linc. That had to hurt so much. You’ve been on your own for a long time.”

I’ve been on the receiving end of sympathy many times in my life. Most of it felt disingenuous. But this? Those few words from Ainsley? Somehow I can feel her sorrow for me through those few little words and her kind eyes.

“It did. Then it was just me. No other family. So I think I just don’t know any different.”

She nods in understanding. “I get that. Then there’s my family, that has zero boundaries.”

I chuckle thinking back to that. How was that only a week ago? “Yeah, it was a lot.”

She shakes her head and I feel like we’re getting back on the right track. “They mean well. We all do, when it comes to our siblings. But with me I feel like they’re too much.”

“How so?”

“I’m not the baby of the family, but I’ve always been the most delicate,” she says, absently grabbing a french fry, but not eating it.

“I was the good one. The one who didn’t care about tattling, because rules were in place for a reason.

And I followed them, every single one. I was also a bit of a crier.

And when I say was, I mean am. You put on the sad puppy adoption commercial and I’m a puddle. ”

“I mean who isn’t? Those eyes? That song? Take my money and then also give me that dog.”

“Exactly,” she says. “But yes, combine all of that together, and I was definitely the most sensitive of the five of us. As we got older, and it was clear that I was the one who wasn’t going to take the risks or push the boundaries, I became the most breakable.

So when they saw the news about us, and the pictures, I get why they did what they did. ”

“The black was a nice touch,” I joke as I grab another tender.

“Can I ask, though, how does a girl who doesn’t swear, only drinks when pushed to her limit, and gets nervous when breaking the smallest rule, also related to four siblings who launched a ninja expedition to try to spy on their sister in broad daylight? ”

“Oh, if we were trying to spy on another sibling, I would’ve been right there with them,” she says. “The day I first met you?—”

“Do you mean the day you ran into me or the day I became your boyfriend?”

It’s not hard to make Ainsley blush. And I don’t know if I’m ever going to get tired of it.

“Ran into you,” she says, her shy smile gracing her beautiful face before continuing. “That night, we all ganged up on Quinn’s boyfriend’s mom, and fooled her into thinking she was getting a lot of money in order for her to not try to get custody of a baby.”

I blink rapidly, trying to follow that line. “Excuse me, what?”

She laughs. “It’s a long story for another day. But that was my way of saying that if shenanigans are happening, I’m all about them. I just need them to stay on the right side of the law.”

“Wait, does your family break the law?”

She shakes her head as she takes another bite of a ranch-dipped tender. “A few arrests, but no convictions. My sister Stella, though, was once picked up by the FBI for questioning.”

I drop the tender I was about to put in my mouth. “The FBI? As in the Feds?”

“Yup,” Ainsley says, like that isn’t a bombshell. “But it all went away after we got her ex to admit to a dominatrix that he set her up.”

I stare at her, jaw dropped, because no way those words just left her mouth. “You’re lying.”

“Cross my heart.”

We both pause for a second after she says it. I don’t think she meant to, but the second it came out of her lips, she realizes what she said.

Kind of like me last night when I scored that touchdown. I didn’t even realize what I was doing until I did it. But in that moment, the first person I thought of was Ainsley.

Because my mind was clear. During that entire play, it was like every other worry or possibility left my head. All I saw was an open field and six points.

I know rationally that Ainsley didn’t magically fly into the stadium and wave a magic wand to clear my mind from the noise. But she also did. Which is why when I found the end zone and my teammates started flooding me in celebration, it was just her blonde hair and blue eyes I could think of.

I’d wondered if she saw it. Knowing Ainsley the little I do, I doubted she was going to bring it up. But between how her breath stopped just now, and the flush in her cheeks, she did. And that’s good enough for me.

“So you’re saying that I, the man who has also never been convicted, but was damn close a few times, picked the right sister to date?”

Ainsley gives me a genuine smile with a coy shoulder shrug. “Stick with me, Kincaid. I’ll have you volunteering and not swearing in no time.”

I don’t know what draws my attention from Ainsley to out the window, but I do. Which is when I see a not-so-sly passerby not passing by. And aiming a camera right through the window.

“I think we’ve been found,” I say. “Want to keep them on the move?”

Ainsley looks out the window, then back to me. “Can ice cream be involved?”

“Can it be involved?” I stand from my seat, holding my hand out for her to help her up. “Not only can it be involved, I think it’s required.”

“So if you weren’t playing football, what would you be doing?”

“Oh yes! The twenty-questions part of the first date!” My sarcastic comment earns me a side-eye as we walk with our ice cream cones along the Cumberland River. “I’m kidding. But yes. It was football player or bust.”

“But you went to college? What did you major in?”

“Communications, which in athlete terms, meant I was majoring in football,” I say. “And if your next question is ‘Linc, what would you do with that if football didn’t work?’ The answer is play football. I needed a major, and it required the least amount of science and math classes.”

“Unlike my major, which was all math and science,” she says before taking a lick of her sugar cone filled with strawberry ice cream. I opted to go with a waffle cone of cookies and cream. “That was the only thing that almost stopped me from becoming a nurse.”

“And let me guess, you were a straight-A student, even while taking stupid hard math and science classes?”

She bashfully shrugs. “Yes. But I had to work for them. I think organic chemistry almost killed me.”