Not Another Bad Date Read Online Free

taken too many hits to the head. He seemed kind of nice, but there had to be something wrong with him. Some thing. Some reason why a nice guy would date Devon Hamilton.
    She was still wondering about it five hours later when Zach walked into the restaurant where she worked five nights a week serving pizza. He came in with three of his football friends, but he’d hung around until she got off work.
    “Where’s your girlfriend?” she’d asked, as he opened the door for her.
    “What girlfriend?”
    Adele walked out into the crisp night air and shoved an arm into her sweater. “You know what girlfriend.”
    He moved behind her and held her sweater while she threaded her other arm inside. “Describe her for me.”
    “Blond. Skinny. Jumps around a lot in a cheerleader’s skirt.”
    “Oh, that girlfriend.” He pulled her hair from the back of her sweater, and the tips of his warm fingers brushed her neck. “She isn’t my girlfriend.”
    Adele looked up into the shadows of his face. “Since when?”
    “You ask too many questions.”
    It really wasn’t her business anyway. It wasn’t like he was asking her out. “Aren’t you cold?”
    “I’m like a furnace. I don’t get cold.”
    She supposed it had to do with all those muscles. He walked her back to her dorm room and left her at the door with no more than a handshake. But the next night when he walked her to her door, he backed her against the wall and kissed the air from her lungs. He’d told her he couldn’t stop thinking about her, and within two very short months, he’d made her love him so completely that she’d found it hard to breathe around him. Hard to do anything but think about him. She fell so fast and hard and completely, she hadn’t thought twice about giving herself to him, body and soul.
    Adele had never planned to save herself for marriage, but she had wanted her first sexual experience to be with someone she loved. She’d thought that person was Zach, but once she’d given him everything she’d had to give, he’d crushed her heart like a can of Lone Star. He’d dumped her flat and returned to Devon, and Adele had been so devastated that she’d left the University of Texas at midterm and moved more than a thousand miles away to live with her grandmother in Boise, Idaho. A few months after she’d moved in with her grandmother, she’d received an invitation in the mail. Cecilia Blackworth Hamilton Taylor-Marks and Charla May and James Zemaitis requested the honor of Adele’s presence at the wedding of their children, Devon Lynn Hamilton and Zachary James Zemaitis. There had been no return address, but Adele had known who’d sent it.
    Adele had known that Zach would marry Devon, but apparently it hadn’t been enough for Devon to have Zach. She’d wanted to rub Adele’s face in it.
    She’d never told anyone about her relationship with Zach. Not her friends and not her sister. Looking back on it, she wondered how she could have been so foolish. Not only had she given her heart away easily, she’d given it to a jock.
    The last she’d heard, Zach was playing pro ball for Denver, not that she kept up on sports. But occasionally she had heard his name mentioned in the sports segment of the nightly news or seen his face selling Gatorade or Right Guard or jock itch cream on television. Okay, so she’d never seen him selling jock itch cream.
    She didn’t know if he was still playing for Denver or had been traded. She didn’t know where he was or what he was doing, and she didn’t give a damn. Hopefully, he was still married to Devon, and his wife was making his life hell.
    Adele leaned her head back against a cushion and let out a breath. She was getting a little bitter. About her life and men, and she really didn’t want to live that way. She loved her life, mostly, and despite her rash of bad dates and her first heartbreak, she loved men.
    Don’t I?
    She sat up and looked across the room. What if all the bad dates had more to do