Chapter Six
Jay took her to Adventure Village. It wasn’t his usual destination for a first date, but he wanted to show off the business he’d built—and have some fun, too.
“I didn’t know there was mini golf here,” Alyssa admitted when he handed her a putter and an orange ball.
“We started out with a couple of paintball fields, but we’ve expanded a lot since then,” he said proudly. “Hayley is currently designing a new brochure and working on a marketing plan to showcase our newest offerings.”
He gestured to the tee area. “Ladies first.”
She set her ball down, then crouched to read the green and assess the break.
“Someone takes her mini golf seriously,” he mused.
She sent him a quelling glance. “Quiet in the gallery.”
His lips curved, but he dutifully remained silent as she lined up her shot.
Her stroke, relaxed and smooth, had the ball rolling up and over the first hill, gaining enough speed to climb over the next and then come to a stop less than three inches from the cup. His tee shot went out of bounds, costing him a penalty stroke. She finished the first hole with a birdie, he recorded a double bogey.
And that was pretty much par for the course over the next seventeen holes. He did manage a hole in one on number twelve, while Alyssa aced numbers eight, eleven, twelve and fifteen.
“Well, that was fun,” he said when he’d tallied up their scores and returned their putters to the rack.
She laughed. “It really was—or at least more fun than washing my kitchen floor.”
“Is that how you usually spend your Saturday nights?” he wondered.
“I don’t wash the floor every Saturday night,” she said. “Sometimes I do windows.”
He chuckled as he slid an arm across her shoulders. “While not quite as exciting as that, we do have an arcade where we could kill some time waiting for our dinner to get here,” he said, leading her to another room.
Alyssa immediately zeroed in on the Tetris machine. “Do you ever play?” she asked.
He tapped the leaderboard on the screen, pointing to player name JC12 in the second-place position.
“Who’s Ford68?” she queried, noting the name in first place.
“My buddy Carter—the one who was pretending not to hit on you last night.” Jay pulled a couple tokens out of his pocket. “Do you want to give it a go?”
“Sure,” she agreed.
He slid the tokens into the slot, hit the button to select “2-player game” and stood there, watching with his jaw on the ground, as Alyssa effortlessly decimated level after level of the game.
She was still playing when he went to the main entrance to collect and pay for the pizza he’d ordered.
“Are your hands cramping yet?” he asked when he returned to the arcade after setting their food in the party room.
“A little.”
“You want to take a break and have some pizza before it gets cold?”
“I just need two more minutes to move into first place on the leaderboard,” she told him.
It took her less time than that.
Jay owned the top spot on a couple other games, but he’d never been able to bump Carter out of the number one position on Tetris. Alyssa had done so without breaking a sweat. And watching her had left him feeling both awed...and aroused.
She could have racked up an even higher score, but she stepped away from the game and shook out her hands, flexing her fingers to restore blood flow.
“I didn’t know what you liked, so I got half with just cheese and half with pepperoni,” he said, turning his attention to their dinner.
“I like pizza,” she said.
He opened the box and turned it toward her. She opted for pepperoni, carefully lifting a slice and setting it on the paper plate he’d given her.
“Regular cola, diet cola, orange soda or water?”
“Orange,” she decided.
He retrieved two cans from the fridge, then took his seat across from her and selected his pizza.
“You must have spent a lot of time hanging out in arcades while you were growing up,” he remarked.
Alyssa shook her head as she peeled a slice of pepperoni off her pizza. “I spent a lot of time with the Game Boy my parents bought to eliminate my boredom while I waited around in hospitals and doctors’ offices.”
He paused with his can of soda halfway to his mouth. “You were sick?”
She chewed the sausage, swallowed. “I was born with an atrial septal defect—more commonly known as a hole in my heart.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means, in my case specifically, that there was an abnormal opening in the upper chambers of my heart,” she explained. “I had three surgeries in the first five years of my life, after which the doctors determined that I was perfectly healthy and could do any and everything that all the other kids were doing.”
“That must have been a relief.”
“You’d think so,” she agreed. “But my parents didn’t believe the doctors, which meant I was subjected to numerous ongoing tests in their efforts to get a lot of second and third opinions.” She lifted the slice of pizza from her plate. “And that was a pretty heavy topic for a fake first date, wasn’t it?”
“If there’s a list of conversational topics assigned to specific date numbers, I’ve never seen it,” he told her.
She smiled. “Well, I apologize for dumping all that medical history on you.”
“No apology necessary,” he assured her. “Though I think I’m beginning to understand why you moved from Southern California to northern Nevada.”
“It was actually my sister’s idea,” she confided. “Not Nevada specifically, but the moving away from home.”
“Older or younger sister?”
“Older by three years. Cristina’s an executive at Google, married for seven years to a terrific guy with whom she has an adorable almost-five-year-old son.”
“Any other siblings?”
She shook her head. “My parents always imagined they’d have a houseful of kids, but that plan was put aside while they focused on making sure I got healthy.”
“I’ve got a brother and two sisters,” he said, shifting the focus of the conversation in an attempt to lighten the mood. “All younger. All a pain in my butt while we were growing up. Actually, they’re still a pain in my butt most of the time.”
She nibbled on her pizza. “Tell me about them.”
“My sister Regan is twenty-seven and an accountant at Blake Mining. Spencer is twenty-five and travels the rodeo circuit as a professional cowboy, and Brielle is almost twenty-four and a kindergarten teacher at a private school in Brooklyn.”
“That’s a long way from home,” Alyssa mused.
“She went to New York City to go to college and decided to stay.”
“Do you ever visit her there?”
He nodded. “I’ve been a few times.”
“Is it as fabulous as it looks in the movies?” she asked.
“If towering skyscrapers, bumper-to-bumper traffic and oppressive crowds of people are your idea of fabulous.”
She smiled, undaunted by his description. “It’s been a long-time dream of mine to visit there someday,” she admitted. “To see Times Square and Central Park and the Statue of Liberty. To look out over the city from the top of the Empire State Building, see a Broadway show, take in the exhibits at MOMA and the Guggenheim.”
“It sounds as if you’ve given this some thought,” he noted.
“A little,” she admitted, then laughed. “Or a lot.”
“So why haven’t you gone?”
It was a good question.
She’d held herself back from doing so many things because she didn’t want to give her parents any more cause for concern. And the idea of her youngest daughter traipsing around the country would likely give Renata Cabrera a heart attack.
“Maybe I will,” she said. “Someday.”
As if on cue, her cell phone rang.
“I have no idea how she does that,” Alyssa muttered.
“Who?” Jason asked.
“My mother.” She retrieved her phone from the side pocket of her handbag and showed him the display: Mom calling.
“Are you going to answer?”
“I’d rather not,” she admitted. “But if I don’t, she’ll worry that something happened to me, then she’ll call again and again until I do.”
“Go ahead,” he urged. “I’ll just sit here and pretend I’m not listening to your conversation.”
She was smiling as she connected the call.
But contrary to his admitted intention to eavesdrop, he pushed away from the table and moved to the other side of the room to put the leftover pizza in the fridge.
Alyssa didn’t talk to her mother for very long, and when she tucked the phone away again, she asked him, “What did you say to Diego last night?”
Though she’d attempted to keep her tone neutral, some of the tension she felt must have been reflected in the question, because he responded cautiously.
“I get the feeling that you’re looking for something specific, but I honestly don’t remember all the details of our conversation.”
“Did you tell him that I was the woman you’d dreamed about long before we ever met, and that you couldn’t wait for me to meet your family?”
“That does sound vaguely familiar,” he confirmed. “An inspired off-the-cuff performance, if I do say so myself.”
“You could have talked about anything else,” she pointed out to him. “The Golden Knights’ inaugural season, or the expansion of the subdivision on the west side of town, or even the price of tea in China. Why did you have to make up details about our nonexistent relationship?”
“Because Diego wasn’t interested in any topic of conversation that wasn’t you,” he told her.
She shook her head. “I only meant for you to play along in the moment, but you took over directing and rewrote the whole script.”
“What’s the big deal?” he asked, unconcerned.
“The big deal is that my parents are now coming to Haven to meet you.”
* * *
“Whoa!” Jay held up his hands and took an instinctive step backward, as if that might distance him from the very possibility. “I don’t do meeting the parents.”
“Believe me, I want them to meet you even less than you want to meet them,” Alyssa said grimly.
He should be relieved she was letting him off the hook, but he couldn’t help but feel a little insulted by her response. “Why don’t you want them to meet me?”
“Because you’re not actually my boyfriend,” she reminded him.
“Okay, that’s a valid point,” he acknowledged.
“And now I’m going to have to tell my mother that we broke up and she’ll tell Diego, and the next time I see him, he’ll want to help me mend my broken heart.”
“You don’t look particularly brokenhearted to me,” he remarked.
She dropped her face in her hands. “How did this happen to me?”
Again, he knew she wasn’t really expecting an answer, but he couldn’t resist teasing, “Because you lied to your mother.”
“You’re joking,” she noted. “But maybe it’s true.”
“Are you suggesting that the earth’s rotation is dependent on some kind of maternal karma?”
“Of course not. But there’s no denying a mother’s intuition,” she told him.
He thought of his own mother and wasn’t convinced. Margaret Blake-Channing had been too involved in her career to know—or even care—what her kids were up to most of the time. In fact, he had trouble believing that she’d been away from her office long enough to conceive and bear four children. Of course, considering that both his parents worked at Blake Mining, it was possible she hadn’t left her desk at all—and that was not something he wanted to be thinking about right now. Or ever.
Not that he had any cause for complaint. He’d grown up with a lot of privileges and, though his parents had both worked long hours, Celeste had been there to ensure homework was supervised and proper meals put on the table. But the nanny/housekeeper wasn’t a strict disciplinarian, so Jay had never felt the need to lie to her.
“Why do you say that?” he asked Alyssa now.
“Because anytime I’ve been less than completely honest with her, she’s somehow known it.”
“Maybe you’re just a bad liar,” he suggested.
“I am a bad liar,” she agreed. “I don’t like lying—especially to my parents. And every time I’m even just a little bit untruthful, my mother somehow knows it.”
“Give me an example,” he urged.
“In my junior year of high school, I was out with my friends and took a few puffs of a cigarette that was offered to me. As soon as I got home, she asked if I’d been smoking—which, of course, I denied—and then she grounded me for smoking and lying.”
“She probably smelled smoke on your clothes,” he pointed out logically.
“And when my friend Karen swiped a bottle of vodka from her parents’ liquor cabinet and we mixed it in our lemonade at the Fourth of July picnic, she asked if I’d been drinking. And there was no way she could smell that because it was vodka.”
“How old were you?”
“Seventeen,” she admitted.
“So maybe there were other signs that you’d been consuming alcohol,” he suggested drily.
“Maybe,” she acknowledged.
“So your mother caught you in lies about smoking and drinking, and you think that proves she has some kind of sixth sense about when you’re lying?”
“And then there was the time I asked to go to a movie with my best friend—and I didn’t tell her that we were meeting a couple of boys there, too. But somehow she knew.”
“Isn’t it possible that someone saw you at the theater with the boys and told her?”
“Of course,” she agreed. “But the point is that she always knows when I’m not telling her the truth.”
“So that’s it? You’ve lied to her a total of three times in your life?”
“Four, including the boyfriend thing,” she said. “Big lies, that is. There have been smaller ones that she lets me get away with—such as when I tell her that the chicken isn’t too dry, or I like her new haircut.”
“And maybe she doesn’t have a clue that you’re being less than truthful about the boyfriend, and she sincerely wants to meet the guy you’ve been dating.”
“This is all Liam’s fault,” Alyssa decided. “If he had been there when he said he was going to be, I would have kissed him instead of you.”
“So are you and Gilmore...a thing?”
“No,” she said. “I told you—I’m not dating anyone and I don’t want to date anyone.”
“Why not?” he asked curiously.
“Because I’m enjoying living my own life.”
“Why would dating someone change that?”
“It wouldn’t, necessarily, if it was someone other than Diego,” she acknowledged. “But if I consented to a friendly dinner with my mother’s best friend’s favorite nephew, that friendly dinner would lead to casual dating, which would then transition into an exclusive relationship and a ring on my finger.”
“You really believe that, don’t you?”
She shook her head. “That’s why, when my mother called to tell me that Diego was going to be in Haven, I came up with the phony boyfriend plan. But Liam wasn’t there and I kissed you, and you had coffee with Diego and now...” She sighed. “It’s been nice fake dating you, but now I have to figure out how to explain our breakup to my parents.”
“Here’s a novel idea,” he said. “Why don’t you tell them the truth—that you’re not dating anyone because you don’t want to date anyone?”
She chewed on her bottom lip as she considered her options. “Maybe I could still make this work with Liam.” The furrow in her brow deepened. “Obviously I’ll have to find out what other details from your conversation Diego passed along to my mother.”
“Such as your boyfriend’s name?” he suggested.
She closed her eyes and wearily said, “Yeah, that could put a wrench in things.”
“You think?”
“Unless—” her eyes popped open again “—I can get Liam to pretend that he’s you, just for one night.”
“That’s not gonna happen, either,” he told her.
“How do you know?”
“Because he’s a Gilmore.”
“And?” she prompted.
“And although my last name is Channing, my mother was a Blake.”
“How is that relevant?” she asked.
“You haven’t heard about the Blake-Gilmore feud,” he realized.
“Nothing more than a vague comment from Sky last night,” she admitted.
“It’s a long story,” he said, “but the gist of it is that the Blakes and the Gilmores came to Nevada to settle the same piece of land more than a hundred and fifty years ago. Rather than admit they’d both been duped, they agreed to split the property.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“Everett Gilmore arrived first and, having already started to build his homestead, took the prime grazing land for his cattle, leaving Samuel Blake with the less hospitable terrain. As a result, the Crooked Creek Ranch—and the family—struggled for a lot of years until gold and silver were discovered in their hills.”
“And now both families are rich,” she noted.
“But the animosity persists,” he told her.
She sighed. “I know I have no right to ask you for any favors, but if you could just meet my parents—”
Jay was shaking his head before she finished talking. “No.”
“It doesn’t have to be a big deal,” she promised. “Just a quick get-together, maybe throw in a mention about how nice it is to finally meet the parents you’ve heard so much about and—”
“I’ve heard nothing about them. I don’t even know their names.”
“Miguel and Renata,” she supplied helpfully.
“Which doesn’t change anything,” he said. “I don’t ever meet the parents of a girl I’m actually dating, so to meet the parents of a girl I’ve never even kissed...” He shook his head. “Not going to happen.”
“Except that you did kiss me,” she pointed out.
“No,” he argued. “You kissed me.”
Her brow furrowed as she considered the distinction. “How does that make any difference?”
“Honey, if I’d made a move on you, I guarantee it wouldn’t have been in a crowded bar on a Friday night with a counter between us.”
And even while he was trying to remember all the reasons he wasn’t willing to make that move, he found his gaze drawn to the delicate shape and tempting fullness of her lips. The brief kiss she’d planted on him less than twenty-four hours earlier had made more of an impression than he wanted to admit, and stirred desires he couldn’t let himself acknowledge.
“Okay, then,” she finally relented.
But he could tell that she was still trying to come up with an alternate plan.
“Tell them the truth,” he suggested again.
“The truth will lead to me walking down the aisle in a white dress before the end of next summer.”
“I’m sure you’re exaggerating.”
“If you’d agree to maintain this charade long enough to meet my parents, you’d realize I’m not.”
“Yeah, that’s not gonna happen.” But even as he said the words, he remembered the promise he’d made to Kevin and silently cursed his predicament.
He’d planned this outing as a way of breaking the ice with Alyssa, showing her that he was interesting and fun so that she’d agree to go to Matt’s wedding with him. It was the price Kevin had demanded for his forgiveness, but the instinctive panic that flooded Jay’s mind at the prospect of “meeting the parents” had momentarily pushed everything else aside.
Now that the panic had begun to recede, he was beginning to see that her dilemma could lead to a win for both of them.
“I need to learn to stand up to my parents—I know I do,” she admitted. “But as nosy and interfering as they can be, I know it’s only because they worry about me.”
“How old are you?” he asked curiously.
“Twenty-six.”
“Isn’t that old enough to be living on your own?”
“Of course it is,” she agreed. “But they’ve always been a little...overprotective.”
“Because of the heart thing?” he guessed.
She nodded.
“I don’t mean to sound unsympathetic,” he said. “But the overprotectiveness is their problem, not yours.”
“I know,” she agreed, pushing away from the table. “Thank you for an enjoyable evening, but I’d like to go home now and try to figure out plan C.”
“Does plan C involve Gilmore?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Then let’s talk about plans for tomorrow before you do anything too hasty,” he suggested.
She frowned. “What plans for tomorrow?”
“I’m free for dinner. And that chili you made the day of the storm was really good.”
“You want me to cook dinner for you?”
“I’m going to be working all day,” he pointed out as he rose to his feet. “And it sure would be nice to come home and share a meal with my doting girlfriend.”
“You’ve already made it clear that you don’t want any part of this.”
“Maybe our conversation over dinner will change my mind.”
Her gaze narrowed. “You’re totally playing me, aren’t you?”
“There’s only one way to find out, isn’t there?”
She forced a smile. “Dinner’s at six.”