Caleb and Yvette sat beside one another in the same booth where they had decidedly not celebrated Valentine’s Day. But this time, he was in fantastic mood. Partly because he wasn’t sporting an itchy beard, but mainly because his life was pretty damn perfect.

He’d finally found his one true love and he was once again gainfully employed as an actor. Well, as a clown. Close enough.

“What are you grinning about, Bobo?” Yvette asked as she reached past him to pass Kennedy the bowl of chips.

He shrugged. “Why shouldn’t I be happy? It’s my birthday.” Though, he could admit that even for the birthday boy, he was grinning like a fool. But he didn’t care. Life was good and if that meant he was going to permanently wear this dopey smile, he was cool with it.

Yvette and Kat had swapped out Doctor Hottie for Bobo now that he was officially a clown. Yeah, that’s right—he was the new Mr. Hermithead, and he couldn’t have been happier about it. Once his pride got over itself, he realized that it was the funnest job he’d ever had. Just like his daytime soap gig, he got paid to act and help people escape, though now his demographic was slightly younger and as far as he could tell, they couldn’t give a crap what his pecs looked like beneath his ridiculous outfit.

Some parents watched him too, and over the last few months he’d accrued a small but loyal fan base among the stay at home moms who watched him with their kids. The best part about that? It drove his girlfriend nuts.

No one had ever been jealous over him before and he found that he loved it.

Kennedy had insisted on throwing him a thirtieth birthday party and he’d insisted that it be just them and his closest friends and at his favorite bar. The perfect start to the next decade of his life. It had been a close call there for a while. He’d been certain his thirties were doomed to be an extension of his twenties—one big experiment in searching for the wrong things.

Like his dream woman, for example. She was as mythical as she was boring. He grinned when Kennedy stole a wing from his plastic basket—it was his favorite bar, but definitely not the classiest.

He watched her munch on his food, giving him a little smirk at her conquest. Who would have thought his one true love would be a challenging, career-obsessed woman who didn’t like animals or kids?

Not him. He’d been such an idiot to think he could predict love like that. Luckily Kennedy seemed to have a soft spot for dopes in clown suits.

Besides, it wasn’t like she could judge too harshly, what with her weird checklist for the perfect, most logical boyfriend. As if logic had anything to do with love. He wrapped an around her shoulders, reveling in the happiness that was this group.

Kat had her Bryce, Yvette had her Darren, and he’d found Kennedy—his true love. He might be he sappiest of them all, but at least he’d found a woman who loved that about him. In a couple somebody had to be the mushy one, she’d informed him very logically while they laid in the bed the weekend before.

Maybe this was true. But Caleb considered it his mission in life to bring romance and whimsy to Kennedy’s uptight world. It was his honor-bound duty as her boyfriend—literally her clown of a boyfriend—to ensure that that her life was filled with passion and excitement and more love and romance than she could handle.

“You ready to head out of here soon?” Kennedy asked, slipping her hand into his under the table.

The night was winding down. They’d had dinner earlier at one of his favorite spots, and now everyone was slowing down on the drinks and stifling yawns.

She grinned up at him as she leaned in closer, her sexy voice so close to his ear, her breath warm against his neck. “I was thinking I could hail us a taxi.”

“Good luck,” he said, doing his best impersonation of his former self. The guy she’d met that first night who’d had his head stuck so far up his ass it was a wonder he could see the hottie who’d been right in front of his eyes. It had become something of a joke between them, reenacting that first encounter. God, it had only been a matter of months but so much had changed between then and now, it was like he was looking back on another lifetime.

Everything was different now, and everything was also so right. He’d found his dream career—one that played to all his strengths and let him do what he loved every day. He also got to work alongside one of the smartest, quickest, most enchanting women he’d ever met… a woman he was proud to call his girlfriend.

Patrick had come back. Of course he had—Kennedy wasn’t the kind of woman you just walked away from. He almost pitied the man his poor decision to leave her in the first place. But if he hadn’t, Caleb might never have won her for himself. Kennedy had nicely turned him away, explaining that she’d changed while he’d been gone.

And she had. She seemed happy with the changes, embracing more excitement and irrational passion, as she called it, than she ever had before. He didn’t know about all that, all he knew was what he could see. And he could say with full certainty that she smiled more these days, and was way quicker to laugh. He liked to think that he was as good for her as she was for him.

As if to prove his point, she smiled up at him with that sexy, mysterious little grin he’d worship until the day he died.

“If you play your cards right, I might just let you share my cab,” she teased.

He leaned down to plant a kiss on her lips. “Oh, I’m counting on it.” And he was. He had it all arranged. Emma had kindly agreed to be elsewhere and she’d let him in earlier that day to set the stage.

She didn’t know it but at this moment her room was filled with roses and candles. The box with her engagement ring was stuffed inside her underwear drawer ready for him to pull out once she’d been thoroughly dazzled by his romantic know-how.

Some might argue that it was too soon, but he knew better. When you knew, you knew. And he knew.

Kennedy was it. She was the one.

She was everything he’d never known he’d ever wanted.

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Want more steamy romantic comedies? Check out the Starting from Zero series. Click on the links below for three standalone sexy romantic comedies about fresh starts and new beginnings.

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