The Match: An EXTENDED edition rom-com from the author of the TikTok sensation THE CHEAT SHEET! (It

Chapter 8

How am I doing in my attempt to keep Evie Jones at bay? Not great, considering she’s sitting in my passenger seat right now. I nearly ramped the curb when I saw her standing there with Charlie. She looked sad and concerned with her phone pressed to her ear. I threw the truck in park and almost sprang from my seat before I mentally grabbed myself by the collar and shook some sense into my sorry ass.

“How are you?” I ask after Evie puts Charlie in the back seat with Sam and buckles herself into the passenger seat.

This is ridiculous. I’m ridiculous. I saw this woman not even four hours ago, and I’m already feeling needy to know how she is? What she’s been doing since she left our house? Why she looks so sad?

“Fine.” She gives me the universal female answer for everything is horrible, but I resist asking any further questions, because I’m not her boyfriend. Never going to be.

Next time I date, it will be someone who doesn’t take my breath away and definitely not someone seven years younger than me. (She told Sam her age. I was eavesdropping.)

“Thanks for giving me a ride.” Evie crosses her legs.

“Happy to.” And I am. Actually, I’m far too happy to have her seated beside me. “Where am I headed?”

“Oh, here, I can type my address into your phone.” Her emerald eyes, along with her soft vanilla scent, hit me for the first time since she got in the truck. She’s saying normal words, and her tone is completely casual. And yet, my heart is racing as if she just whispered something dirty in my ear.

I hand my phone over to her, and once she’s done typing in her address, we set out toward her apartment. Because I have no idea how to talk to this woman without accidentally flirting, I do the same thing I’ve been practicing all day in her company: keep my mouth shut. I also squeeze the steering wheel, because out of the corner of my eye I can see an impressive amount of her tan legs, and I swear to myself that I will not give in and look at them.

I will not.

After a minute of silence, Evie adjusts in her seat to turn around and look at Sam. I’m not sure why this takes me by surprise. “What do you think about your first day of training with Daisy?”

Man, I like her southern accent. I grew up here. I’m used to women all around me having accents. Hers is different, though. It’s sweeter somehow. Drenched in honey.

“It was great. I wish she could have stayed with me tonight,” says Sam.

“I know. It’s sad to have to say goodbye to them at night, isn’t it? But until you’ve learned everything you need to know about how to interact with her, it’s better to let her sleep at her volunteer’s house. But you did so great today. I was really impressed with how quickly you caught on to all the techniques.”

I catch Sam’s eye in the rearview mirror and see the moment Evie’s praise hits her bloodstream. She wants to smile. She wants to soak every ounce of that compliment up, wring it out, then soak it up again. Other than my sisters, she hasn’t had a woman offer her praise like that since Natalie left. I feel as if I can see the void inside her and watch Evie’s words fill a small part of it.

“Thanks.” Sam pushes away her unruly hair, which I have a hard time brushing behind her ear, and looks out the window. Only when her head is fully turned do I see the slight grin touch the corner of her mouth.

I’m torn. On the one hand, I want Sam to receive the praise she needs. But on the other hand, I’m scared to death of Evie. After this week she’ll be gone, and it’ll be just me and Sam again.

Evie turns back to the front, and I hear her take in a deep breath through her nose. She lets it out like it’s the first one she’s taken all day.

“How was your dinner?” I ask, proud that it sounded innocuous enough. Polite. Business talk between two colleagues.

“Dinner?” she asks with a furrowed brow.

“Yeah, weren’t you just leaving that restaurant? I assumed you had eaten there.”

“Oh.” She looks down at her lap. “I was supposed to, but . . . my company wasn’t so great, so I left before eating.”

My eyes slice to her, and my mouth goes rogue. “Was the guy a jerk to you?” I have no idea why I said that. I don’t even know if she was there with a guy.

One minute I’m driving Miss Daisy, and the next I’m a psycho-jealous boyfriend, fighting some random jackass in a bar because he looked at my girl wrong. I’ve never been that guy before. Not even with Natalie, and part of me wonders if we ever really loved each other.

I think Evie finds my comment amusing. She relaxes in her seat, and I can tell she’s fighting a grin by the way she’s biting her lips together. “I was actually having dinner with my parents. But someone was . . . never mind. It’s a long story.”

My grip on the wheel relaxes. I see Evie’s fingers (and bright-yellow nails) creep toward the release button for the center console. For a second, I think she is going to open it and look inside, but she catches me looking at her hand and pulls it away. All day, I caught her peeking around corners of the house when she thought I wasn’t looking. I think I even heard her open a cupboard in the guest bathroom at one point. She wouldn’t have found anything fun in there. I keep all my personal items in my bathroom.

Maybe I should find it creepy that she was searching my house. I don’t. Actually, it makes me smile, because I know she’s as curious about me as I am about her—even though I really shouldn’t be and need to put her out of my head.

Speaking of curiosity, I want to ask her more about her parents and this mysterious someone she stopped talking about, but Sam chimes in from the back seat before I get the chance.

“If you haven’t eaten, you could come with Dad and me to dinner.”

I try to flash Sam a look in the rearview mirror that says no she absolutely cannot!

Evie is not coming with us to dinner. I can’t handle any more hours with this beautiful woman. After spending the first half of the day together, I feel like I’ve been staring at the sun. I shut my eyes, and the image of her face is burned there. I might never see properly again.

Also, she made Sam laugh ten times today. Ten. I kept a tally.

Yeah, Evie’s not the only one being creepy.

I realize belatedly that Evie saw me give Sam that look. I try to play it off and smile at Evie, but she just chuckles like she’s giving me the middle finger in her head. She thinks I don’t like her all that much, and although it’s kind of torturing me, I’m also okay with her thinking that, because I’ve been working hard to give her that impression all day.

“Thanks for the offer, Sam, but I’m actually pretty tired, and I think I heard Charlie’s stomach growl earlier. I should get home and feed him.”

“You sure? You’re welcome to join us.” I’m all politeness now that I know I’m in no danger of her accepting.

She makes a guttural noise that says she knows what I’m doing. I glance up at her in time to see her lips mouth liar liar, pants on fire. She smirks and turns her face to look out the side window. I like that she never lets me get away with my rudeness.

Five minutes later we are pulling up outside a classic Charleston-style tall and skinny house in the center of town. It’s not bad. A little old and outdated, but it looks like a pretty nice place, all in all. I wonder what it looks like inside. Does she have colorful throw pillows sprinkled around the living room? Is she organized or messy? Somehow, I instinctively know that she’s messy. Evie just seems like the sort of woman to kick off her shoes haphazardly as she walks into her apartment and drop her purse somewhere random that she’ll forget by the morning. I definitely have her pegged as an “unfasten her bra, pull it out her sleeve, and toss it over the back of a couch before she’s even made it fully into the house” kind of person. I’ve seen a few women do that move and it’s always impressive to me.

I really want to walk her to her door and find out if I’m right.

Seeing me inspect her place, she says, “This isn’t my house. I rent out their detached studio apartment around back.”

Oh.Now I’m even more curious.

She gathers her purse and slings it over her shoulder. I notice that her hair gets caught under the strap, and before I realize what I’m doing, I gently lift her purse and pull her hair free. Evie’s eyes widen, and I drop her lock of hair quickly, turn, and practically barrel out my door. My face is flaming because I just touched her hair like I’ve known her forever, and . . . wait, why am I getting out of my truck? What am I supposed to do once Evie comes around to this side of it? Do we hug? Definitely not. Do we shake hands? That would be strange. I feel like a teenage boy who has no idea how to act around a woman. This is awful.

I hear Sam call out a goodbye from the back seat and watch Evie wave when she and Charlie round the truck. If I’m not mistaken, she gives my truck one appreciative glance before meeting my eyes. What would I do if she gave me that same look? I’m officially losing it.

“Well”—she squeezes that damn purse strap again—“thanks for the ride. Should I Venmo you some money for gas?”

I shake my head and stuff my hands in my pockets. “Definitely not. Glad to help out.”

She’s fidgeting, awkward, and won’t make eye contact with me. Charlie’s eyes are very judgmental. Maybe she thinks I don’t like her after that look she intercepted in the truck. Maybe that’s for the best. “Okay. Well . . . I’ll see you two tomorrow, then.”

“Right. Yeah. Sounds good.” I try to think of any way to stall. To spend just a few more seconds with Evie Jones and her beautiful green eyes that I should not be staring at. “Unless . . .”

“Unless?” Her tone shoots up.

I shift on my feet. “Unless you need me to walk you to your door?”

“Oh . . . no,” she says, tone lowering back down. “I mean, I’m good. It’s well lit back there and safe. Thank you, though. Enjoy your night.”

I wish she would smile at me—just want one for the road. She looks over my shoulder toward Sam’s window, and then her face lights up with the smile I want aimed at me, but when she looks back it falls away. None for you, jerk. I get an awkward wave instead, and then she and Charlie disappear around the house.

When I’m back in the truck and buckling up, Sam says, “She saw you make that face, you know.”

I sigh. “I know.”

“Why didn’t you want her to come to dinner?”

At least a hundred answers fly through my mind, but I can’t tell my ten-year-old daughter any of them. “Because . . . I didn’t want her to feel uncomfortable having to eat with us.”

“I think she would have liked to come.”

I flip my turn signal and move into traffic, pretending not to be overly curious about Sam’s statement. “Oh yeah? Why do you think that?”

“Because she peeks at you as much as you peek at her.”

Never mind that her statement makes me sound like a massive creeper . . .

I look at Sam in the rearview mirror and see her satisfied smirk. “We’re just friends, kiddo. There’s nothing else between Evie and me.”

“Well then, you should have made her come with us. Friends eat dinner together.”

The problem is, I don’t want to be friends with Evie. I want to take her on a date, and run my hands through her long hair, and find out if her lips feel as soft as they look.