Asil’s Third Date Asil and the Not-Date #2
What was she doing here? Who needed the Internet to find a friend?
This was really stupid no matter what the people in her favorite Facebook hangout said about the new service for people who wanted to talk about gardening with other like-minded people.
Platonic Plantophiles had sounded so hopeful, a not-dating site.
Someone to talk to who wasn’t a client and didn’t work with her—and was not interested in a romance in any sense of the word.
She’d had enough of romance for a while.
In a fit of optimism, she’d input her information and waited.
The first reply had come from Spokane. They had been instructed to use a single name only (preferably your actual first name, but usernames were acceptable) for safety’s sake.
Over half a million people lived in and around Spokane, and there were probably a dozen Phoebes.
But the Phoebe she knew loved lilacs and owned a business downtown.
Tami would rather stab herself with a fork than spend an hour talking to that Phoebe.
If it was that Phoebe, Tami trusted that she would never connect Tami who loved herbs with the Tami who’d headed the team that fought successfully to build a series of new homeless shelters in the downtown area—where they were the most needed. Tami hadn’t returned Phoebe’s email.
The second email she’d gotten a week later had been from Carter in Billings, Montana. Billings was more than five hundred miles away. They’d exchanged a few emails, found no real connection to make spanning the distance worthwhile, and ceased communicating.
She’d looked up profiles herself after that, determined to get the most out of the three months of service she’d paid for. She’d found there were clusters of people in Florida and Southern California. But other than Phoebe, Carter in Billings was honestly the closest person signed up on the site.
She chalked the whole mess up to experience and put it behind her. The next day, Moreno (she assumed it was his last name), a rose lover who lived in an unspecified small town in Montana but often found himself in Spokane on business, contacted her.
She’d checked his profile, but there was very little other than what he’d told her in his initial email.
There was no date of birth; “not quite as old as dirt” wasn’t much of a clue, though it left her with the impression of someone who was past middle age.
His profile picture was a Black Baccara rose held between two fingers.
His fingers were in shadow and told her nothing about him.
With those few hints, she made up a story about him in her own mind: an older man, Hispanic from his name, and well educated from his emails.
He raised roses in the snowy mountains and needed someone to talk to.
He would come, laugh about the atmosphere of the restaurant—she had told him that she could be awkward in social situations, and she could tell that he had a sense of humor from the emails they had exchanged.
She heard a sound behind her and turned to see a man murmuring to the host who had seated her. The host glanced in her direction and smiled. The man looked over and up and met her eyes. If she had had any doubt, it was extinguished by the Black Baccara rose in his hand.
Instead of the older gardener she had dreamed up, she was getting…something else. He looked dangerous and expensive, gorgeously dressed in a bronze fitted shirt that showed muscle without clinging too tightly and formal black slacks.
His face was the color of teak, but he wasn’t Native American, African American, Hispanic, or any other race she could pinpoint. None of that mattered, though, because he was the single most beautiful man she’d ever seen in the flesh.
Wow, was her first thought.
Her second thought was, There is no way in hell this man needed a dating site to find someone to talk to.
She’d been set up. Maybe Phoebe had connected the Tami from the site to the Tami from the homeless shelters.
Maybe one of her coworkers had figured out that she was registered on a not-dating site.
She straightened herself in her chair and pulled on her professional mask to cover her anger. Her hand reached up to grab her mother’s pendant necklace for reassurance, and she forced it down to rest on the table in front of her.
This was supposed to be something she was doing for fun, damn it.
The woman’s face grew grimmer the closer Asil got to her table. She glanced at the rose in his hand, folded her arms, and looked away.
Amusement fought with pique—he had dressed carefully for this “date” his Concerned Friends had arranged for him from the Platonic Plantophiles—A Meeting Place for Friends Who Garden site.
His shirt was silk, yes, but it was a dusty brown a few shades lighter than his skin, a most ordinary color.
Nothing romantic. The shirt a friend would wear going to dinner with another friend.
Maybe she hadn’t wanted a platonic friend? The restaurant was more romantic than he had expected. But he thought that even in a brown silk shirt he wouldn’t make a bad date. Her reaction reminded him of…the very first of these dates, actually.
Ah, of course. The problem was that he was too beautiful. That response was something he was used to dealing with.
He sat down, thanked the host, set his rose down gently, then folded his hands on the table and waited. It was better to make her speak first. He took the opportunity to look at her.
The dim light didn’t hinder his sight except that it made colors a little harder to determine.
Her hair was light brown and her eyes another light color—blue or hazel.
She had a face that showed signs of smiling a lot, which he liked.
Her jaw was stubborn, which might be mostly a result of the current situation, but he liked that, too.
She appeared to be somewhere in her early thirties.
“You are Mr. Moreno?” she asked.
“I am,” he responded. “You were expecting someone different?”
“Yes.” She considered him, her body stiff. “No.” She finished the dark wine in her glass and said, “Did Phoebe set this up?”
“No,” he told her. “Who is Phoebe? And why would she want to set you up?”
She ignored his question, and instead waved a hand in his general direction and said, “Why would you need a dating service?”
“Yes, I agree I am magnificent,” he said, stating the obvious. “But we are not on a date, yes? This is to see if we might become friends.” He smiled at her gently. “I am set in my ways and tend toward isolation. Some friends of mine thought it would be good for me to socialize.”
“This is a bet,” she said flatly.
“Not at all,” he said. He thought about the betting pool his Concerned Friends had mentioned in the very first email and amended his reply.
“Not for me. It is a gift—one that I cannot return if it doesn’t fit.
” He lifted an eyebrow, inviting her to appreciate the awkwardness of such a gift.
“They set both of us up. I don’t know who they are yet, these generous friends of mine who have been corresponding with you.
Because of that ignorance, I cannot vouch for their pure intent.
But spending time with someone who also loves to garden in a restaurant with good food doesn’t seem like such a terrible thing. ”
She smiled faintly, but it was a real smile. Ah, good. She was warming to him.
“So,” he said. “I brought you a rose from my greenhouse. I thought you might enjoy it.” He nodded to the flower he’d set between them. Like bait.
She hesitated, then took it and lifted it slowly to her nose.
“It’s December,” she said. “How did you get it to bloom in Montana in December, Mr. Moreno?”
“Call me Asil,” he told her.
She pulled the flower to her face one more time, set it down. She stared at it for a few long seconds, then looked up at him with a faint, crooked smile.
“Asil,” she repeated, getting the pronunciation correct. “How did you get a Black Baccara rose to bloom in the middle of winter, Asil?”
And so they talked roses.
He was pleased to discover she was nearly as avid a gardener as he was himself, though she preferred herbs to flowers, even roses.
His breadth of knowledge, deeper than hers, even about her beloved herbs, finally convinced her that someone had not sent him to humiliate her.
After that she relaxed a bit, and he found her to be funny and a bit ironic, which he enjoyed.
“You know why I was signed up at the dating site,” Asil said, taking a bite out of the crusty bread their waiter had brought. “Why were you?”
“The not-dating site,” she corrected him, blithely unaware that his wolf did not like being corrected.
He kept her unaware by tightening the leash that kept his darker half out of sight.
“I broke up with my boyfriend,” she said after a moment.
“If he had time off, I didn’t. I decided that maybe I wasn’t cut out to be anyone’s girlfriend, not until we get a few more people in at work so my job resembles something that might be done in a forty-hour workweek. Or even a sixty-hour one.”
“What do you do?” he asked.
“I’m a social worker,” she told him. “I work for a nonprofit involved with finding housing—temporary and permanent—for the homeless.”
That was not what he expected.
As in his youth, the homeless population was the result of society’s failure to care for their own.
This land’s homeless tended to be drug addicts, alcoholics, and the mentally ill—victims. He was a dominant werewolf, and caring for his own was sealed into his bones, so he felt society’s failure to care for their most vulnerable to be a shame upon this country.
This woman protected the people no one wanted.
He looked at Tami from a predator’s perspective for a moment—she was average height for a woman and looked as though she spent some time at a gym. But most men would outweigh and outmuscle her.
“Hazardous work,” he murmured.