The Last First Kiss. Marie Ferrarella

even remember shutting her eyes.

      Squinting, she tried to make out the time on the cable box across the room. The numbers swam around, and she gave up.

      “Right. I called,” she murmured, dragging her hand through her hair, trying to figuratively drag her thoughts together at the same time.

      “About anything in particular?” Dave pressed. She sounded sluggish. He thought back and couldn’t remember a time when she wasn’t going ninety miles an hour. “Because if this can wait, or you just called to yank my chain, it’s been a really long day and I’ve got an early call tomorrow in the hospital—”

      She wasn’t about to give him a chance to hang up. From the sound of it, she was going to have to make an appointment to talk to him on the phone if she didn’t speak up quickly. So she did. “Our mothers are trying to set us up.”

      “What? With who?” he asked incredulously.

      Was he kidding? “What do you mean, with who? With each other. At least,” she amended, backtracking just a step, “I know mine is, and whatever mine does, yours usually does, too.”

      When did this happen? It wasn’t making any sense. She must have made a mistake. “What are you talking about?” he demanded.

      She took a breath and explained how she’d come to this conclusion. “After I came back from your clinic, my mother called me at work to see if I’d given you the game.”

      “She obviously knows how dependable you are,” he observed dryly.

      Her back instantly went up. “I’ll have you know that I am—Never mind.”

      This wasn’t the time to allow herself to get into an argument with him. They were both tired. Things could be said that couldn’t be retracted. The best way to prevent that was not to start anything at all. Besides, she had a far more important point to get to. She couldn’t allow herself to get sidetracked.

      “Anyway, she wanted to know how you looked. More accurately, she wanted to know what I thought of the way you looked.”

      So far, he wasn’t hearing anything that should have set off any whirling red lights for her. “Natural question,” he commented. “We haven’t seen each other in almost two decades.”

      She stopped her narrative, struggling with her temper. Was he for real? Or was he just baiting her? If it was the latter, maybe he’d learned a thing or two since they’d last seen each other. But somehow, she doubted that. He’d always been too upstanding to stoop to anything.

      “Were you always this naive, or did you just suddenly decide to go back to your childhood?”

      He really wasn’t in the mood for this. “If you’re going to insult me—”

      “Tempting, but I’ll save that for some other time. Right now, hard as it is for me, I need to ask you for your help.”

      Dave interpreted her question the only way he knew how. “You have a medical question?”

      “No, I have a mother question. Or rather, a solution to a meddling-mother situation.” He was very quiet on the other end. Was that a good sign, or had he fallen asleep? “Our mothers want to get us together. I never told you,” she segued quickly, “but I once overheard them talking about how terrific it would be if, when you and I grew up, we’d get married.”

      His voice was stripped of all emotion as he said, “No, you never told me that.”

      “At the time I heard it, I thought it was too gross to repeat,” she explained. “But it obviously has never stopped being on their minds.”

      He was trying to follow her logic and found that there were gaping holes in it. “And you think that your mother calling you to see if you delivered the game to me is actually some kind of a confession on her part that she’s trying to get us to the altar?”

      She knew he was mocking her and forced herself to swallow a few choice words. “Her asking me what I think of your looks is pretty transparent.”

      Where was all this going, anyway? “So you called to warn me?”

      She shifted the phone to her other ear. “No, I called to get you to cooperate with an idea I have.”

      He really didn’t like the sound of that. “This never turned out well for any of the characters in those sitcoms you always liked so much,” Dave pointed out.

      That he remembered she used to watch them astonished her. She told herself it meant nothing and kept talking. “What if you and I pretend to go out together? Pretend to, you know, like each other.”

      It sounded as if she were forcing herself to endure a fate worse than death. “Assuming I’ve had my rabies shots,” he said sarcastically, “how is this going to teach our mothers a lesson? This is what they want—according to you.”

      Kara sighed. “You really don’t have an imagination, do you?”

      “I have one,” he told her. “I just don’t let it go off on wild tangents.”

      She took offense and shot back through gritted teeth, “Okay, Davy, let me spell it out for you. We go out. We pretend to fall in love, and then we have one hell of an argument, making sure that we have this fight where our mothers can hear us. After the argument, we go through the throes of an agonizing ‘breakup.’ A devastating breakup,” she specified, really throwing herself into the role, “where we both act as if there’s no tomorrow—”

      “Being just a little melodramatic, don’t you think?” he interjected.

      He really was spoiling for a fight, wasn’t he? Not that she was intimidated, but she wanted this to get under way quickly. The sooner the better.

      “Maybe. We’ll have to play it by ear. But they’ll be so upset that we’re upset, I guarantee that it’ll cure them once and for all from trying to play matchmaker with us on any level—separately or together.” She paused to take a breath. “What do you think? You game?”

      If he said no, he had a feeling she’d keep calling and badgering him until he agreed. Still, throwing his lot in with Kara made him uneasy.

      “Why do I get the feeling that I’m about to sign my own death warrant?”

      What was it about him that set her off like this? Eighteen years and nothing had changed. Except that he was better looking, but that had no bearing here.

      “Because you’re running on next to no sleep, you have no imagination and you don’t know a good plan when you hear one. Shall I go on?”

      He laughed shortly. “Not that I have the slightest doubt that you could, but please don’t.”

      She was still waiting for an answer. “Does that mean no?”

      This was the moment of truth. He could still walk away. But he had a feeling that she had a point. Though he loved his mother dearly, he could think of nothing he wanted less than to have her playing matchmaker on his behalf.

      “That means that I’m probably going to really regret this, but you do have a point.”

      Yes! “Glad you recognize that.”

      He wanted to move this along while he still had a prayer of getting some sleep. “All right, mastermind, so what’s our next move?” he asked her.

      She would have thought that was self-evident. “We pretend to go out.”

      “And what, notify the press first? How are our mothers going to know we’re going out? I think they’d be suspicious if either one of us just picked up the phone and called to tell them.”

      She smiled. He was almost cute when he tried to be flippant. The key word here was almost.

      “Ah, there is more than just space between those manly ears. You’re absolutely right. How about that birthday for