Riveted. Jay Crownover

for him. My patience was wearing thin and my typically affable attitude was starting to get just as gloomy and gray as the one that hung over Church.

      But then it happened and I just knew. I knew like I had never known anything as clearly and as unquestionably in my whole life. I knew with a rightness that shot through my soul and made my heart flip over in my chest.

      I was trying to cash out a group of overly intoxicated and obnoxiously difficult young men. It wasn’t anything new. I’d been a cocktail waitress for a long time and knew how to handle myself and the customers. This drunken group was no better or worse than any other one I’d had to deal with in all my years slinging drinks and working the floor, but they were loud and the things they were saying were easily heard throughout the bar. Some of it wasn’t so bad. They liked my hair (curly and strawberry blond—who didn’t like my damn hair?) and they liked the way my shirt fit tight and snug across my chest. I was a solid D cup, so again who didn’t like my tits? But they also had a lot to say about my ass. Apparently it was too big for my small frame, and they didn’t love my freckles. That red hair was authentic and as real as it could be, so there wasn’t much I could do about the colored specks that dotted the bridge of my nose and brushed the curve of my cheeks.

      I had pretty thick skin, you had to when you worked in a bar and liquor loosened tongues, so I was ready to brush the entire conversation off and snatch the credit card off the table when I felt a hand on my lower back and a storm not just brewing off in the distance but collecting and gathering, ready to unleash hell at my back.

      “You good, Dixie?” The question made me freeze and it wasn’t because it was asked into my ear with an unmistakable slow and very southern drawl. It wasn’t because he was so close I could feel every line of muscle in his massive body and both the heat of his skin and the chill of his icy anger pressing into my back.

      No, I froze, riveted to the spot and stunned stupid, because in twenty-six years no one had ever bothered to ask me if I was good. They always assumed I was.

      I was the girl that could handle myself and everyone else around me.

      I was the girl that never asked for help.

      I was the girl that always smiled even when that smile hurt my face.

      I was the girl that always had an ear to bend or a shoulder to lean on for a friend even when I really didn’t have time.

      I was the girl that everyone ran to with a problem because I would drop everything to help fix it even if it was unfixable.

      I was the girl that never let anything or anyone drag her down and fought to keep everyone else up with her.

      I was the girl that everyone always assumed was good … so they never asked … but he had and the world stopped.

      I gripped my pen and struggled to clear my throat. “I’m good, Church.” My voice was barely a breath of sound and I felt his touch press even deeper into my lower back.

      “You sure?” No, I wasn’t sure. I was as far from good as I had ever been and I had no clue what to do about it.

      I gave a jerky nod and blew out a breath, which had him taking a step away from me. I looked at him over my shoulder and he returned the look. There was no warmth in his fantastic eyes. There was no change in the harsh expression on his face. There was no knowledge that he had fundamentally changed my life in the span of a few terse words.

      He was simply doing his job, making sure everything in the bar was okay and that the staff was safe. Meanwhile I was shoved unwillingly into the kind of love that had my arms flailing, my legs kicking, while a-scream-ripped-from-my-lungs in love with him. Of course I did that all silently and in my head as he walked away from me, because I might have now known he was it for me, but it was evident Church didn’t have a clue.

      No one had ever given me any idea how to handle it when the right one came along, but you weren’t the right one for him.

      There is no such thing as darkness; only a failure to see.

      —Malcolm Muggeridge

      

       Dixie

      Um … I had a lovely evening.” No, I hadn’t. It was awful. It would go down as the worst first date in the history of first dates, which was something considering my recent run as the awful-first-date queen. But it wasn’t in my nature to say so. All I wanted to do was say good-night and go hide in my bedroom with a glass of wine and my dog for the rest of the evening.

      “Aren’t you going to invite us in for a drink?”

      I fought to hold back a cringe and looked over the shoulder of the very cute but painfully shy young man I had accepted the date with after several weeks of online chatting. I’d met him through one of the dating apps I had signed up for when I decided I was done waiting for my perfect to realize that I was perfect for him.

      My terrible luck in love had held true and this date, with this cute boy … and his mother, the person who had asked about coming in for a drink since my actual date seemed incapable of speech. Yep, it solidified the fact that I was bound to end up alone. That beautiful blinding thing that everyone important in my life that I loved seemed to find with such ease was clearly not in the cards for me. I wanted a fantasy but every day was faced with the fact that all I was getting was cold, hard and very lonely reality.

      I sighed and reached up to push some of my wayward, strawberry-colored curls out of my face. I was annoyed that not only had I clearly been cat-fished—there was no way the son was the one running his dating profile, not if he couldn’t string two words together, and not if he couldn’t look at me without blushing and trembling nervously—but by the fact that I had wasted a perfectly cute outfit, killer hair, and a face full of flawless makeup on this sham of a date. I was typically a very low-maintenance kind of girl, so pulling myself together like this took time and effort that I would never have expended if I had known it was all for a woman with crazy eyes and a psychotic interest in finding her grown child a suitable mate. Honestly, I was surprised the woman hadn’t asked for blood and urine samples before the appetizers arrived. She’d grilled me like I was a POW for the entire date and when my answers didn’t meet her expectations I could feel her disappointment wafting from across the table.

      Anyone else would have gotten up the instant their date showed up with parental supervision. They would have chalked it up as a loss and deleted the guy off the app. I, unfortunately, wasn’t wired that way. Nope, I was predisposed to believe every situation, no matter how bad, had a silver lining. I thought maybe my date would loosen up and tried to reason that it was actually kind of sweet he was so close to his mom. I figured after dinner and the interrogation I would be vetted enough that maybe he would want to do something without our eagle-eyed chaperone. I thought his shy demeanor made him seem vulnerable and that he was even more adorable in person than he was in his profile picture.

      It didn’t get better.

      It got worse, and I quickly realized the lining was never going to be silver because it was made out of lead, and I was sinking with it to the bottom of the bad-date ocean. I tried to think of a polite way to get out of the rest of the evening but the woman wouldn’t give me a minute to breathe. She even went as far as to follow me to the bathroom so I couldn’t send out an SOS call to one of my friends for a convenient escape. It was brutal, but I powered through, thinking once they followed me home and saw me to the door in an old-fashioned but still over-the-top gesture that it would be over. I had a boatload of nosy neighbors and a big dog in my apartment, so I didn’t fret too much about him knowing where I lived (the mom was a different story).

      I was wrong.

      I shifted my weight on my feet and bit back a sigh. I should have known she was going to be persistent, but I was done playing nice for her when it was clear her