AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The limp and the height were the reasons I’d arrived early to the little, out-of-the-way north side restaurant for my eharmony date with Chicago businessman Dane Quimby.
I say “date” because that’s what he thought it was. To me it was a job with a high probability of being mostly unpleasant, but also served with a side dish of smug satisfaction.
I use the Black Widow analogy because of my Iron Man leg, but I grew up on a steady diet of Charlie’s Angels reruns. Even though I’d been compared to Jaclyn Smith, the glamorous P.I., I was way more Kate Jackson, the athletic one. My own P.I. license had taken six thousand hours and a test to earn, and as far as I was concerned, the fact that it was only legal in California, where I’d lived until the previous year, was a technicality. To get a license in Illinois required a twenty-hour training course and forty hours of firearms training, neither of which I’d done. I wasn’t a fan of guns, and I didn’t really want my fingerprints on file with the State of Illinois, because … reasons.
So, there I was, waiting for a married guy to buy me dinner before he tried to get into my pants. They happened to be my favorite skinny jeans, with enough Lycra to make sitting possible without blood-flow constriction, and they were tucked into my super-favorite tall riding boots. The boots were flat andtherefore comfortable. They also did a great job of hiding my prosthetic lower leg from casual judgment and stale notions of “handicaps.” Someone would have to get me naked to know I was a below-the-knee amputee, and no one but my dog ever saw me naked.
Dane chose the location for our date, which was notable for its lack of pretension, a curvy waitress, and a cheap menu. I had nothing but respect for large-busted women, since I could only imagine the back pain and underwire bras they endured. I was just as happy with the two-dimes-and-a-piece-of-tape version of lingerie which kept my nipples from becoming a distraction that diminished my powers of intimidation.
The waitress greeted Dane with an enthusiastic kiss on the cheek when he came in, and I smirked at the difference between his internet dating profile picture and the truth of him.
My date for the evening was somewhat vertically challenged and sported blond from a bottle. He had the athletic build of a man who did his treadmill miles with the Nasdaq scrolling under his news, and the smile of a shark who negotiated deals for a living.
His eyes found me with just the slightest double-take, and I watched him take stock of all my visible body parts with a vertical visual sweep as he approached the table.
“Sophie?” he asked, wearing his attempt at a rakish grin. I didn’t bother to point out the bit of something green stuck in his teeth. Sophie wasn’t my real name, of course. I am far too paranoid to use verifiable information on the internet, and a name came with a degree of identifiability that was outside my comfort zone – my comfort zone encompassing all four U.S. time zones.
I held my hand out to shake his. “Hello, Dane. It’s nice to finally meet you.” Dane was obviously not paranoid enough, or just exceptionally cocky, as that actually was his real name. His wife hired me to discover if he’d been cheating on her, and it had only taken three internet searches and fifteen minutes to determine that he was on four dating websites and was practically a platinum member of Tinder.
He sat down across from me and shook his head with a chuckle. “You look exactly like your picture. I guess that means everything else in your profile is true?”
It had taken me twenty minutes to hack into the website and data-mine his search histories, and another ten to build a profile to match his wish list. “Yes, I really am a tantric yoga instructor. Doesn’t everyone tell the truth online?” I said with nary a blink.
He licked his lips, and I felt queasy. “I can’t really talk about my time in Special Forces, so I guess you could say my profile is true-ish.”
It had taken thirty minutes of background checks using mostly public databases to determine he’d left the military in disgrace. “Oh, wow. Were you, like, a spy or something?”
He chuckled. “You’re from California, aren’t you?”
Smile. Blink. “I basically grew up on the beach.” I’d grown up backpacking in the Sierras, but I threw the guy a bone and added a bikini to his mental image of me.
“I always thought I should live in Cali,” he said. “I’d work out on the strand like those guys in Venice Beach, and be friends with movie stars.”
The effort not to laugh out loud was costing me. “I’ve seen those guys in Venice. You’d fit right in,” I simpered. My first job as an insurance investigator had been in Venice, and I’d had to navigate sneering gangbangers and strung-out homeless guys every day. Also, no one in Californiaevercalled it Cali.
He held up a finger and did the “I’ll have what she’s having” thing to order a drink like mine. I smirked at the waitress’s raised eyebrow. Wouldn’t he be surprised when he got sparkling water with lime instead of the vodka tonic he thought I had?
“You must wonder what attracted me to you,” Dane said with a knowing smile.
Actually, I was mentally calculating my billable hours and hoping to be done here in less than thirty minutes because … round numbers. “You read my mind,” I said with a low, breathy voice. To my own ears I sounded asthmatic, but experience had taught me that horny guys dug breathless women.
Dane set his cell phone on the table next to him, screen up, so I’d see how very important he was when he got all those calls and texts he was expecting. A call from a number I recognized as his wife’s flashed on the screen as the phone buzzed, and he quickly declined it.
“Your profile says you’re looking for uncomplicated with a side of kinky,” Dane said, leaning forward to trace the path of ice sweat down the side of my glass. His meaningful glance was allimagine me doing this to you, and I barely suppressed a shudder as I forced a languid smile.
“I guess that’s one way to interpret my profile,” I said.The other way is to actually read the words, dumbass, which said I like simple pleasures and I’m open to trying new things. I pushedmy drink away because he’d touched it and now his cooties coated it like crap smears on a public toilet. Dane took the gesture as an invitation to share, because he was presumptuous like that. He slid his hand down the outside of the sweaty glass with a suggestive wink. This guy hadallthe moves.
“So, tell me about tantric yoga.” His hand fisted up and down the glass before he took a big gulp. To his credit, he hid his shock at the bubbly lime-water well, but I shot the waitress a grateful smile when she set the fresh drink down in front of me.
“Are you ready to order?” she asked. Dane was about to answer, but I quickly interrupted.
“Could I have a minute?”
“Sure, take your time,” said Tiffani, with an “i” dotted by a smiley face sticker. She walked away with the self-assured hip-sway of a woman who knows her own appeal.
I turned my gaze back to Dane and answered his question with a slow, seductive smile. “Imagine the possibilities of a person who can hold her leg behind her head.”
I conveniently forgot to mention that said leg wouldn’t actually be attached to the rest of me at the time. I pictured my peg leg prosthetic resting on my shoulder like a wooden bat. Of course I had a peg leg prosthetic, because who wouldn’t?
