“I wonder what color his eyes are—” Darcy broke off as the guy stopped on the path to the house and unerringly looked up at the window where the two of them stood staring at him.
With a commingled squeak, they dropped to the floor.
Afraid he was missing some fun new game, Oreo barked happily and leapt off the bed and right on top of them.
“Oomph.” Darcy pulled the silly dog in for a hug. “You big lug. You need a diet.”
Zoe pushed Oreo’s tail out of her face. “Think he saw us?” she asked, panicked.
“Nah,” Darcy said.
Zoe let out a relieved breath. “Really?”
“No.” Darcy grinned and sat up. “He totally saw us.”
Oh for God’s sake. The guy’s a dentist, she reminded herself. By definition, that meant he most likely was a people person, right? Right, she decided. And him being a people person was a good thing since one of them needed to know what they were doing.
She and Darcy—and Oreo—crawled away from the window and stood.
“Feels a little like old times, doesn’t it?” Darcy asked, dusting herself off. “Remember when we sneaked out of the house to do that midnight full moon climb up White Eagle with the Connelly brothers? We climbed out the window and got caught by Grandpa and were grounded for the rest of the summer.”
“That was you and Wyatt,” Zoe said. Their brother had always been able to find trouble. “I never got grounded.”
“That’s right. Wyatt was way more fun than you.”
Zoe slipped into a pair of flats and Darcy rolled her eyes.
“What’s wrong with the flats?” Zoe asked. “You wear flats all the time.”
“Yes, because I have a spinal injury that makes me want to drop to the floor and curl up in a ball whenever I wear heels,” Darcy pointed out. “You don’t have such an excuse. Plus you have legs a mile long that look amazing in heels, which makes me hate you just a little bit.”
“Flats,” Zoe insisted.
“Fine. So what do we know about this guy?”
“He’s a dentist from Hennessey Flats,” Zoe said. “Karen set me up with him. He’s her neighbor.”
“The Karen who does your hair, the Karen who’s been married and divorced three times?” Darcy asked.
“Yeah, so?”
“Sooooooo,” Darcy said, “don’t you think if her neighbor was hot, she’d date him herself, if not make him husband number four?”
Well, crap. She hadn’t thought of that.
“Plus . . . a dentist?” Darcy asked doubtfully.
“What’s wrong with him being a dentist? At least he’s gainfully employed.”
“Nothing’s wrong with it,” Darcy said reasonably. “If you want to sleep with a guy whose hands have been inside other people’s mouths all day long. Do you know how many germs that is? A million. A million trillion.”
Zoe shuddered. “Great. Thanks for that. Don’t you have somewhere to be?”
“Yep,” Darcy said, but moved back to the window. “You got a reprieve; he stopped to take a call.”
Zoe grabbed her purse and turned to Oreo. “Hold down the fort for Mommy, okay?”
Darcy snorted. “If a bad guy showed up, he’d hide in your closet.”
This was probably true but the big, goofy dog was the only home security system she had right now. In the past few months both Wyatt and Darcy had moved out, Wyatt to live with his fiancée, Emily, and Darcy to live with her boyfriend, AJ.
Zoe had told herself she was good with that. Sure, she missed bossing them around as she’d been doing since the dawn of time because one, their foreign diplomat parents had never seemed to notice that they’d had children, and two, well, Zoe kind of just loved to boss people around. But she wasn’t going to complain. Not when she’d seen just about every corner of the world and knew exactly how good she really had it right here in Sunshine, Idaho, alone or not.