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Read on for:
Penny Reid’s Booklist (current and planned publications) Sneak Peek: Dating-ish, book 6 in the Knitting in the City Series (Available Now!)
Other books by Penny Reid
Knitting in the City Series
(Contemporary Romantic Comedy) Neanderthal Seeks Human: A Smart Romance (#1)
Neanderthal Marries Human: A Smarter Romance (#1.5)
Friends without Benefits: An Unrequited Romance (#2)
Love Hacked: A Reluctant Romance (#3)
Beauty and the Mustache: A Philosophical Romance (#4)
Ninja at First Sight (#4.75)
Happily Ever Ninja: A Married Romance (#5)
Dating-ish (#6)
Marriage of Inconvenience (#7, coming 2017)
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Winston Brothers Series
(Contemporary Romantic Comedy, spinoff of Beauty and the Mustache) Truth or Beard (#1) Grin and Beard It (#2) Beard Science (#3)
Beard in Mind (#4) Dr. Strange Beard (#5, coming 2018) Beard Necessities (#6, coming 2018)
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Irish Players (Rugby) Series – by L.H. Cosway and Penny Reid
(Contemporary Sports Romance) The Hooker and the Hermit (#1)
The Pixie and the Player (#2)
The Cad and the Co-ed (#3)
Sneak Peek: Dating-ish (Available Now!)
By Penny Reid, book #6 in the Knitting in the City series
DeepMind
A neural network that learns in a fashion similar to that of humans and may be able to access an external memory like a conventional Turing machine, resulting in a computer that mimics the short-term memory of the human brain.
–Source: Google’s Artificial Intelligence Program
I was sweating.
“Is this seat taken?”
My head whipped up from the book I wasn’t actually reading to look at the café employee. Her hands rested on the only other chair at my table and she gazed at me with an affable, expectant smile.
“It’s taken,” I shrieked. Like a lunatic.
But, man, I need that chair!
She lifted her hands, recoiling as though the metal singed her skin, and gave me a wide-eyed stare. My attention moved behind her and I spotted the nearby table of university students, obviously hunting for an extra seat.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to—” I shook my head, gathering a deep breath and telling myself to calm down. “I’m meeting someone and he’ll be here soon. I’m a little early.”
“Okay, no problem.” She affixed a polite smile and moved to another table, making the same enquiry.
Longingly, I gazed at the booth by the window. Every café or coffee shop has that one coveted table, where two to four friends can gather and spend an afternoon not being overheard while sharing ideas and stories. Or where a person can go to work—impervious to the room and its distractions—headphones on, laptop open, losing count of how many lattes and croissants were consumed over an eight-hour day.
I did not have that table. I had a mediocre table, set in the center of the coffee shop, surrounded by other mediocre tables.
But I would not let my mediocre table get me down.
My attention flickered to the door of the café, then to the clock above it. He wasn’t late. Yet.
Squirming, wishing I’d worn anything other than this sweater dress, my eyes returned to the book on my lap.
Pay no attention to me, nothing to see here. I’m just perspiring, wearing a sweater dress in May, and not reading while waiting for my perfect match.
Derek Simmons. Six foot three with a well-maintained beard, great smile, gray eyes, tan complexion, and short hair. He didn’t work out regularly—which was great, because that meant he didn’t expect me to work out either—but enjoyed some outdoorsy activities. Engineer. Thirty-nine. Divorced, two kids.
Derek and I were a perfect match. That’s what FindUrPartner.com indicated last Thursday.
You have a perfect match. The notification alerted me as soon as I signed in. The irony was, I’d been logging in to suspend my account. After almost two years of Internet dating debacles and equally disappointing men, I was ready for a break. But then I’d received the perfect match message. Therefore, I did what any normal person would do.
I Internet stalked him.
Loves: cooking, hiking, camping, eighties music, film noir. Reads: GQ Magazine, The Economist, Politico. TV shows: The Walking Dead, Daredevil, and Project Runway.
. . . cooking, film noir, The Economist, and Project Runway?
YES! A man unicorn.
Compelled by his uni-horn, I emailed him.
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Hi Derek,
I hope you are well. According to this website, we’re a perfect match. This has never happened to me before, so I thought I’d reach out and say hi. Let me know if you’d like to meet up for coffee sometime. I work downtown near the Loop and am free next Monday afternoon.
Best, Marie
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The next morning, I was alerted that he’d looked at my profile, and I read his response with bated breath.
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Hi Marie,
Thanks so much for your note.
Next Monday works for me. I’m near the university. You name the place and I’ll be there.
-Derek
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I loved his response.
Direct. To the point. Polite. No detour into unnecessary topics. No typos.
To say my hopes were high would be a gross understatement. My hopes had reached astronomical. Since our exchange of emails, I’d tried to curtail those blasted hopes to no avail. I couldn’t help my hopes.
Don’t run away from me, hopes! I can’t move that fast in these heels and we’re in this together.
But they did run away, hopping onto a spaceship—likely one of those SpaceX crafts that keeps infuriating Elon Musk by blowing up—leaving me on the ground, waving frantically, which was probably compounding my sweating problem.
Arm waving at one’s high hopes while wearing a sweater dress in May is a workout.
But he’s perfect!
This squealing nugget of optimism originated from some dark corner in my brain. Once I found the owner of this voice inside my head, I was going to . . . I didn’t honestly know. On the one hand, I didn’t want to be bitter and jaded, trading optimism for pessimism.
Or worse, nihilism. Nihilism was the worst. And the perpetuators of it had no imagination when it came to accessorizing. All black, all the time? No, thank you.