Dangerous Curves Ahead: A Perfect Fit Novel by Sugar Jamison

thirty,” Colin responded to Mike’s question in his slight brogue. “One day I turned around and all the girls at the bar were babies. And instead of wanting to take them home I wanted to tell them to put on a goddamn sweater.” He took a long swig of Guinness. “My sister is twenty, for fuck’s sake. I feel like a pervert.”
    “You’re getting old.” Mike grinned at his friend. He was beginning to understand what Colin was talking about. They were about to be thirty-three. Staggering home after last call didn’t seem so appealing. Waking up next to a girl who was barely out of her teens, even less so. “But why trivia night?”
    “You see, my friend”—Colin playfully slapped him on the back—“on trivia night you’ve got more of a variety for people-watching.” He pointed at a gaggle of middle-aged women sitting at the bar. “Soccer moms. They’re a fun group, come every week, usually spend their days up to their elbows in shit and driving the carpool. So when they get a chance to come out they get raunchy. They’re loud. They flirt like slags and they know more useless shit than anybody else here. I try to get on their team at least once a month.”
    Mike shook his head at his friend’s perceptive evaluation of those women. Colin had mellowed out a lot in the past few years. The man who was never afraid of a bar fight was now hanging out with soccer moms and limiting his alcohol intake. When had his friend grown up?
    “So whose team are we going to be on tonight?”
    “Well.” Colin scanned the room. “Those frat boys over there are out. They don’t know shit and are usually drunk off their asses before the fourth round starts. See if you can find some elementary school teachers or something. They know almost as much as the soccer moms, and they hate losing.”
    “What the hell do elementary school teachers look like?” Mike searched the room, passing his eyes over multiple groups of women. All he could picture was his fifth-grade teacher Mrs. Larson, who wore cat-shaped earrings and had a mole on her chin with a hair growing out it. He shuddered. He didn’t think he could spend the whole night on a team with women like that. But he would if he had to. Colin, it seemed, played to win, and Mike owed him this.
    “Look for girls in their twenties that look kind of sweet but serious. They usually aren’t the ones with their tits hanging out.”
    “You should have been a cop.” Mike glanced at his friend before he continued to scope out possible elementary school teachers and potential teammates. He saw lots of women, but a flash of red caught his eye. Something, a pull, he couldn’t describe it, forced him to focus on the woman who was wearing it. Ellis . She was sitting on the other side of the bar with a pink-colored drink in her hand. “I should have known.”
    She looked up at him as if he’d called her. Her eyes widened with surprise as they connected with his. He wanted to turn away, pretend like he hadn’t seen her. The woman irked him but he just couldn’t look away. She kept popping into his mind, every day, and he was sure that attraction had nothing to do with it. He found her sexy—but he found a lot of women sexy. It was the fact that he couldn’t recall where he knew her from. If he knew, he could then put her out of his mind and focus on something else. Somebody else.
    Not wanting to be rude to the woman who had been nothing but rude to him, he nodded his head in acknowledgment, expecting her to do the same.
    She stuck her tongue out at him.
    “Brat.” He found himself smiling, knowing that his earlier thoughts were wrong. She wouldn’t be so easy to put out of his mind. He had made that mistake already.
    “Huh?” Colin asked, looking in Ellis’s direction.
    “Ellis.” Mike shook his head at her immature gesture. She was next to the same redhead and blonde she’d been with the day of the robbery. Both her friends were staring at him with interest. It made him