“But we have to get to know each other. We have to talk about our feelings.”

He winced. “Why?”

“We just do. That’s what...” She felt her eyes widen. “We’re totally different. The man-woman thing is real. I want to go have a conversation about my life and your life and what we can do to help each other, and you want to physically do something with only the occasional grunt for conversation. As a man, you don’t want to talk about anyone’s feelings, let alone your own.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing. It’s not. Not talking about your feelings can be very relaxing.”

Which might be true but wasn’t helpful. “We really didn’t think this through.”

Aidan leaned toward her. “No. Do not give up on me now. We have a deal. We’ve gotten this far, we can figure out the rest of it. You want to do girl stuff and I want to do guy stuff.”

He gave her a slow, sexy smile. One that had her breath catching. But before she could do something ridiculous, like bat her eyes at him or flip her hair, she reminded herself that it wasn’t a slow, sexy smile. They weren’t involved that way. It was just a smile. She would ignore any subtext her hormones might read in to the situation.

“I know,” he told her. “We’ll alternate. Girl date, guy date. Not date, but you know what I mean.”

“That could work. We could each plan our gender event.” She grimaced. Avoiding the word date was harder that she would have thought.

“Gender event?”

“Do you have a better phrase?”

“I’m liking gender event.”

She laughed. “Okay, so you’re responsible for boy things and I’m in charge of girl things. And yes on the alternating. So who goes first?”

He stretched out his arms, one hand flat, the other curled into a fist. “Rock, paper, scissors?”

She shifted until she was facing him, then together they hit their fists against their flat hands and counted to three.

“Rock,” Aidan said triumphantly, then groaned when he saw her paper. “You win.”

“I know,” she told him. “Poor you. I grew up with a brother. Why do guys always start out with rock? It’s very predictable.”

“We can’t help ourselves.” He stood. “We’re going to get margaritas and talk about our feelings, aren’t we?”

“You know it.”

* * *

JO’S BAR HAD been around for eight or nine years. Aidan had been there a few times, but it wasn’t the kind of place he and his friends liked to hang out. For one thing, the bar catered to women.

On the surface, that might seem like a good thing—lots of beautiful women hanging out. What’s not to like? Only it wasn’t that kind of place. For one thing, the lighting was way too bright. There were no dark corners or ratty old booths. Instead the booths were new and scaled down in size. There were tables everywhere. The walls were painted some weird light purple color—Nick would know the name of the shade, but he didn’t.

While there were plenty of TVs around, they were always turned to shopping or female-based reality shows. The menu had lots of salads on it and most of the drinks had a diet version. The only part of the bar that felt close to normal was the small room in back with a pool table, but even with that concession, Jo’s generally wasn’t a place men went to on purpose.

Now The Man Cave was different. More male-friendly. Not that Shelby led him there.

“Isn’t this nice?” she asked as they walked inside.

“Uh-huh.”

“Oh, look.” She pointed to the televisions. “They’re having an America’s Next Top Model marathon. I love that show.”