Stop.

Don’t engage.

Go home.

But did she do any of those things? No, she did not. Instead she smiled back and said, “I could knock the ball out of the park teaching you how to have fun.”

“I have no doubt,” he murmured, and blew all her remaining brain cells.

Chapter 3

#GoBigOrGoHome

It wasn’t until Finn shifted away to help one of his servers that Pru let out a shuddery breath. I’m known as the Fun Whisperer? She smacked her own forehead, which didn’t knock any sense into her. Ordering her hormones to cool their jets, she turned away to take in the rest of the pub.

She was immediately waved over to the far end of the bar, which she’d missed when she’d first come in because hello, she’d honed in on Finn like a homing pigeon.

Informally reserved for those who lived and worked in the building, this end of the bar was instant camaraderie as someone you knew was always there to eat or drink with.

Tonight that someone was Willa, sole proprietor of the South Bark Mutt Shop, a one-stop pet store on the southwest ground-floor corner of the building.

Willa eyed a still very wet Pru and without a word pushed a plate of chicken wings her way.

“You’re a mind reader,” Pru said and slid onto the seat next to her.

Willa laughed at the squishy, watery sound Pru made when she sat. “When you live in a city that’s all hills and rain and soggy rainbow flags you learn really fast what’s valuable. An umbrella with all its spokes . . . and a man who believes in happily-ever-afters.”

Pru laughed. “Aw. You believe in fairy tales.”

Willa smiled, her bright green eyes dancing. If you took in her strawberry red hair cut in layers framing her pretty face and coupled it with her petite, curvy frame, she looked like she belonged in a fairy tale herself, waving her magic wand. “You don’t believe the right guy’s out there for you?”

Pru took a big bite of a mouth-watering chicken wing and moaned. Swallowing, she licked some sauce off her thumb. “I just think I’d have better luck searching for a unicorn.”

“You could wish on the fountain,” Willa said.

The fountain in their courtyard had quite the reputation, as the woman she’d seen earlier had clearly known. The 1928 four-story building had actually been built around the fountain, which had been here in the Cow Hollow district of San Francisco for fifty years before that, when the area still resembled the Wild West and was chock-full of dairies and roaming cattle.

Back then only the hearty had survived. And the desperate. Born of that, the fountain’s myth went that a wish made here out of true desperation, with an equally true heart, would bring a first, true love in unexpected ways.

It’d happened just enough times over the past hundred plus years that the myth had long since become infamous legend.

A big hand set a mouth-watering looking watermelon mojito mocktail in front of her, the muscles in his forearm flexing as he moved. Pru stared at it for a beat before she managed to lift her gaze to Finn’s. “Thanks.”

“Try it.”

She obediently did just that. “Oh my God,” she murmured, pleasure infusing her veins. “What’s in it?”

He smiled mysteriously, and something warm and wondrous happened deep inside her.

“Secret recipe,” he said while she was still gaping up at him. He turned to Willa. “And your Irish coffee.”

Willa squealed over the mountain of whipped cream topping the glass and jumped up to give Finn a tight squeeze.

Pru knew that they were very tight friends and it showed in their familiarity with each other. It didn’t seem sexual at all so there was no need for jealousy but Finn definitely let down his guard with Willa. And it was that, Pru knew, that gave her the twinge of envy.

Finn waited until Willa sat and attacked her drink before he spoke again. “Your girl Cara tried to con Sean into a drink last night.”

Willa, who’d just spooned in a huge bite of the cream, grimaced. She always had three or four employees on rotation at her shop, all of them some sort of rescue, many of them underage. “She have a fake ID?”

“Affirmative,” Finn said. “He cut it up on my orders.”

Willa sighed. “Bet that went over like a fart in church.”

Finn lifted a shoulder. “We handled it.”

Willa reached out and squeezed his hand. “Thanks.”

Finn nodded and turned his attention back to Pru, who’d sucked down a third of her drink already. “You need your own order of chicken wings?”