Sex, Lies, and Online Dating by Rachel Gibson

to call me and take me out and—”
    “He’s pursuing you,” Clare pointed out.
    “I guess.” Lucy paused a moment to collect her thoughts. “It’s just that I’ve never met a man who wanted to see so much of me right off. You know how men are, they take you out and might call you again in a week or two or not at all. Quinn doesn’t seem to know that he’s supposed to keep me waiting by the phone, wondering why he isn’t asking me out again.”
    “Wait.” Adele held up her fork. “You don’t want to go out with him because he seems really interested in you? Now that’s crazy.”
    Lucy shrugged. Maybe, but there was something about him that she just couldn’t quite put her finger on. Something that told her he was too good to be true, and in her experience, if something looked too good to be true, it was too good to be true. “Maybe I don’t trust the whole my-wife-died thing. I don’t get the impression that he’s lying about it—exactly. I can’t put my finger on it, but I just don’t trust him completely.” She shook her head and cut into her chimichanga. “Maybe I’m being overly suspicious.”
    Adele looked up from her salad. “Get him to take you to his house. If he won’t take you, then it’s probably because his wife isn’t really dead.”
    “Are you high? That’s how Richard Franko got five of his victims,” Maddie said, referring to the serial killer she’d written about several years ago. “He just invited them home and, like lambs to slaughter, they went. Lucy could be walking into a nightmare.”
    It really was no wonder Maddie didn’t date. She viewed most men she met as psychopathic killers. “He’s not a killer. I just wonder if he’s too good to be real.”
    “Adele might be on to something,” Clare said. “If you see his house, you can tell right away if he’s still married, or if he’s set up a shag pad. If he won’t take you home, he’s married. If he does take you home—”
    “Then he’ll expect sex,” Maddie interrupted.
    “True.” The thought of having sex with Quinn wasn’t unappealing, but so soon after meeting him was out of the question.
    “If you’re going to be foolish enough to go to his house,” Maddie said, “be sure and take the personal protection I’ve given you.”
    “I will,” Lucy promised. For Christmas the previous year, Maddie had given them all pepper spray, a personal alarm, a stun pen, and a pair of brass knuckles. “And I’ll make sure I have my car,” she added, even though she wasn’t even sure she would ever end up at Quinn’s house. “So I can leave before there’s any danger of getting naked.”
    “I don’t know which is more dangerous,” Adele said. “You at some guy’s house you don’t know, or driving your car.”
    “I’m an excellent driver,” Lucy insisted.
    “That’s what Rain Man said,” Clare pointed out.
    Lucy knew that her friends thought she was a bad driver, but she wasn’t. Sure, she drove a little fast and yelled things at other cars, but she hadn’t had a wreck in five years. “How’s everyone else’s love life?” she asked, purposely changing the subject once again.
    “Nonexistent,” Maddie complained. “There aren’t any men in this town.”
    Adele reached for her margarita. “I found an old face scrubby and a Crock-Pot on my porch yesterday.”
    “Dwayne,” the other three said, all at the same time. A lean, mean, buff machine, Dwayne Larkin hung drywall for a living, and for two years Adele had thought he just might be Mr. Right. She’d overlooked his habit of picking his teeth at the table and smelling the armpits of his shirts before he put them on. Because he looked kind of like Viggo Mortensen, she’d put up with his beer-guzzling, belching ways, right up to the moment he’d told her she was getting a “fat ass.” No one used the f-word in reference to Adele’s ass, and she’d kicked him out of her life. Too bad he wouldn’t go completely. Every few weeks,