I felt bad for Jenny, as Ethan’s answer started out sounding romantic, just what they’d all want to hear, but pivoted to suggest he might be shallow enough to judge and dismiss a woman as soon as he set eyes on her. I was pretty sure he didn’t think that. But the words were out there: too late to take them back.
“I’m starting to wonder whether men these days know what romance is at all,” Gill said. “Winning a date with one of you four just might turn out to be the boobie prize.”
The four of us exchanged glances with one another and sort of shook our heads in agreement, if that made sense.
We couldn’t come across as total dicks. The PR would be bad, but that wasn’t the worst thing. It wasn’t kind to Jenny or Gill.
But I couldn’t wait for this disaster to finish. I itched to go find out about the kitchen staff.
If she wanted to spend the rest of the night with me, I’d show her what it was like to be the true winner this evening.
CHAPTER SIX
KAYLA MARTIN
Is it be my imagination?
The four male contestants were hotter than hell, and from their pedestals on the stage, each one of them seduced me with his smoldering good looks, sexy voice, and spoken word. Well, not only me but every straight woman in the room.
But especially me!
Each one of them found me in the crowd and seemed to stare directly at me for a good part of the time. And the way they looked in my direction was seductive. Almost foreplay. If they looked at every woman in that way, no wonder they had the following, the fans, and the reputations.
I cringed in sympathy with Gill and Jenny at times when the guys barely played along with the concept. I couldn’t imagine how Jenny was to choose one of them when she couldn’t see them.
Despite it not going as I expected, it was a terrifically entertaining show to watch. The guys were hilarious together, which kind of went well with the cheesy sixties decor, and they had the audience laughing much of the time.
Gill gave a terrific performance as the MC holding the show together. “Let’s rip the bandage off, people, let’s get this game into the home stretch,” she said, with that happy-go-lucky forced smile of hers.
Years in the bar trade and whatever she’d done before had given her bags of confidence and the skill to handle all types of tricky people.
She was used to keeping it together in the most chaotic of times. It made me incredibly jealous of her. She was a natural extrovert, a butterfly, where I was a twenty-six-year-old caterpillar who didn’t expect metamorphosis anytime soon.
The crowd laughed and cheered along with everything. Maybe the event wasn’t as much a disaster as completely sober me had expected.
“Well then, we’ve had three questions and four answers to each one. Now it’s time for you to make up your mind, Jenny. They are all lovely, but you have to pick just one of our handsome, entertaining, and charming bachelors. Who will it be, Jenny?”
“To be totally truthful, Gillian. It’s a difficult choice. Who knows what will happen? It’s like a scratch-off lottery ticket. But if I have to choose one and only one and not all of them?”
“Yes, Jenny, it is only one. Don’t be greedy.”
“So I gotta pick Number one, Gill.”
The crowd cheered loudly, approving of her selection. Again, for me, I wondered if they were drunk or being polite. I didn’t exactly see potential in an Ethan and Jenny relationship. Or Jenny with any of them. She was an ordinary girl, and they were mega-rich sports stars. Realistically, those guys have supermodels on their arms. Ordinary mortals like any of us in this bar didn’t stand a chance at a lasting relationship with a star quarterback.
Not to mention that I couldn’t shake my own attraction to Ethan, and he’d definitely looked at me more than once. Despite how he’d looked at me, getting to know him in any way seemed firmly in the realm of fantasy.
Ethan didn’t appear delighted to be a winner. He let out a long, exhausted sigh before Gill pulled Jenny from behind the screen so she could finally meet all the contestants in person.
I wanted to get back to work once the show was effectively over, but it was difficult to tear my attention away and leave when Gill was about to wrap things up.
Each man politely hugged Jenny and kissed her on the cheek before she came face to face with the man who’d be her date, the so-called winner of the contest, Ethan.
Jenny was the real winner; the gorgeous QB didn’t need a charity dating show to get a date. She and Ethan whispered things to one another, but the plainness of their faces told me it was more friendly than romantic. How could it be anything else?