The Rebound Girl (Getting Physical) Read Online Free Page A

he and Laura signed the divorce papers, and most of that time had been spent hiding in his apartment, avoiding women and Lincoln’s single-minded insistence that Matt needed to put himself out there again.
    He’d finally caved, and the first woman he’d gathered up the nerve to approach turned out to be this one. Easy to talk to, funny, pretty in a straightforward, no-nonsense way he wasn’t used to. And best of all, she’d already made it abundantly clear she had no intention—or expectation—of sleeping with him. She was like training wheels.
    Awesome, bacon-loving training wheels.
    “So...what brings you to Pleasant Park?” Matt asked conversationally, blissfully bereft of pressure. “You’re clearly not from around here.”
    “Work stuff,” she said, toying with a straw wrapper. Her eyes met his squarely, full of challenge and promise.
    “Is your work top secret? I’d offer to tell you what I do for a living, but you’ll laugh.”
    “Oh, I already know what you do. You’re an English professor. The elbow patches and Oxford shirt give it away.”
    Matt looked down at his attire. Sure, Lincoln had said a button-down shirt and jacket would put him on the firm path to celibacy, but Matt refused to take fashion advice from a man who owned two-hundred-dollar jeans. “Should I have left a few of the buttons undone? Lincoln said chest hair is passé.”
    Whitney grinned widely, and Matt couldn’t help his elated feeling of pride. See? He was funny. He could still do this.
    “And I’m not an English professor,” he added. “But good try.”
    “Lecturer?”
    “Getting warmer.”
    “Oh, crap—you’re a poet, aren’t you?”
    He braced himself. “Actually, I teach kindergarten.”
    The silence that followed lasted for exactly five seconds before Whitney burst into laughter. It was the kind of laughter that shook her whole body, and, predictably, she held none of it back.
    Matt was used to getting strange reactions. People—especially female people—couldn’t help but find something to talk about in his chosen profession. Most of them thought it was sweet. Some thought it was creepy. Trust this woman to find it downright hilarious.
    “That is so adorable it almost hurts my teeth,” Whitney said once she finally regained her composure. A kindergarten teacher ? Did a more nauseatingly endearing profession exist anywhere in the world? “So you, like, sing songs all day? And clap and play games and stuff?”
    Rather than take offense to her reply, as she expected, Matt laughed, his same soft chortle that never seemed to contain any malice. Whitney found it strangely addicting.
    “There’s a little more to it than that. But yes, I’ve been known to sing.”
    “I swear to God, if you tell me you karaoke on the weekends, I’m walking out the door,” Whitney warned.
    Divorced, chivalrous, kid-loving, kind...it was like someone had taken a poll of all the non-threatening, asexual characteristics a man could possibly exhibit and rolled them up into a tidy package. Somehow, it worked for him—and the feelings being aroused in Whitney’s breast were anything but asexual.
    “Singing in front of six-year-olds and singing in public are two different things.” Matt smiled, deepening his cherubic dimples. “And to be honest, I’m not very good at either one.”
    Whitney was not the sort of woman who paid any attention to her ovaries or what was expected of them as she strode confidently into her mid-thirties, but she could have sworn they swelled in autonomic response to that smile.
    The waitress came by then, her hands laden with plates of towering stacks of pancakes that glistened with butter and late-night calories. With the promise that she’d be by with more coffee in a few minutes, she left them to divide their bounty however they saw fit.
    Sharing a plate of food with someone you just met was supposed to be an awkward experience. In the thick of a relationship, cutting up pancakes and fighting