Free The Blonde Theory by Kristin Harmel

blonde. I was completely unused to this feeling of attracting men rather than repelling them.
    “How about tomorrow night, then?” he pressed on. “I mean, I know it’s soon. But if you’re free...”
    “I would love to,” I said, beaming at him. Then I remembered: Tomorrow night was the firm dinner. The one Matt James had agreed to go to out of pity for me. The one I was dreading. But I still had to go. And it’s not like I could tell Scott that. “Um, I mean, I’m actually busy tomorrow,” I corrected myself. “A dance squad meeting. But maybe the next night?”
    “Sure,” Scott said with a smile. “Wednesday it is.”
    “Wednesday it is,” I echoed. The girls would die. I was going on my first Blonde Date the day after tomorrow! And Scott was just my type: smart, cute, self-confident. The plan was working!
    Maybe I could get to like the dumb-blonde version of myself after all.

Chapter Five
    F or the hundredth time, Harper, it’s not really a date,” Emmie’s voice bubbled from the phone, which I was currently holding a few inches away from my face and glaring at. “So there’s nothing to worry about.”
    “I
know
it’s not a date,” I said sharply as I returned the phone to my ear, wondering if she was picking up on the tension in my voice. It wasn’t like I was lying. I
did
know it wasn’t a date. It’s not like I was delusional. It was just one of those irrefutable laws of the universe—like gravity and e = mc 2 . Newton or Einstein had probably also cataloged the fact that hot soap actors were never attracted to stuffy, brainy thirty-five-year-old lawyers.
    “So why are you worrying?” Emmie pressed on. I pulled the phone away to glare at it again. Too bad I didn’t have a videophone yet. I felt that Emmie deserved to see the death rays I was currently shooting in her general direction.
    “I’m not,” I grumbled, saying each word slowly and distinctly. But of course I was. It was hard not to feel a little spark of something as I sat in my living room, dressed in a black Armani dress and a string of pearls, waiting for a soap star to come pick me up for my firm dinner. But that
something
was actually an abundance of patheticness. Seriously, I knew Matt James didn’t have any interest in me; either he felt sorry for me, or he was just looking for an opportunity to be exposed to a roomful of lawyers so that he could study for his role on the show. And here I was, dressed up, looking rather hot, if I do say so myself, waiting for a knock on the door from a guy who would never look at me as anything but his co-star’s dorky, pathetic lawyer friend.
    I had tried to express this to Emmie earlier, but she had taken it all wrong, and I had gotten embarrassed. I mean, it wasn’t like I could tell her that I actually had a minicrush on Matt, because of course that was immature, illogical, and downright embarrassing. So my mumbled explanations had somehow come out sounding like I was afraid of this date or something. Emmie had laughed and started joking about how Matt and I would never work out anyhow. “As
if
he would ever ask you out!” she had added with a giggle, completely unaware that she was offending me.
    Emmie was right; I wasn’t his type. I was sure of it. And you know what? That was fine, because he wasn’t my type anyhow. He probably hadn’t even gone to college. He probably wasn’t settled in his career like most of the guys I dated; I suspected that to him, the soap opera was just a step on the ladder of fame, and he hoped to move on to Hollywood sooner or later. And I’d decided in my midtwenties that I wouldn’t date any more men who were still trying to “find themselves.” Inevitably, while looking for themselves, they seemed to find a reason to discard me. Then they promptly moved on and married the next woman they stumbled across. Seriously. Before Peter, it had happened to me three times in a row. Not that it mattered then: I was young myself, and I wasn’t