Free A Date With Fate by Tracy Ellen Page B

breakfast for lunch in Uptown at French Meadow Café. I’m a sucker for their Eggs Benedict, plus we split one of their enormously delicious cinnamon rolls. We later walked it off around the scenic, nine mile circuit of Lake of the Isles, Calhoun, and Harriet. The two levels of lake paths were busy with bikers, joggers, and walkers outside with the same idea to embrace the sunshine.
    In Minnesota, everyone takes advantage of beautiful, fall days like a bunch of paranoid hoarders. We all know what’s lurking around the corner to descend on us at any given moment. It’s not unheard of for the temp to be fifty one day with a blizzard the next.
    Speaking of hoarders, while we walked, I was munching on chocolate-dipped macaroons from a bag that had magically appeared in my hand upon leaving French Meadow. I noticed that no matter how much we were laughing and talking, Luke always kept an eye out on our immediate environs. He truly has a special talent for vigilance. I never felt like I had less than his total attention, but he also managed to admire the awe-inspiring architecture of historic homes surrounding the lakes, watch the people around us, watch me, and watch the ground where we walked.
    Turns out this observation knack of his was a good thing for me. Luke steered me over an ankle-twisting pothole in the path, and around a deep puddle I would have gone swimming through. I was oblivious to these dangers to my person. I was too busy waxing on enthusiastically about a recent book I’d read and loved. He later caught me mid-air when I took a swan dive over an exposed tree root. The story he’d been telling had me laughing so much, I hadn’t been paying a bit of attention to the path under my feet. That one would have really hurt, so I appreciated his save.
    This would all be a mite embarrassing were I the type to actually care about such things as my own dignity and public humiliation. It was odd to receive a deep kiss for being an oblivious klutz, but I grinned and bore the punishment. I gave in gracefully to Luke’s vehement insistence he hold my hand to keep me alive.
    Our daytime date was a great time. We spent hours marveling at how smart we were on almost every subject under the sun—when we weren’t heatedly debating about the other’s idiotically wrong viewpoint. The drive home down 35W was quieter. It was laced with long looks in anticipation of what we’d be doing later when we were alone inside my apartment.
    In the dusky, late afternoon light, we relaxed together. Luke was a shadowed outline of a man sprawled at the end of my comfy, leather sofa. I was idly mulling over if I should invite him to come with me to the Halloween costume bash I was invited to later that night. I was envisioning him in his Army uniform; Major Anthony “Tony” Nelson to my “I Dream of Jeannie” genie. Who cares if he wasn’t Air Force, or a major? I’m not picky; a man in uniform is hot.
    Luke reached over and started playing with my hand, running his thumb over my knuckles and between my fingers.
    Apropos of nothing, in a voice as smooth as the velvet pillow I was leaning my cheek against, he spoke. “Tell me your secret fantasy, Anabel.”
    ‘Holy…so much for being relaxed!’ After a moment, I remembered to snap closed my hanging jaw. Luke didn’t chatter away in idle conversation to hear himself speak, so I knew immediately he was totally serious. His face was smoothly composed and gave away nothing of what he was thinking. Just like that, easy as you please, he asked me to tell him something I have never divulged to another living soul.
    I was confused, too. First off, did he mean most people have only one secret fantasy? Because I knew immediately what my number one secret fantasies was out of about fifteen fantasies. Secondly, did this mean he was into kinky sex stuff to ask me this after dating for only a couple of months, and those dates being spread out? Was he going to get progressively weirder on me? Or,