Free The Trouble with Dating Sue (Grover Beach Team #6) by Anna Katmore

a bit anyway. Guess she’ll tell me what happened.”
    “Going out with her? As in—”
    “Going to have a soda with her,” Ethan cut me off with unmistakable annoyance. “We are friends . So stop the hell jumping to conclusions, Chris. You and Mom are the worst suckers for romance in town. What’s wrong with you lately?”
    A sneer almost made it to my lips. “Nothing. Just…” Seducing my brother’s new girlfriend would be a shit move and I’d have to back out of that challenge. But since he seemed to be happy being single, and Susan was just a friend , there was nothing to worry about, right? Nevertheless, I was really starting to feel for him. From the look on his face, Mom had probably cornered him last night to squeeze out all the information about his latest female guest.
    When Ethan prompted me, with a quizzical stare, to finish my sentence, I ended it with an amazingly creative, “Nothing.”
    We ate in silence for a couple of minutes. Curiosity nagged at me to find out more about his afternoon…hangout? Because it certainly wasn’t a date with Sue. I cast him the same quizzical look he’d given me moments ago, which he probably misread as me fighting another brain freeze, because he didn’t say anything. When the silence got annoyingly long, words burst out of me. “So, where are you taking her?”
    Ethan hesitated a moment before he revealed, “Charlie’s.” It was barely more than a mumble, and he didn’t look up either. Just his cheeks turned a heated pink in spite of the cold ice cream we were shoveling into our mouths.
    As far as I knew, Ethan wasn’t a big fan of Charlie’s Café in town. Apparently the menu bored him, and he didn’t want to waste money on drinks when he was saving for a car—that’s what he’d said last spring. Yet today he was a lucky car owner and still didn’t want to go there with me on the occasional Saturday night. My conclusion was that he just lacked the guts to bring a date, and being the fifth wheel has never been Donovan style. His choice was always staying home on the weekends and playing Wii. Pathetic.
    Sticking his spoon in the ice cream, Ethan rose and left the kitchen to go hit the shower. He was done in ten minutes—shaved, dressed, and styled—and by that time I’d annihilated the entire raspberry-almond dream by myself. Hands tucked into my pockets as I leaned against the wall in the hallway, I watched him tie his shoes. “When are you meeting Sue?”
    “Five.”
    I glanced at my watch and narrowed my eyes. “It’s quarter past four. You’ll be at Charlie’s in five minutes. Three if the traffic lights favor you.”
    Ethan smoothed out his black jeans and adjusted his collar. “Yeah, but I’m not going to drive. I’m taking a walk.” If the tremor in his voice hadn’t betrayed him, the way he fumbled with the strands of his hair to make them stand perfectly in place as he looked in the mirror certainly would have.
    “Antsy?” I teased.
    Drawing a deep enough breath to inhale every dust particle in the room that Mom hadn’t caught on her last cleaning day, he turned to me. His larynx bobbed with a hard swallow. “See you later,” he said and walked out the door.
    Holy cow! I’d never seen my brother this nervous before. If Sue really wasn’t the reason, then what was?
    Scratching my head, I stared at the closed door for another moment before I walked into my room and did some quick cleaning. Afterward, I booted up my computer. It was five thirty, and Lauren would be here in half an hour. She liked tutoring me to the background singing of Enrique Iglesias. I couldn’t say I enjoyed that wailing, but as long as it made her happy and, more importantly, got her in the right mood, no one was going to hear me complain.
    When I heard the front door slamming shut a little later, I peeked out into the corridor. It couldn’t be Ethan coming back already. That would be like the shortest date ever, even if we were only talking soda