Page 44 of Reaching Gavin

“She’s a lawyer,” Jillian explained.

“She knows how to read people,” Jess said. “I believe her exact words were: Cassie has finally caught herself a real man.”

Now I was definitely jinxed. Not only was I having a hard time not thinking of Gavin as Mr. Right, my friends had already decided he was the one. It was going to be hard enough for our fledgling relationship to live up to my expectations. I couldn’t imagine how hard it would be to live up to theirs.

“And we Googled him,” Jillian confessed. My friends had stalked him more than I had.

“Did you run a background? Get his FBI file?” I sat down on my bed, crushing a pile of clothes underneath me, ensuring they’d be a wrinkled mess, but I didn’t care. My friends had given me a headache.

“We like him even more now,” Jess said.

“You two really are determined to jinx this.”

Jillian shook her head furiously. “Don’t worry. Trust me on this. Sometimes life surprises you.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” I pinched the bridge of my nose as my temples began to throb.

“Good guys still exist,” she told me. This time she smiled as she looked over her shoulder at her own Mr. Right. “You’re going to have to trust us on this.”

“Jillian is right,” Jess added, “and believe us when we tell you that when the right one comes along, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“I mean, even my mother didn’t scare Liam off.” To Jillian there was no greater proof that she’d found a keeper.

They were making a lot of sense. They’d found true love. They’d fought for it. After my last relationship disaster, their stories had given me hope. It was just that I had finally accepted that the right guy might never come along. Now I had to face the possibility that he had. “How will I know?”

“You just will,” Jess promised.