No More Bad Dates (High Tea, #1)
(Cozy Cottage Café, #5)
by Kate O’Keeffe
Publication date: Sept 5th, 2019
Genres: Adult, Contemporary, Romance
Three friends form the No More Bad Dates Pact: stop dating the wrong guys and start dating the right ones – weirdos and jerks need not apply.
Twenty-five-year-old Sophie McCarthy’s career is virtually nonexistent, her family expects her to “do something important” with her life, and she’s totally sick of dating the wrong guys: the self-absorbed, the arrogant, the borderline criminally insane.
After she’s unceremoniously dumped during the vows at her boss’s wedding, she and her two equally disappointed-in-love best friends agree to help each other find decent guys to date. Together, they form the No More Bad Dates Pact: stop dating the wrong guys and start dating the right ones–weirdos and jerks need not apply.
When Sophie’s roommate Jason Christie–a.k.a. doctor-in-training and serial nurse-dater–joins the pact, he vows to weed out the bad ones for her. But with his rejection of every guy Sophie meets, she begins to wonder if he’s got an ulterior motive. And anyway, why does she always have so much more fun with Jason than with the guys she’s actually trying to date?
While desperately seeking her “happy for now,” could Sophie stumble into her “happily ever after?"
High Tea is a spin-off of Kate O’Keeffe’s bestselling Cozy Cottage Café series. Escape to New Zealand in this fun, feel-good chick lit series!
Books in the High Tea series:
Book 1: No More Bad Dates
Book 2: No More Terrible Dates – releasing very soon!
Book 3: No More Horrible Dates – releasing soon!
Excerpt:
“Like you, Sophie, I’m looking for
someone special, someone who can share my passions,” he begins.
“Like diving?” I ask, hopeful. Diving
might not be my favorite thing, but at least it’s not weird.
“More than diving,” David explains.
“It’s a lifestyle, really. Something I committed to a couple of years back. In
fact, I celebrated my two-year anniversary of living this way only last month.
It was a super special day.” He turns to me. “If you’re who I think you are,
who I hope you are, I believe you
could have shared that moment with me in a really beautiful way, Sophie.”
My hopes drop to my shoes. Uh-oh. Alert! Alert!
Jason leans his elbows on the table.
“Okay, dude. Enough preamble. Give it to us straight.”
David’s face is bright when he states
simply, “I live my life as much as I can in the world of merfolk.”
Merfolk?
Oh, no no no no no no.
There’s a stunned silence around the
table as our jaws collectively drop.
“In the world of what?” Darcy asks, her
eyes shooting to mine.
“In the world of merfolk,” he repeats
as though he’s just said something totally normal, like “in an apartment
downtown,” but in reality, what he said is the complete opposite of normal.
“Merfolk. As in . . . mermaids?” I manage to ask, even though
I really don’t want to know the answer. I’m pretty darn sure all my hopes with
this guy have just been dealt a Game of
Thrones-scale deathblow.
He nods. “Mermaids, mermen, merboys,
and mergirls. We’re a community, people coming together from all walks of life
in the merfolk lifestyle.” He places his hand on mine. “I really hope it’s
something that resonates with you, Sophie. Perhaps all of you.”
Jason puts his hand up in the air.
“Oh, I’m definitely in on this.”
That strange Darryl Hannah comment
about growing my hair suddenly makes sense. He wants me to be a mermaid with
him, “living the merfolk lifestyle!”
This cannot be happening. The cute guy
from High Tea who seemed to have it all going on, the guy with his head screwed
on right, who loves his mom is a freaking merman?
No, just no.
I think I’ve burst a blood vessel in
my brain.
“You’d make an amazing mermaid,
Sophie,” he continues, gazing at me as he takes a strand of my hair in his
hand.
I’m too stunned to respond. Instead, I
simply gawp at him as though . . . well, as though he’s just told me he’s a
merman.
“Okay, explain something to me here,
Dave,” Jason begins. “You like to swim around dressed up as a fish with a bunch
of other people, also dressed up like fish, and do what? Commune with sea life?
Braid seaweed together? What?”
Jason’s tone isn’t lost on David. He
might be a wannabe merman, but he’s not stupid. “I get it. This is new to you.
A lot of people have this reaction when they hear about my merfolk lifestyle.”
I swear, if he says, “merfolk
lifestyle” one more time, I may blow enough blood vessels to render my brain
completely useless.
“So, you’re trying to be Aquaman?”
This from an amused and persistent Jason.
David shakes his (human) head. “Oh,
no. Aquaman’s not a merman. And anyway, he’s not real.”
“Jason Momoa is though,” the
Momoa-obsessed Darcy comments.
“Aquaman’s not real but mermen are real?” Jason is trying to
suppress his grin—and barely managing it.
“Look, I know you’re finding this hard
to get your head around. But did you know that for thousands of years, many
cultures around the globe have had stories of merfolk? Many, many cultures, not
just one or two. Coincidence? I think not.”
“Back up the bus here,” Darcy says.
“You’re telling us that not only do you ‘live the merfolk lifestyle,’ but you
believe they exist, too?”
“Well, yes,” David replies as though
it’s a commonly held truth that half human, half fish creatures swim through
our waters every day of the week. “Could all those cultures be wrong?”
Err, yes, David. Yes, they could.
“How do you do it, exactly? How do you
swim around dressed as a merman?” Erin asks.
“It’s really quite simple. I’ve got a
monofin I use when I swim. It straps around my hips and stays on in the water.
It’s a work of art, really. So beautiful. It’s very freeing to swim with it in
place.”
“I would have thought it would be the
exact opposite of ‘freeing,’” Darcy mutters quietly to me.
Erin darts me a quick look before
saying, “Right. Well. I, ah, think we’ve learned quite a lot about you today.
Thank you for sharing that with us, David.” The ever-tactful Erin gives him a
shaky smile.
“I’m always keen to share this part of
me with new, open people. I sense some of you might find this a little hard.”
He looks pointedly at Jason. “But I hope you’ll reflect on it and perhaps even
consider the lifestyle one day.” He puts his hand on mine and gives me a
meaningful look.
“Well, I don’t know about the rest of
us, but I’m guessing that about wraps things up,” Darcy says. “Sophie? Any
final words?”
Other than “no way, José,” nothing.
“I’ll, ah, see you in a minute? We need to discuss things.” I say to him.
He gives my hand a squeeze and stands
up. “Is that how this works now? You discuss me, and I see if I passed?”
“Yes. We will see if you passed.” Erin
does her best to suppress a grin.
Once David’s out of earshot, I shake
my head, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.”
“Has that guy watched The Little Mermaid one too many times or
something?” Erin asks.
“Soph, you’ve outdone yourself with
this one. Your date thinks he’s a fish,” Darcy manages before her laughter
overflows.
“Half fish, half man,” Erin corrects,
Darcy’s laugh catching as she too erupts.
“Imagine if he didn’t get the memo on
which parts were meant to be fish and which parts were meant to be human. He
could turn up to one of these merfolk lifestyle get-togethers with a fish head
and human legs.” Jason laughs at his own joke, and before long, all four of us
are swept up in our laughter together.
I wipe the tears from my eyes. “I
don’t get it. What’s the appeal? You can’t move your legs and you’ve got to
spend all your time trying to stay afloat in the water.”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Jason says. “It’s
a sex thing. He wants to get it on like he’s a fish.”
I slap him on the arm. “Jason!”
“Come on. What else can it be? The
guy’s a marine biologist, he loves marine life, he works in an aquarium; he’s
got a serious thing for fish.”
“Maybe he wants to do it with tuna?”
Darcy says.
Author Bio:Kate O'Keeffe is a bestselling author of fun, feel-good romantic comedies. She lives and loves in beautiful Hawke's Bay, New Zealand with her family, two scruffy dogs, and a cat who thinks he's a scruffy dog too. He's not: he's a cat. When she's not penning her latest story, Kate can be found hiking up hills (slowly), traveling to different countries, and eating chocolate. A lot of it.Visit kateokeeffe.com and sign up to her newsletter so you never miss out on new releases and great book deals again! Follow her on Bookbub to learn about deals on her books. Just cut and paste this link into your browser: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/kate-o-keeffe.
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