The Bookworm's Guide to Dating

never made a girl orgasm, was he?
I was regretting this already. I had no idea what I was thinking, offering to help her date people.
For fuck’s sake, I’d had a crush on the girl for years.
A pathetic little loser crush that I’d never acted on because her brother was my best friend.
Maybe this would help me get over the crush. It was the only thing I had to hold onto right now, because fuck knows why I’d put myself in this position.
I’d lost my damn mind.
That was all I had.
I had no idea how to matchmake Kinsley. I had no idea how to matchmake anyone at all. I’d never done it in my life, yet she was now expecting me to find her future husband.
On the fucking internet.
Who found their husband or wife on the internet?
Although, in White Peak, you probably had a better chance of it than meeting them in the bar.
It wasn’t exactly hopping here.
But that was the way I liked it.
I peered around at our work site. It was my break so I had a legitimate reason to be spending the next fifteen minutes on my phone, but that didn’t mean I was going to enjoy it.
I logged into Kinsley’s dating account on Stupid Cupid and checked the messages. Much to my chagrin, there were fifteen new messages since this morning when I’d last looked.
This was going to be a lot of work.
The first three guys didn’t fit her parameters at all. One was a pro snowboarder, and I’d never once seen Kinsley do anything other than grumble about mushy snow, much less do sports in it. The other two were just your everyday guys who were a one in a million.
A bit like me.
If that wasn’t a fucking kick in the teeth…
I deleted their messages and moved on to the next. He was a potential match—he was an electrician and liked to read sci-fi and dystopian novels.
Whatever the hell a dystopian novel was.
His profile didn’t show where he lived, but he otherwise lined up exactly with what Kinsley was looking for. I sent him a message explaining who I was and asking where he lived, then moved on.
By the time I was done, I’d identified three possible dates for her and become more than a little acquainted with some self-loathing.
The door to the trailer swung open and Colton walked in, blowing out a long breath. “Why do you look like your puppy just died?”
I blinked at him. “I’m tired,” I lied. “Why do you look like a dust storm threw up on you?”
“Fucking new kid.”
Ah. Yeah. Our newest recruit to the building site was inexperienced, but he made mistakes not many people who were actually builders would make. I was starting to wonder if he knew what he was doing at all.
It was becoming tiresome.
Colton fired up the coffeemaker and held up a mug in question. When I nodded, he put my mug under the machine first and fixed my coffee before he did his.
“What are you doing in here?” He sat down opposite me at the table and peered at my phone. “A dating site? Since when did you use fucking dating apps?”
“It’s your sister’s,” I said dryly. “I agreed to help her find a date, remember?”
Colt wrinkled his face up. “I thought you were kidding when you told me that.”
“Evidently not.”
“Have you found anyone?”
“Three possibilities,” I replied. “But I’m not showing you. She gave me specific guidelines, and I’m sticking to them.”
He stared at me. “If you set her up with a fucking idiot—”
“Give me some credit, man. I don’t want to see her with an idiot either. She’s already got you for a brother; she’s idioted out.”
He reached over and slugged me in the arm. “Fuck you. We both know that most of the guys around here are assholes.”
“Yeah, well, none of these guys are from White Peak. They’re all nearby towns,” I explained. “They fit what she wants. She gave me some fucking tight parameters to work within, I’ll tell you that much.”
“Are you surprised?”
“No. Kinsley would eat romance novels if they’d give her the necessary nutrition to survive.”
“Exactly. She knows what she wants but, buddy, I’m not sure those men exist outside of the books she reads.”
I shrugged and checked the messages again. “Whatever it is, I’m gonna try and get her a date and if I fail, it’s down to her. She said she wants to date more this year.”
“I know what she said, but do you really think it’ll go well? Don’t get me wrong, I love my sister, but she’s a dating disaster. You could do a Meghan Markle and marry her off to a prince, but that doesn’t mean it’s gonna go well.”
“Well, that didn’t go well, either.”
“I have no idea. I’m not even sure that’s her name.”
I snorted. “My sister is obsessed with the British Royals. It’s painful when we have a family dinner.”
And that was no lie. My youngest sister, Piper, was twenty-six, and she’d grown up with Kinsley and the other girls. She was the only one who’d left White Peak and was currently living in Vegas. She was working as a promoter while she saved up enough money to open her own bakery.
“I really don’t care about those,” Colt mused. “But Kinsley is an introvert, Josh, you know that. She’s awkward and nervous and all that other shit, which is why her dating life doesn’t exist.”
He was saying this like I didn’t already know. Like I hadn’t considered this before I went ahead and said I’d help her.
All right, I fucking hadn’t, but Colt didn’t know that.
“Yeah, I know,” I said as I deleted a message from a guy who lived across the state line in North Dakota, at least two hours away from us on a good day. There was another guy from Canada, but she’d already told me she wasn’t into border control being necessary for a date, so I blew him off, too.
“I think you’ve lost your mind,” Colt said