Match Me If You Can

  Her composure dissolved. “I’m your matchmaker!”

  “Right. A matchmaker. You didn’t have to swear a Hippocratic oath to get your business card.”

  “You know exactly what I mean.”

  “You’re single; I’m single. It wouldn’t have been the end of the world if we’d seen this through.”

  She couldn’t believe she’d heard him right. “It would have been the end of my world.”

  “I was afraid of this.”

  His mildly exasperated air pushed her over the edge, and she stomped toward him. “I should never have let you come with me this weekend! I knew it was a bad idea from the beginning.”

  “It was a great idea, and no harm’s been done. We’re two healthy, unattached, reasonably sane adults. We have fun together, and don’t even try to deny that.”

  “Yeah, I’m a great buddy, all right.”

  “Believe me, tonight I wasn’t thinking of you as a buddy.”

  That threw her totally off stride, but she recovered quickly. “If another woman had been around, this would never have happened.”

  “Whatever you’re trying to say, just spit it out.”

  “Come on, Heath. I’m not blond, leggy, or stacked. I was the default setting. Even my ex-fiancé never said I was sexy.”

  “Your ex-fiancé wears lipstick, so I wouldn’t take that to heart. I promise, Annabelle, you’re very sexy. That hair…”

  “Do not start in on my hair. I was born with it, okay. It’s like making fun of someone with a birth defect.”

  She heard him sigh. “We’re talking about simple physical attraction brought on by some moonlight, a little dancing, and too much liquor,” he said. “Do you agree that’s what this is?”

  “I guess.”

  “Basic physical attraction.”

  “I suppose.”

  “I don’t know about you,” he said, “but it’s been a long time since I’ve had such a good time.”

  “Okay, I’ll admit it was fun. The dancing,” she added hastily.

  “Damned right it was. So we got a little carried away. Nothing more than circumstances, right?”

  Pride and self-respect dictated that she agree. “Of course.”

  “Circumstances …and a little animal instinct.” His huskier pitch began to sound almost seductive. “Nothing to get worked up about. Are you with me?”

  He was throwing her off stride, but she nodded.

  He moved closer, his gravelly whisper a rasp over her skin. “Perfectly understandable, right?”

  “Right.” She was still nodding, almost as if he’d mesmerized her.

  “Are you sure?” he whispered.

  She kept nodding, no longer remembering exactly what the question was.

  His eyes gleamed in the moonlight. “Because that’s the only way …you can explain something like this. Pure animal attraction.”

  “Uh-huh,” she managed, beginning to feel like a bedazzled, bobble-headed doll.

  “Which sets us free”—he touched her chin, the barest brush—“to do exactly what neither of us can stop thinking about, right?” He dropped his head to kiss her.

  The night wind hummed; her heart pounded. Just before his lips touched hers, his eyelids flickered, and she glimpsed the faintest hint of cunning loitering in those green irises. That’s when it hit her.

  “You snake!” She pushed against his chest.

  He stepped back, all wounded innocence. “I don’t deserve that.”

  “Ohmygod! You’ve just put me through Sales 101. I bow to the master.”

  “You’ve had way too much to drink.”

  “The Great Salesman asks just the right questions to get his mark agreeing with everything he says. He makes her nod her stupid head until it feels like it’s coming off her neck. Then he dives in for the kill. You just tried to make a sale!”

  “Have you always been this suspicious?”

  “This is so you.” She stomped toward the path, then spun back because she had so much more to say. “You want something you know is totally outrageous, and then you try to sell it with a combination of leading questions and fake sincerity. I just watched the Python in action, didn’t I?”

  He knew she had his number, but he didn’t believe in conceding defeat. “My sincerity’s never fake. I was stating the facts. Two single people, a warm summer night, a hot kiss …We’re only human.”

  “One of us, anyway. The other’s a reptile.”

  “Harsh, Annabelle. Very harsh.”

  She advanced on him again. “Let me ask you a question, one business owner to another.” She planted her fingernail in his chest. “Have you ever had sex with a client? Is that acceptable professional behavior in your book?”

  “My clients are men.”

  “Stop weaseling. What if I were a world champion figure skater on my way to the Olympics? Let’s say I’m a favorite for the gold medal, and I just signed you as my agent last week. Are you going to have sex with me or not?”

  “We only signed last week? That seems a little—”

  “Fast-forward, then, to the Olympics,” she said with exaggerated patience. “I’ve won the stupid medal. Only the silver, since I couldn’t land my triple axel, but nobody cares because I’m a charmer, and they still want my face on their breakfast cereal. You and I have a contract. Are you sleeping with me?”

  “It’s apples and oranges. In the case you describe, millions of dollars would be at stake.”

  She made a rude buzzer noise. “Wrong answer.”

  “True answer.”

  “Because your megabusiness is so much more important than my silly little matchmaking agency? Well, it might be to you, Mr. Python, but it’s not to me.”

  “I understand how important your business is to you.”

  “You don’t have a clue.” Pinning the blame on him felt so much better than assuming her rightful share, and she stomped back to the picnic table to grab the flashlight. “You’re just like my brothers. Worse! You can’t stand having anybody say no to you about anything.” She thrust the flashlight toward him. “Well, listen up, Mr. Champion. I am not somebody you can pass the time with while you wait for your spectacular future wife to show up. I won’t be your sexual entertainment.”

  “You’re insulting yourself,” he said calmly. “I may not be crazy about all of your business practices, but I have nothing except respect for you as a person.”

  “Great. Watch me build on that.”

  She turned on her heel and stalked off.

  Heath gazed after her as she disappeared into the trees. When he could no longer see her, he picked up a stone, skipped it over the dark water, and smiled. She couldn’t have been more right. He was a snake. And he was ashamed of himself. Okay, maybe not at this exact instant, but by tomorrow for sure. His only excuse was that he liked her so damned much, and he hadn’t done anything just for fun in longer than he could remember.

  Still, trying to nail a friend was a rotten thing to do. Even a sexy friend, although she didn’t seem too clear about that, which made the effect of those mischievous eyes and the swirl of that amazing hair all the more enticing. Still, if he was going to blow his training for marital fidelity, he should have done it with one of the women at Waterworks, not with Annabelle, because she was right. How could she sleep with him then introduce him to other women? She couldn’t, they both knew it, and since he never wasted his time supporting an unsupportable position, he couldn’t imagine why he’d done it tonight. Or maybe he could.

  Because he wanted his matchmaker naked …and that definitely wasn’t part of his plan.

  Heath slept on the porch that night and awakened the next morning to the sound of the front door closing. He rolled over and squinted at his watch. It was a few minutes before eight, which meant Annabelle was heading off to meet the book club for breakfast. He rose from the mattress he’d dragged out to the porch for the best night’s sleep he’d experienced in weeks, a hell of a lot better than tossing and turning in his e
mpty house.

  The men had a round of golf scheduled. As he showered and dressed, he went over the events of the previous night and reminded himself to mind the manners he’d worked so hard to acquire. Annabelle was his friend, and he didn’t screw over friends, figuratively or literally.

  He drove to the public course with Kevin but ended up sharing a golf cart with Dan Calebow. Dan kept himself in great shape for a man in his forties. With the exception of a few character lines, he didn’t look all that different from his playing days when his steely eyes and cold-blooded determination on the field had earned him the nickname Ice. Dan and Heath had always gotten along well, but whenever Heath mentioned Phoebe, as he did that morning, Dan always said pretty much the same thing.

  “When two hardheaded people get married, they learn to pick their battles.” Dan spoke softly so he didn’t distract Darnell, who was lining up his tee shot. “This one’s all yours, pal.”

  Darnell hooked his ball into the left rough, and the discussion returned to golf, but later, as they were riding down the fairway, Heath asked Dan if he missed his head coaching job, which he’d left for the front office.

  “Sometimes.” As Dan checked the scorecard, Heath spotted one of those rub-on tattoos on the side of his neck. A baby blue unicorn. Pippi Tucker’s handiwork. “But I have a great consolation prize,” Dan went on. “I get to watch my kids grow up.”

  “A lot of coaches have kids.”

  “Yeah, and their wives are raising them. Being president of the Stars is a big job, but I can still get the kids off to school in the mornings and be at the dinner table most nights.”

  Right now, Heath couldn’t see anything too exciting about either activity, but he took it on faith that someday he might.

  He finished the round only three shots behind Kevin, which wasn’t bad, considering his own twelve handicap. They turned in their carts, and then the six of them headed into the clubhouse’s private room for lunch. It was a dingy space with cheap paneling, battered tables, and what Kevin insisted were the best cheese-burgers in the county. After a couple of bites, Heath found himself agreeing.

  They were enjoying replaying their round when, out of nowhere, Darnell decided he had to spoil it. “It’s time to talk about our book,” he said. “Did everybody read it like you was supposed to?”

  Heath nodded along with the rest of them. Last week Annabelle had left him a message with the title of the novel all the men were supposed to read, the story of a group of mountain climbers. Heath didn’t get to read for pleasure much anymore, and he’d enjoyed having an excuse. When he’d been a kid, the public library had been his refuge, but once he’d hit high school, he’d gotten wrapped up in the demands of working two jobs, playing football, and studying for the straight As that would put the Beau Vista Trailer Park behind him forever. Reading for fun had gone by the wayside, along with a lot of other simple pleasures.

  Darnell rested an arm on the table. “Anybody want to start the ball rolling?”

  There was a long silence.

  “I liked it,” Dan finally said.

  “Me, too,” Kevin offered.

  Webster held up his hand to order another Coke. “It was pretty interesting.”

  They stared at one another.

  “Good plot,” Ron said.

  An even longer silence fell.

  Kevin made some accordion folds in a straw wrapper. Ron messed with the saltshaker. Webster looked around for his Coke. Darnell tried again. “What did you think about the way the men reacted to their first night on the mountain?”

  “Pretty interesting.”

  “It was okay.”

  Darnell took his literature seriously, and storm clouds were gathering in his eyes. He shot Heath a menacing look. “You got anything to say?”

  Heath set down his burger. “Combining adventure, irony, and unabashed sentimentality is always tricky to pull off, especially in a novel with such a strong central conceit. We ask ourselves, where is the conflict? Man v. nature, man v. man, man versus himself? A fairly complex exploration of our modern sense of disconnection. Bleak undertones, comic high notes. It worked for me.”

  That cracked ’em all up. Even Darnell.

  Finally, they quieted down. Webster got his Coke, Dan found a fresh bottle of ketchup, and the discussion turned right back to where everybody except Darnell wanted it to be.

  Football.

  After lunch, the book club took a walk around the campground and continued their discussion of the biographies of the famous women they’d read. Annabelle had dug into both Katharine Graham’s and Mary Kay Ash’s books. Phoebe had concentrated on Eleanor Roosevelt, Charmaine on Josephine Baker, Krystal on Coco Chanel. Janine had read several biographies of cancer survivors, and Sharon had explored the life of Frida Kahlo. Molly, predictably, had chosen Beatrix Potter. As they talked, they related the women’s lives to their own, looked for common themes, and examined each woman’s survival skills.

  After their walk, they returned to Kevin and Molly’s private gazebo. Janine began setting out an assortment of old magazines, catalogs, and art supplies. “We did this in my cancer support group,” she said. “It was pretty revealing. We’re going to cut out words and pictures that appeal to us and assemble them into individual collages. When we’re done, we’ll talk about them.”

  Annabelle knew a land mine when she saw one, and she was very careful what she chose. Unfortunately, not careful enough.

  “That man looks a lot like Heath.” Molly pointed to a hunky model in a Van Heusen shirt Annabelle had pasted in the upper left corner of her poster.

  “He does not,” Annabelle protested. “He represents the kind of male clients I want Perfect for You to attract.”

  “What about that bedroom furniture?” Charmaine pointed out a Crate & Barrel sleigh bed. “And the little girl and the dog?”

  “They’re on the other side of the paper. Professional life. Personal life. Totally separate.”

  Luckily, the dessert tray arrived just then, so they stopped interrogating her, but even a slab of lemon cake didn’t stop her from lambasting herself for last night. Had she been born stupid or was this a skill she’d worked to acquire? And one more night stretching in front of her…

  Twinz!”

  Heath winced as he spotted the pint-size demon from the blue lagoon clomping toward him through the sand in a polka-dot bathing suit, her red rubber boots, and a baseball cap that came down so far over her ears only the curly ends of her blond hair peeked out from beneath. He grabbed the newspaper from under his beach chair and pretended not to see her.

  The guys had played a couple of games of pickup basketball after lunch, then Heath had gone back to the cottage to make some phone calls. Afterward, he’d pulled on his trunks and headed for the beach, where they were supposed to meet the women later for a swim before they all headed to town for dinner. Despite the time he’d spent on the phone, he’d started to feel as though this really was a vacation.

  “Twinz?”

  He pulled the newspaper closer to his face, hoping Pippi would go away if he ignored her. She was unpredictable, and that made him uncomfortable. Who knew what she’d come up with next? Off to his left, Webster and Kevin tossed a Frisbee with some of the kids who were staying at the campground. Darnell lay on a Mickey Mouse beach towel, engrossed in a book. Small, sandy fingers tapped Heath’s arm. He turned a page.

  “Twinz?”

  He kept his eyes on the headlines. “No twins here.”

  She tugged on the leg of his swim trunks and said it for the fourth time, except this time it sounded like pwinz, and that’s when he got it. Prince. She was calling him Prince. And wasn’t that just cuter than crap?

  He peered at her around the side of the paper. “I didn’t bring my phone.”

  She beamed at him and patted her little round stomach. “I got a baby.”

  He dropped the paper and looked frantically around for her father, but Kevin was showing a skinny kid with a bad haircut h
ow to get more mileage from the Frisbee.

  “Hey, Pip.”

  He whipped around to the sound of a familiar female voice and saw the cavalry walking toward him in the form of his sexy little matchmaker, delectably dressed in a modestly cut white bikini. A rainbow-colored plastic heart gathered the material between her breasts into pleats, and a second heart, this one larger and printed directly on the fabric, nested next to her hip. He couldn’t see a hard edge or sharp angle anywhere. She was all pliant curves and soft contours: narrow shoulders, nipped waist, round hips, and thighs that she, being a woman, undoubtedly thought were too fat, but he, being a man, judged extremely nuzzle-able.

  “Belle!” Pippi squealed.

  He swallowed. “I’ve never been happier to see a person in my life.”

  “Why’s that?” Annabelle stopped next to his chair but refused to look directly at him. She hadn’t forgotten about last night, which was fine with him. He didn’t want her to forget, proving her point that he was a snake, but not an unredeemable one. As much as he’d enjoyed himself—and he’d definitely enjoyed himself—there’d be no repeat performance. He was bad, but not that bad.

  “Guess what?” Pippi went through the stomach-rubbing routine again. “I got a baby in my tummy.”

  Annabelle looked interested. “No kidding? What’s its name?”

  “Daddy.”

  Heath winced. “That’s why.”

  Annabelle laughed. Pippi sprawled in the sand and picked at a dab of blue polish on her big toe. “Pwinz don’t have his phone.”

  Annabelle sat in the sand next to her, looking puzzled. “I don’t understand.”

  Pippi patted Heath’s calf with a sandy hand. “Pwinz. He don’t have his phone.”

  Annabelle gazed up at him. “I understand about the phone part, but what’s that other thing she’s saying?”

  Heath gritted his teeth. “Prince. That’s me.”

  Annabelle grinned and hugged the little troublemaker, who launched into a monologue about how Daphne the Bunny used to come into her bedroom and play but wouldn’t come anymore because Pippi was too big. As Annabelle tilted her head to listen, her hair brushed his thigh, and he nearly jumped out of his chair.