A Perfectly Imperfect Match (Matchmaking Mamas) (6 page)

He glanced at his watch out of habit. When Jared saw the time, he frowned. He was far behind schedule and they hadn’t even gotten around to any of the specifics about the gig. “Look, can I call you later on tonight?” he wanted to know.

For just one isolated moment, she thought Jared was asking to call her on a social basis. But the next second, she knew that wasn’t possible. After all, he’d done nothing to indicate that he would be interested in seeing Elizabeth the woman instead of Elizabeth the violinist.

“Absolutely,” she told him with a bright smile. “I should be home for most of the evening.”

“Good, then I won’t get your answering machine again.” He shrugged, ever so slightly self-conscious. “As I mentioned before...I’m not really too keen on talking to machines.”

She laughed at the footnote he’d just tossed in her direction. He found the sound light, melodious and almost hypnotic.

“No worries... I’ll be sure to pick up,” she promised him, getting behind the wheel of her vintage car.

Jared stepped back, allowing her space to swing her door closed. “I’ll talk to you then,” he said.

Then, turning on his heel, he started retracing his steps to get to his own car, which was parked a good deal closer to the soundstage than Elizabeth’s was.

The fact that he fully expected to hear her car start up but didn’t had him stopping after about five steps and turning around.

He could see her frowning from where he stood. Frowning and going through the motions of starting her car up.

Still nothing.

Her beloved vintage car was apparently nonresponsive, no matter how many times she tried to get it to come back from the dead.

Chapter Four

J
ared stood watching her for a moment longer, thinking that Elizabeth’s car was just being temperamental. Some older models seemed to take their own sweet time starting up.

He was still waiting to hear her engine make the proper noises as he made his way back to the uncooperative Thunderbird.

“Problem?” he asked.

Elizabeth’s frown deepened as she pumped the gas pedal one more time and turned her key. Still nothing. She was also afraid that she was going to wind up flooding the engine.

Frustrated, she sank back in her seat. “Not if I don’t mind spending the night in the parking lot,” she responded.

Moving to the front of her vehicle, Jared looked down at her headlights and said, “Turn on your lights.”

She had no idea how that was going to help anything, but at this point she was willing to try anything. Shrugging, she did as he instructed.

“Now what?” she asked.

There wasn’t so much as a glimmer in either headlight.

The phrase “dead as a doornail” came to mind as he frowned at the vehicle.

“Now nothing, I’m afraid,” he told her. “Looks like your battery’s dead.”

Undaunted, she said hopefully, “Maybe we can jump it.” She slid out from behind the wheel. “I’ve got jumper cables in my trunk.”

Jared looked at her in surprise. He thought of that as being rather responsible for someone her age. He doubted if his sister even knew what jumper cables were. Experience taught you things like that.

“I take it this has happened before,” he assumed.

She inclined her head and made a vague gesture he couldn’t begin to interpret. “Once or twice. Or five,” she muttered under her breath.

He still heard it. “All right, I’ll go bring my car around and see what I can do.”

* * *

But apparently, at least on the outset, he could do nothing—although it certainly wasn’t for lack of trying.

Jared aligned his vehicle so that the two cars were literally nose to nose in the lot. Elizabeth took it from there. He was amazed at how expertly, not to mention quickly, she managed to hook up her car’s battery to his.

“Start yours first,” she urged as she got in behind the steering wheel in her car.

When the other engine hummed to life, Elizabeth pressed down on the gas pedal and turned the key, mentally crossing her fingers. She might as well not have bothered.

Her engine remained dormant.

There wasn’t so much as a feeble whimper coming from that region. Every spark of life in the battery had been utterly siphoned off.

Jared came around to her side of the two tethered vehicles and looked down at her battery. Usually, when a mechanic swapped out a battery, he would scratch out the month and year on the new one to indicate just when it had been pressed into service. He saw nothing but spots of corrosion on top of this battery.

“How old is it?” he asked, tapping the top of the battery where the dates should have been.

“Old” was all she said. Then, because he was apparently waiting for more, she added, “I’m not really sure.”

Jared tried another approach, hoping to jog her memory. “Have you put a new battery in since you bought the car?”

He saw a guilty look pass over her face in response to his question. A second later, she shook her head.

That answered that, he thought.

“Well,” he began with a slight, drawn-out drawl, “the good news is I think we’ve located your problem.”

Since he’d enunciated it like that, she braced herself before asking, “And the bad?”

“I’d say you definitely need a new battery, and most auto parts places are probably closed for the night by now.”

Fruitlessly trying to bring the battery around had taken them a while, and it was now after six.

Jared took out his smartphone and pressed a button to bring it back to life. The moment he did, his thumbs began to fly over the keyboard.

“Are you texting someone?” Actually, what she wanted to ask was
who
was he texting at a time like this.

It seemed to her a rather strange time to touch base with a friend. But then, on the other hand, why not? It was her car that had the problem, not his. He was perfectly free to do whatever he wanted, take off wherever he wanted.

“Just finding out if The Auto Mall is still open,” he explained, referring to a popular auto parts chain. Still looking, he pulled up the chain’s nearest location. The store hours were printed right underneath it. “It is,” he announced.

Where was he going with this? she wondered. “Is that good?”

“Only if you want to drive home tonight,” he told her glibly.

Taking a small notepad out of his other pocket, he jotted down the auto shop’s address and then stood looking thoughtfully at his phone for a moment.

“Give me a minute,” he told her. Turning his back on her, he hit one of the thirty preprogrammed numbers in his phone as he walked away.

Elizabeth watched him, wondering if he was calling a cab for her, or if the call even had anything to do with her dilemma.

Well, aren’t you the swell-headed one?

Why should his call have anything to do with me?
Elizabeth asked herself. It wasn’t as if the man was obligated to help her. Her car would have gone dead whether or not he had shown up today to catch her on-air performance.

She just hoped that this little mishap hadn’t cost her a job. After all she was definitely not at her best with this vehicle dead at her feet, and he might view her as a flighty female who wasn’t capable of staying on top of the simplest of things...like regular maintenance on her car.

In her defense, finding work these days was a full-time job in itself. All the other details of her life—like buying food or getting her car serviced—just had to be fit around her search as best as she could manage. Keeping tabs on the life of her battery, she thought ruefully as she glared at her nonresponsive vehicle, had just fallen through the cracks.

And now, she thought, taking out her own phone, she was paying for it.

She was about to call one of her brothers to ask for a ride home when the handsome stranger sent her way by the mysterious Theresa Manetti walked back up to her.

“All right,” he told her, “we’re all set.”

“All set?” she echoed. Just how was being stranded in a parking lot forty miles from home anything close to that?

He shot her a reassuring look. “The manager said he’d stay open for us, as long as we get there in the next twenty minutes.”

“Manager?” She was beginning to feel as if she’d slipped into some parallel universe where she’d landed the role of the village idiot, destined to repeat words that made no sense to her in their present context. “Manager of what?” she wanted to know.

“Manager of the vintage parts section in The Auto Mall,” he explained, then nodded toward his own car. “C’mon,” he urged. “Get in.”

Rather than comply, she remained where she was, trying to process what he was saying. “Wait, you’re driving to The Auto Mall?”

“Well, I left my helicopter in my other jacket,” he deadpanned, “so yes, I’m driving. The funny thing about batteries, they don’t come when you call them so we’re going to have to go and pick it up at the store.”

Why was he doing this? He didn’t even
know
her. And then something else struck her. “Didn’t you say you had a schedule to keep, or an appointment to go to?”

He’d just been on the phone, taking care of that little detail. The client was hooked on the campaign he’d pitched so there was little chance of losing him by temporarily postponing their meeting over drinks at McIntyre’s.

“Not anymore,” he told her. “I rescheduled.”

It still wasn’t making any sense to her. “But why?”

He got in behind the wheel and gestured for her to get in on the passenger side. “Let’s just say I’m a sucker for a damsel in distress,” he told her. “Now, are you going to get in, or are we just going to stand here and talk until the store closes?” he wanted to know.

“I’m getting in,” she answered, quickly doing just that.

But he didn’t immediately take off the way she’d expected him to. Instead, Jared paused a moment longer to input the address of the auto parts store into his GPS. Offhand, since this part of town wasn’t his usual haunt, he had no idea where the store was in relation to the studio.

Replacing the GPS into its stand on the dashboard, Jared started up his car.

Elizabeth held her tongue as long as she was able, which amounted to thirty seconds before it got the better of her. “You don’t know where the store is?” she asked him as they pulled out of the lot.

“No, I don’t,” he admitted. “But the GPS does,” he assured her, flashing a wide, bright smile at her.

She found the smile stirring, and his willingness to admit that he didn’t instinctively know how to find any place on the map more than admirable.

“Most men won’t ask for directions,” she pointed out, thinking of her father and brothers. Her brothers would rather go to their graves than admit to ignorance when it came to road travel. Her father, on the other hand, seemed to know where
everything
was and how to get there, so he had no need to ask. “They feel it somehow belittles their manhood.”

“Technically, I didn’t
ask
for directions,” he pointed out. “I just told Gloria to find the best way to get to The Auto Mall.”

“Gloria?” she echoed. Was that the name of some administrative assistant back in his office? Or did the name belong to a girlfriend?

And why would any of that even matter to her? Elizabeth silently demanded. Jared was a client—a
potential
client, she corrected herself. What he wasn’t was a potential hunk.

Well, actually, she corrected herself again, he was. But the point was that he wasn’t
her
potential hunk.

After all, what would she do with one of
those?
These days, what with her patchwork quilt of different gigs, she was having trouble finding the time to schedule an oil change for her car, much less anything else. When in heaven’s name would she possibly find the time for a man in her life?

“That’s what I call the GPS,” he told her wryly. “Mine has this female voice that sounds pretty peeved with me every time I opt to ignore one of her directions. I had a teacher like that in elementary school. Her name was Mrs. Reynolds. Mrs.
Gloria
Reynolds,” he emphasized. “She taught fourth grade, and it felt like nothing I ever did was right in her eyes. Every time I hear my GPS mutter ‘recalculating,’ I think of Mrs. Reynolds...so I just decided to call the GPS Gloria,” Jared told her.

She honestly didn’t know if Jared was being serious, or just pulling her leg. But whether he was or wasn’t, that didn’t change the fact that he was putting himself out for her.

She was grateful to him.

* * *

Manny Ramirez was just about to lock up the store for the night when a couple rushed his way.

“You the guy who called about a battery for his T-Bird?” he called out as they approached.

“It’s her Thunderbird,” Jared corrected, “but yeah, I’m the one who called.”

“Got it right over here,” the manager told them, beckoning them over to the last cash register. The battery was out of sight, stored beneath the counter. “Must be your lucky day,” he told Jared. Making his way around the counter, he hefted the battery and placed it on the counter beside the register.

“Because I caught you before you closed up?” Jared asked.

The man shook his head. “Because you got the last battery I had that’ll fit into the space under the hood. That’s not exactly a common model,” Manny told them as he rang up the sale. “Didn’t get too many requests for it so I stopped carrying them.” He patted the battery. “This was the last of its kind in the store. I’m not even sure if the other auto shops have it. It’s usually a special-order item.”

“Then I guess we really are lucky,” Jared agreed, glancing at Elizabeth.

She already had her credit card out and handed it over to the manager. “We really appreciate you staying open for us.”

“Hey, anytime. Nothing waiting for me at home but a wife who starts complaining the minute I walk through the door,” he told them with a sigh. Taking the credit card, Manny glanced at the back to make sure it was signed. Satisfied, he swiped the magnetic strip through the card reader next to the register.

Elizabeth waited until it asked for her signature, then did the best she could to make it look legible, not an easy feat with something that resembled an Etch A Sketch.