Mister Match (The Match Series Book 1) (21 page)

“Yeah, yeah,” Dan said, and shut up and listened.

“So they both showed up at the registration desk,” Adam continued. “According to Ellen, Orlando cut in front of Valeria and managed to check in first, which upset her, and they ended up having words. James told me she called him an inconsiderate jackass, and he called her dumber than a stump, and then she called him a douche canoe—”

“Douche canoe?” Dan interrupted. “What—is that even a thing?”

Adam’s snort of a laugh burbled out of nowhere. “I have no idea. I think we’re getting old, man.”

“I’ll say,” Dan grumbled. “Douche canoe? Seriously? Whatever happened to just calling someone an asshole?”

“Well, get this one—I guess at some point Orlando ended up saying Valeria was a line Nazi, and then apparently he called her Adolf Titler.”

“Adolf Titler?” Dan hooted. “I’m totally using that next time Rachel’s getting on my ass about how I fold the towels wrong.”

Adam snorted again. “Anyway, that’s basically it. They met, hated each other at first sight, traded some choice insults, and the Dream Date crashed and burned before it ever got off the ground.”

“And it was all captured on video,” Dan added glumly. “Better make sure that footage never gets out.”

A creepy sense of foreboding slid up Adam’s spine. “Good point,” he said. “I’ll see to it.”

Chapter
24

____________________________________

L
isa reached out and patted Adam’s arm lamely. She just wished there were more she could do. She didn’t know much about the Mister-Match system—except that, so far, it hadn’t worked for this weekend’s Dream Date couple, or for her, either—and she hadn’t met Orlando and Valeria. She hadn’t even gotten the whole story yet about what had gone wrong. All she’d accomplished since hearing Adam’s voicemails was locating him in the hotel bar, where he was sitting and nursing a beer.

She’d taken the barstool next to his. “Look,” she said now, “there are probably plenty of couples that the Mister-Match thing doesn’t work for. It can’t work for everyone.”

He shot her a dreary look.

“What I mean is,” she hurried on, “there is no perfect system, Adam. Not even yours. No matter how good it is, it’s not going to work for everybody. You’ve just had the bad luck of having it fall flat for a Dream Date couple, so you’re personally invested.”
Literally,
she thought, thinking of the camera crew he’d brought along, the hotel rooms he’d reserved, not to mention herself—the in-house massage therapist, meant to relax the happy couple into their blissful new relationship, while conveniently providing independent interview time for each half of the couple.

Now, none of the above were needed. This would be an expensive weekend for Adam Match, to say the least. It could also lead to further bad press for the site, Lisa knew, if word got out to the right sources.

Adam was eyeing her with baleful blue eyes. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

She squeezed his arm. “I’m trying to say, don’t beat yourself up about it. Crap happens. Maybe—” She shrugged, casting around for something, anything. “Maybe Valeria thought Orlando had bad breath. Maybe he didn’t like her clothes. You know? People can react against other people based on the tiniest little things.” She glanced at Adam’s half-empty pint glass. “If you don’t mind my asking, how many of those have you had so far?”

He eyed it with mild distaste. “Just this one. I’m not even going to finish it. I thought getting a buzz on might help, but I don’t think it really has.”

Why did she find that adorable—that he’d tried to drown his sorrows, and failed?

“Hey, you’ve had a crummy day so far,” she said. “I think you’re entitled to an early drunk if you want one. And you know what they say about drinking alone.” Adjusting herself on the barstool to get more comfortable, she raised a hand to signal the bartender.

Adam squinted for a moment. “If you drink alone, it means you’re an alcoholic?”

“Close, but no. If you’re going to drink alone, it’s always more fun to do it with a friend.” She flashed him a grin as she fished a ten-dollar bill out of her bag and ordered her own pint.

“Wait.” Adam put out a hand to still hers. “This is my treat. Put that on my tab, please,” he said to the bartender.

The man nodded and, a moment later, brought Lisa a tall, frosty glass of amber-colored beer.

“Cheers.” Adam tapped his glass against hers and took another gulp. “Drinking alone, with a friend. Makes sense to me. So.” He raised his eyebrows at her. “You come here often?”

The joke was silly and overused, but it made Lisa laugh anyway. “This is my first time.”

“Count yourself lucky, then, running into the likes of me. I’m a successful entrepreneur with my own dating site. Maybe you’ve heard of it. We match up couples who despise each other at first sight.” He flashed her a big, fake smile, making her laugh again.

Then she glanced around. “Yikes. Speaking of running into people, I hope we don’t see my ex again today. That would just be the icing on the cake.”

“Yeah,” Adam agreed with feeling. “Although maybe I should thank him.”

“For what?”

He shrugged, and the look he gave her was both heated and intimate. “For last night.”

She felt his hand run down her thigh beneath the bar counter, sending warmth through the thin fabric of her pants. He lowered his voice. “It was really amazing for me. I hope it was for you, too.”

Her cheeks heated as she ducked her head. She wasn’t sure how to answer. Not knowing the parameters of their new connection made her uncomfortable. It was hard to tell, moment to moment, whether Adam was treating her with such solicitous intimacy because of their false engagement, or because there was truly something developing between them—something real.

And even more than any of that, what he’d just said rankled—the insinuation that what had happened between them last night had had anything at all to do with their run-in with Rodney. As if she’d been in a vulnerable state that had made her more susceptible to his attentions.

Which was completely untrue. Wasn’t it?

Whether it was or wasn’t, addressing it could wait. Instead, she changed the subject. “Tell me what happened with the Dream Date couple.”

He did. At the “Adolf Titler” part of the story, Lisa couldn’t stop herself from hooting with laughter.

Adam dropped his head into his palms. “I can’t laugh at any of it. I’m too depressed.”

“It’s okay, I’ll laugh for the both of us.” She wiped her eyes. “So there they are, calling each other ridiculous names, and they don’t even know they’re supposed to go on a date thirty minutes later?”

“You got it. And then the hotel manager got involved, and he was apparently on the verge of kicking them both out, when they finally put it together that they were, in fact, here to meet each other and fall in love. And Ellen, from the video crew, caught the whole thing on camera.” He let out a long breath and shook his head. “It’s like a bad MTV reality show.”

“Yeah,” Lisa agreed. She took a sip of her beer. “So, I guess this means no AstroWorld.”

“Nope,” Adam confirmed, glumly.

There went her first Dream Date weekend. She felt strangely disappointed that she wouldn’t be giving any massages or offering advice, as she had to Deb Wayson last weekend, on how to handle a blind date.

After a few moments of sitting quietly while Adam stared broodingly into space, she sat up straighter. “I guess I should go pack up my things.”

He looked at her and blinked. “No. Why?”

“The Dream Date’s over.”

“Sure, but we still have another night booked in the room.”

Lisa blinked. “We can’t stay in this expensive hotel if there’s no reason to be here.”

Adam raised a dark eyebrow, just the slightest bit suggestively. “Are you saying you don’t want to be here with me?”

She felt heat rise up her cheeks again. “I—it’s—I mean, do you think staying another night would be best for the company, as far as our relationship goes?” She cleared her throat. “I mean, we’re supposedly on the outs right now. I supposedly cheated on you. And you said maybe we could use that to segue into...into our breakup.”

Even mentioning their fake-breakup made her strangely unhappy.

Apparently, Adam felt the same way. He briefly closed his eyes, as if the whole thing made him tired. “You know, if I had it to do again,” he said meditatively, “I wouldn’t be Mister Match. I’d hire some good-looking guy to do a photo shoot, make him be Mister Match, so I could be anonymous. Then we wouldn’t have to do any of this crap—fake-engagement, fake-breakup, none of it.”

“But if you weren’t the face of Mister-Match.com,” Lisa said slowly, “you couldn’t do all the marketing stuff. All the talk shows and interviews. You couldn’t travel around doing this whole Dream Date marketing plan.” As she put it into words, she understood the conundrum even better than she already had.

“That’s right. I could do radio spots and print interviews. But that’s about it.” He sighed. “Anyway, no use wishing things were different now.”

There was a moment of silence as they both sat there, rather gloomily.

Then Adam straightened, turned to her and shook his head. “No. This is ridiculous.” He raised a finger. “And you were absolutely right.”

Lisa sat up straighter, too. “I was? About what?”

“About the fact that crap happens. And the fact that we don’t need to stay in this expensive hotel, now that the Dream Date’s off. This was Orlando and Valeria’s dream date, not ours.” He pushed his beer glass away, though it wasn’t yet empty. “And we aren’t letting this weekend go to waste.”

Sliding off his barstool, he took Lisa’s hand. “Come on. Let’s go pack. I know exactly what we’re going to do.”

“G
alveston’s only an hour away.” Adam couldn’t help but talk excitedly as he signed the bill for the rooms. “We’ll get a room in some little motel right on the beach, get some shrimp, some beer. We can take a nighttime swim in the Gulf.” He grinned at Lisa. “Ever gone to the beach at night?”

“Never. Galveston?” she repeated, sounding dubious. “I’ve never even been there before.”

“Never been to Galveston?” He thanked the receptionist and then squinted at Lisa. “Where did you say you’re from, again?”

She laughed, a full-throated sound, and he took a second just to watch her. He loved looking at her—at those dark, pretty eyes, that thick, glossy hair he just wanted to run his fingers through. She was wearing a sleeveless shirt the color of merlot today, and he could just see where the lines of her bra ran under it.

Feeling a little bit like a pervert, he tried not to look.

“I grew up in Smithville,” she told him. “It’s a little town east of Austin. Why?”

“I know Smithville. And I grew up less than half my life in Texas, but I’ve still been to Galveston. Next you’re going to tell me you’ve never been to Mexico.”

“I have too,” she said defensively. “I’ve been to Nuevo Laredo a bunch of times.”

Now it was his turn to laugh. “That’s not Mexico. That’s still just south Texas.”

She raised her eyebrows and gave his arm a playful smack. “Try telling that to the people who live there.”

“Okay, okay, point taken.” He winked, hefted her massage bag against her protests, and moved through the lobby toward the door. “Let’s go see if James feels like taking a drive to the beach.”

“I’m not sure this is such a great idea,” she said, hesitating. “Maybe I should just get back to Austin.”

“You already took the weekend off, right? And you aren’t planning to be home until tomorrow. So think of this as a paid vacation. When’s the last time you took a vacation?”

“It’s been way too long,” she admitted.

He struck a gallant pose, gave a half-bow. “Then do me the honor of letting me treat you to a night at the beach.”

She chewed at her bottom lip, but only for a second. “Well, if you put it that way.” She smiled giddily up at him, and something inside him unfurled.

They were going to have a romantic little mini-vacation—just the two of them.

They stepped outside and were met with a blast of humid heat and sun. It took only a moment to spot James’s sleek, dark sedan. “This way.” Adam gestured for Lisa to walk ahead of him. “James,” he called out, “how goes it?”

Once they were at the car, Adam fished in his pocket for his cell. “I’m going to shut this thing down until tomorrow.” Powering down the phone gave him an instant sense of freedom. “You’re the only person I want to talk to for the next twenty-four hours.”

Lisa’s cheeks went a pretty shade of pink as she shook her hair back from her shoulders. “Thank you,” she said to James, who had taken her bag and her massage table and managed to fit both into the yawning trunk of the car. She turned back to Adam. “Are you sure that’s a good idea? Turning off your phone? I mean, is everything all settled with the Dream Date couple? They went home, and everything?”

“Yep, after I smoothed things over as well as I could, and gave them each free six-month memberships to Mister Match,” he told her. “And gift certificates to a couple restaurants and hotels.”

“A little severance package.” Lisa nodded. “Good idea. It’s truly not your fault, you know. Or the Mister-Match system’s fault. Sometimes things just don’t work out the way we hope.”

He stared out at the busy street for a moment. “Logically, I guess I know that’s true. This is just the way it went, and I can’t do anything about it. I mean, every Dream Date couple signs a contract before they ever go on the date, stating they understand the website isn’t responsible for the success or failure of their love lives, et cetera, et cetera.”

They slid into the cool, dark privacy of the sedan’s back seat, and he closed the door. The car was blessedly quiet and dim, and he sighed as he let his head fall back against the leather seat. “I know I’ve done everything I can.” He glanced at Lisa and, without thinking, ran his hand beneath hers, where it rested on the seat between them. He laced their fingers together and gave hers a light squeeze. “Now I just have to convince my lovely and gorgeous traveling companion to indulge me by spending the night in the Queen City of the Gulf.”

She was staring at their joined hands, and he found himself thinking, for about the thousandth time, of the night before.

From the very first time he’d laid eyes on her, he’d wanted to touch her. The fact that their first encounter had involved her putting her hands all over him hadn’t helped curb his interest any.