Mister Match (The Match Series Book 1) (28 page)

“That’s right,” Willow confirmed.

“And you said you read the birth charts of all her potential dates. I assume you did that to figure out whether they would be good matches for her or not. Except it sounds like they’ve all been terrible matches. I mean, I know I’ve been getting lots of bad press, myself. People are saying I’m a flop at relationships, my dating site doesn’t work, and whatever else they’ve come up with. So maybe I’m not exactly one to talk, but... It seems like you and Clare could have done a better job of matching Lisa up with at least a little higher caliber of men.”

Willow was silent.

Adam frowned. “I mean, couldn’t you tell that Jacob dude was sleazy from his messages, if not from his profile itself?”

“Of course, we could,” Willow said cheerfully.

He squinted. “So you knew he wasn’t all that great? And that Reese guy, too? You read these guys’ charts, exchanged messages with them, determined they would be bad matches for Lisa, and then told her to go for it?”

He was starting to feel pissed off on her behalf. What kind of friends were Willow and Clare, anyway? Didn’t they care about her at all?

And then, all in an instant, the light dawned. “Oh.
Oh.
You knew she wouldn’t go for those guys.”

“Well, of course, we didn’t know for certain. But let’s just say they were pretty safe bets,” Willow confirmed.

“You deliberately led her toward people you knew there was no chance she’d make a lasting connection with?” Adam sat still for a moment, trying to process the information. “I can’t believe you would do that. It’s so manipulative.”

“It may be manipulative,” Willow said quietly, “but I did it out of love. She’s my best friend. And she’d already found her match, before she ever started dating the Mister-Match guys. I just helped nudge her toward her fate, that’s all.”

His stomach sank. Lisa had already found her match. And sweet, calm, unassuming Willow had been playing manipulative matchmaker behind the scenes all along.

Lisa had said that Willow and Clare had appointed themselves her Fairy God-Cupids, but apparently they’d taken the job description to a whole new level.

“Even if I’d played perfectly fair,” Willow pointed out, “it wouldn’t have mattered. You two are made for each other. I knew that as soon as I saw you with her, that very first day at Indulgence.”

“Wait—what?”

“Adam,” Willow said. She sounded amused. “It was completely obvious from the beginning. Lisa met her match when she met you. And then seeing your birth chart only confirmed it.”

“You— I—” He felt utterly befuddled, as if his brain were full of cotton. Or maybe it was his ears. “You think I’m Lisa’s match?”

“Don’t you?”

“Well, yes—I mean, I think she’s mine—but relationships kind of go both ways. You both need to feel the same way if it’s going to go anywhere—” He stopped and shook his head. “Wait, did you say you read my astrological chart, too?”

“Of course. What kind of a friend do you think I am?” She sounded almost offended.

“Wow.” He considered astrology a crackpot science at best, but he couldn’t deny that hearing Willow say he and Lisa were meant for each other felt nothing short of amazing. “Wow. I’m not sure if I should be grateful for your support or scared of your deviousness. Lisa told me about you and Clare being her Fairy God-Cupids, but I never would have suspected you would take it to this level.”

“Don’t underestimate me,” she said simply, and then her voice hardened. “And understand that I’ve loved Lisa since long before you ever met her. If you hurt her, your ass is mine. And you can bet Clare will back me up on that.”

He would have laughed—he never would have expected sweet, dreamy Willow could be so hardcore—except she was dead serious, and he knew it. “Understood. And I promise, you have nothing to worry about.”

“Good. Now, we need to work fast.”

“Work fast?” He was still reveling in the feeling of having someone’s belief on his side. “Why?”

“Because Clare set up another date for Lisa,” Willow explained. “She did it without me, and it’s happening tomorrow. It’s a man named Roberto, and I just checked out his chart. It looks good, Adam. Lisa might actually like this one.”

“What?” He sat up straight, suddenly electrified with energy. “She’s going out with him tomorrow? But I can’t come back to Austin tomorrow. I’m supposed to go to San Francisco, and then get on a plane to D.C. to meet Corinne and Andre and plan their weekend.”

They were going to tour the Smithsonian before hitting the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial—highly touristy choices for a Dream Date, in Adam’s opinion, and not at all the most romantic ones. But where they went was the couple’s business, plus, it was beside the point.

“Then I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how it goes with Roberto,” Willow sighed.

Roberto.
He already hated the guy. He heaved a sigh as the untethered balloon his heart had been flying around on suddenly popped. “I don’t even know if she wants to see me.”

“Adam, would you mind if I offered you a little unsolicited advice?”

“Whatever, go ahead.” What could it hurt? He’d made such a mess of things on his own. He needed all the advice he could get.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Willow advised. “Lisa is in love with you. Obviously she wants to see you. Don’t make her wait any longer than she has to.”

Hearing her vote of confidence in Lisa’s feelings for him meant a lot... Except that, in the end, Willow’s opinion didn’t really matter. Only Lisa’s did.

Which was why Adam would take her advice, no matter what it cost him.

“I’ll be there,” he said.

Chapter
32

____________________________________

T
he dial tone on Lisa’s phone was in stutter-mode when she got home from work Friday afternoon, indicating a voicemail message was waiting for her. Her heart bumped up into her throat, despite herself.
Adam.
He’d called to ask her to join him in San Francisco for the next Dream Date.

Except, as she found when she listened to her voicemail, he hadn’t called. Clare had.

“Hey, girl. I’ve got a surprise for you, so call me! Ciao.”

Lisa frowned. She’d just seen Clare at work, an hour ago. And, a surprise? Whatever it was, she instinctively felt resistant to it. She punched the button to erase the message and then hung up the receiver.

Just then, the phone rang, making her jump.

It was Clare, again. “Good, I’m glad I caught you. We don’t have long.”

“Don’t have long for what?” Lisa kicked off her shoes and padded over to turn on the box fan before heading to the couch.

“My surprise for you,” Clare sang.

Unexpectedly, the old spot behind Lisa’s right eye gave a throb. She pushed a thumb against the brief pain. Funny; that hadn’t happened in weeks. “Can you please just tell me what you’re talking about? You’re giving me a headache.”

“Hey, you haven’t complained about your headaches in weeks.”

Lisa lay back on the couch, trying to pretend the air in the apartment was pleasantly cool rather than warm and muggy. “Yeah?”

“That’s very interesting,” Clare went on. “I think you stopped complaining about them right around when you met Adam Match.”

“That’s not true,” Lisa denied automatically.

“Whatever you say. Anyway, I have to work late tonight, but I have a break right now. Maybe I’d better just come over and tell you about my surprise in person.”

Lisa sighed, frustrated. “Fine. Come over. It’s not like I’m doing anything, anyway.”

Clare made the drive in eight minutes, which Lisa knew because she sat on her couch the entire time, staring at the blinking digital clock on her VCR. She’d done six massages that day, and hardly had any energy left. Besides, she felt weirdly depressed.

Every day she’d come home this week, she’d expected a call from Adam, and every day, she’d been disappointed.

She heard a brief knock at her apartment door, and then Clare walked in.

She looked around the room as if just the sight of it offended her. “Seriously,” she said, “don’t you think it’s about time to start using the A/C?” Shaking her head, she pushed the door shut behind her.

“I’m trying to save money on the utility bill.” Lisa’s head was really starting to throb. Maybe her friend had a point. A hot, stuffy apartment probably wasn’t helping.

Clare went to the kitchen and returned with two glasses of iced water. She handed one to Lisa, gave the couch the side-eye and sat down on the little armchair next to it. “All right. Tell me everything. What’s wrong?”

Lisa shook her head. “Nothing.”

“Bullshit. Try again.”

“Fine. I haven’t heard from Adam since last week. When I got your voicemail earlier, I thought it was going to be him. But it wasn’t. So now I feel kind of bummed out. Okay? Whatever your surprise is, it’d better be good, because I’m feeling crappier by the second.”

“Have you tried calling him?”

Lisa scowled. “Of course not. If he wanted to hear from me, he would have called me.”

“I thought you said he did call, last week. And you didn’t call him back.”

“What, you mean when he left me that voicemail at a time when he knew I’d be at work, telling me not to bother coming to New Orleans?” She gave a humorless snort. “He didn’t ask me to return his call, so I didn’t.”

Clare raised an eyebrow. “If you’re trying to play hard-to-get, you’re actually doing a really good job of it.”

Lisa gave her a look and then glanced away.

“He’s probably scared to call you again, anyway,” Clare pointed out.

“Why would he be scared?”

“Duh.” Clare sounded exasperated. “Because you’ve been dating other people.”

“I went on two dates,” Lisa said defensively. “Weeks ago.”

Clare cleared her throat, and said brightly, “Well, now you’ve got a third.”

Lisa’s stomach clenched. “Excuse me?”

“His name is Roberto.”

“I’m not going out with someone named Roberto.”

“Actually, you are.” Clare grinned. She didn’t even have the decency to look sheepish. “That’s my surprise for you. Since you’re not going to D.C. for the Dream Date this weekend, I set up a date for you to meet Roberto, tonight.” She checked her watch. “Actually, it’s a happy-hour thing, and you’re supposed to be there in about forty-five minutes. Come on, I’ll help you get dressed.” She stood and held out a hand as if to hoist Lisa up from the couch.

“Clare!” Lisa said—shrieked, really. “You can’t just blaze in here like this. This is too much! You can’t just message these random men and set up dates for me and just expect me to—to—” She stopped, unable to put into words the enormity of the not-right-ness of what her friend was doing.

Clare seemed completely unfazed. “Oh, you can handle it. Let’s go pick out something sexy for you to wear, because Roberto looks hotter than—”

“No!” Lisa sounded like a toddler having a tantrum, and she didn’t care. “This is not how I want to do things. Clare, you can’t keep doing this. God! I’ve been all hung up on Adam all week. All I want to do is talk to him, not go out with some asshole prick I’m not even going to like.”

“Have you ever heard that song that goes ‘If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with’?” Clare asked, completely unhelpfully.

Lisa shot her the dirtiest scowl she could muster.

“Willow said you and Roberto will be perfect together,” Clare added.

“Willow said that about the first two guys, and she was dead wrong.” Lisa plopped her head into her hands and muttered, “And besides, I’m already perfect with Adam.”

“But Adam’s not here, sweetie,” Clare said—rather gently, for her. “Roberto is. And any other guy on Mister-Match.com that you might want.”

“Except I don’t want any of the guys on Mister-Match, except Mister Match himself.” Lisa looked up at her friend gloomily. “I’m sorry. I can’t go out with Roberto. You’re going to have to cancel.”

Clare looked at her for a long beat and then sat down.

“Lisa,” she said, “it may be time for me to come clean about something.”

Lisa’s stomach clenched again with foreboding. “What?”

“Well...” Clare hedged. “Remember when Willow and I said we were your Fairy God-Cupids?”

She actually looked nervous. As far as Lisa knew, Clare was never nervous about anything.

Lisa sat up. “What did you do?”

“It wasn’t just me,” Clare said hurriedly. “It was also Willow. It was actually her idea. Although, I did go along with it.”

“Tell me everything,” Lisa ground out. “And don’t leave anything out.”

L
isa was going to kill Willow. Right after she killed Clare. But first, she had to meet Roberto.

No more lies, she thought as she drove downtown a half-hour later. No more false pretenses. Whoever this Roberto guy was, it wasn’t his fault he’d somehow had the crappy luck of getting matched up by a computer algorithm with a woman who had two of the most meddling best friends in the entire universe.

Actually, “meddling” didn’t even begin to describe what Clare and Willow had done.

“Matching me up,” she muttered, “on purpose, with guys they knew from the start I wouldn’t like.” She yanked Betty’s steering wheel to make a sharp right turn.

She needed to calm down. It wasn’t Betty’s fault; no sense in damaging her poor car just because she was monumentally pissed off. This wasn’t Roberto’s fault, either. And she was going to straighten this whole mess out, once and for all.

The
whole
mess. Start to finish. On the off-chance that any paparazzi happened to show up this evening, Lisa would tell them she had a statement to make, and she’d tell them the whole damn story, starting with Adam Match’s very first lie to the
Access Austin
interviewer, a month ago.

She squeezed Betty into a tiny spot on Fourth, grudgingly fed money into the parking meter—God, how she missed the good old days, when street parking was free after six p.m.—and then found Lotus, the bar where Clare had set up her tryst with Roberto.

She was beyond caring how this went. She hadn’t even changed her clothes or tried to look nice for it. Why should she? All she was here to do was set the record straight, and avoid leaving Roberto hanging. She saw no reason he should get hurt, just because Clare and Willow had no sense of what was and was not appropriate.

Even if he did turn out to be another sleazebag, like Jacob. Or another uptight bore, like Reese.

There was no tattooed bouncer waiting at the door of Lotus, which made the place a definite step up from her last date at the Sidecar. She walked right into the dim, blue, aquatic-themed interior, and immediately spotted a man who looked like an underwear model, aside from the negligible detail that he was fully clothed. She could see at first glance that he was well-built, muscular, tanned. He was dressed in black slacks and a cream-colored shirt, his dark hair was brushed back from a smoothly-shaven face, and he was smiling at her.

He stood, and his tentative grin widened. “Lisa? You’re even prettier than you look in your photos. I’m Roberto. It’s so great to meet you.”