Mister Match (The Match Series Book 1) (3 page)

Lisa squinted at her quizzically. Who had they talked about the other night? Ugh—other than Rodney, of course.

Her eye suddenly throbbed as if someone had squeezed it, and her chest prickled with cold.
Relax.
White light, and all that crap.
There was no way Rodney was down the hall in room four, waiting for her to give him a massage. That would be the cruelest of jokes. Willow and Clare would never do that to her.

Twinge.

“Massages are fun,” she muttered to herself as she walked down the hall. “I love my job.” Even when she had to perform it through a throbbing headache.

She removed her sandals, knocked lightly on door four, and waited a beat before sliding it open.

And was immediately brought up short by a broad, tanned, muscular back. Smooth, powerful shoulders. Dark, wavy hair just begging for her fingers to run through it and mess it up a little. And a really, really great ass, covered only by gray boxer briefs with “Calvin Klein” woven into the elastic waistband.

Chapter 3

____________________________________

T
he man was apparently about to drop his pants to the floor. Instead, he froze, holding them at thigh level, and turned at the same moment that Lisa lifted a hand to her mouth.

“Oh, crap.” He yanked his pants back up.

The surprise in his dark blue eyes was no doubt mirrored in her brown ones. “I’m so sorry,” Lisa said quickly, looking downward as she backed into the hallway. “I was told you were ready.”

“I was getting ready,” he said, “and then I had to take a call. I’m sorry.”

He sounded flustered, but also clearly amused. He was trying not to laugh; she could hear the smile in his deep, smooth voice.

“Please,” she murmured, “take your time. I’ll just come back in a few minutes.” She slid the door closed behind her.

Out in the hall, she pressed her fingers to her burning cheeks. God.
God.
When was the last time she’d seen a man that good-looking, up close and personal? Maybe never.

His eyes had bored right into her, and though she’d only gotten a quick glimpse of his face—well, the guy was model-good-looking. No, more like Hollywood handsome. He was more rough than pretty, and his eyes and mouth held both humor and character.

And heat. He’d only gotten a quick look at Lisa, too, but he’d stared at her with some kind of ultra-awareness, like he’d wanted to eat her up. And, oh, how she would love to be eaten up by a mouth like that right about now—

“Good Lord, girl,” she whispered fiercely to herself. “Get over it.” Hot men were one-hundred-percent untrustworthy. Hadn’t she learned that the hard way from her experience with Rodney? Thanks to him, she finally understood that men were basically incapable of being handsome and decent human beings at the same time.

And compared to the man she’d just walked in on, Rodney wasn’t hot in the least. He was tepid, at best. Which meant, if good looks and lie-like-a-dog dishonesty were directly correlated, she’d better stay as far away from this guy as possible.

A
dam stood with his pants clutched around his hips for a full ten seconds before he remembered himself and yanked them up.

“Hoo, boy.” He couldn’t help but laugh aloud as he zipped them up. This had been a bad idea from the start. He didn’t even have time for a massage. The interview with Kiki James was in just a few hours, and he needed to prepare. But Jess had suggested he do something to relax, and she had this way of being really insistent, even via long-distance phone calls. The Keiko offered in-house massage sessions, and it had seemed like a good idea...

Until
she’d
walked in the door.

Christ, what was it with this place? Adam had heard people say Texas had the hottest women, but this hotel seemed to be stuffed with them. First there’d been the receptionist out front, with the dominatrix hairdo and the screw-me mouth, and then there was her coworker with the wide gray eyes and sweet, hippie-ish appeal. And now there was this one, with her wary but beckoning gaze, dark hair curling down over her tanned shoulders, and curves in all the right places.

And now she was supposed to give his naked body a rubdown?

Nope. Not going to happen. How would she react mid-massage, when he turned up with the inevitable hard-on elicited by the first pair of female hands to touch him in months? She’d probably kick him in the balls and then out the door, and she would be absolutely in the right.

He should’ve gone for a swim in Barton Springs instead. Knocking out a few laps in blessedly cold water would have been a hell of a lot more relaxing than this.

“Stupid,” he muttered, buckling his belt and then looking around for his shirt. Forget whether the massage was a dumb idea—this self-imposed-celibacy thing was the real dumb idea. And he placed the blame squarely on Dan and his ridiculous contract. Adam had refused to sign the thing, and yet he’d still managed to feel guilty ever since, every time he felt even a shred of attraction to a member of the opposite sex.

It had all started a couple of months ago, back in early February, when a journalist from a popular online magazine had contacted Adam for an interview, to run over Valentine’s Day. Adam had been happy to do the interview, excited for the exposure—until the feature went live, and he’d learned the journalist had thrown him under the bus. Instead of focusing her piece on the wild success of Adam’s startup and his unusual matchmaking theories, she had called his relationship status into question, positing that if Mister Match was single, his matchmaking techniques couldn’t possibly have any merit.

That week, there had been a precipitous drop in new member enrollments on the site.

The following week, a celebrity gossip magazine had happened to run some photos of Adam at a Dallas coffee shop he’d visited with his stepsister, Jess, and her toddler son. The pictures had shown Adam goofing around with Benny and sitting with his arm slung across the back of Jess’s chair. Apparently, playing with a toddler and having minimal, thoroughly platonic bodily contact with a member of the opposite sex was enough to convince gossip bloggers of a romantic connection. “Is He or Isn’t He?” the photos’ headline had read, with speculation about “Mister Match’s mystery woman” and his “secret bride and baby.”

That week, new member enrollments on the site had soared.

Clearly, when it came to the success of the business, Mister Match’s marital status mattered. Hence, the contract. Dan had asked Adam to agree to avoid romantic entanglements and stay quiet about his marital status, in order to allow the media to continue drawing its own conclusions—the hope being, of course, that the media would keep assuming Mister Match had a wife and child waiting for him at home.

“It’s for the good of the company,” Dan had reasoned. “Just while the site’s getting its feet off the ground. After that, you can do whatever—and whoever—you want.”

Adam, of course, had told Dan exactly where he could stick his contract. And yet, his partner’s point had hit home. Adam was the face of Mister Match. If he wanted people to believe his dating theories had any merit at all, he couldn’t let them see him as the failure at relationships that he really was.

So he’d decided, on his own, to set aside his personal life in order to devote his time and energies to the business. It wasn’t like he had any time for dating, anyway. But apparently, that decision had turned him into some kind of oversexed maniac who morphed into a big, throbbing erection at the sight of gorgeous brown eyes and a nice pair of breasts.

He was halfway finished buttoning his shirt when his fingers stilled. He rolled his eyes.
Slow down, tiger.
He was being an idiot. What was he, an animal, in thrall to hormonal surges, unable to control his own behavior? He’d seen that massage therapist for less than five seconds. How did he know whether her breasts were nice or not? Okay, sure, they were big. So he was going to sneak out and cancel the massage because she happened to have more than a couple of handfuls of womanly assets?

“This is ludicrous.” He started unbuttoning the shirt again, and then froze once again. How much time had he already wasted, going back and forth like a moron? She’d said she’d be back in a minute. She was probably on her way back down the hall right now. She was going to walk in on him half-naked again, and then he’d really feel like a genius. She’d probably think he was some kind of exhibitionist flasher creep.

He closed his eyes for a moment, shook his head. He was acting like a teenaged boy about to get his first awkward grope from an older girl. “Cool it, Masters,” he muttered. “It’s a massage, not a hand job.”

With an annoyed growl directed solely at himself, he removed his shirt as quickly as possible and hurriedly stepped out of the rest of his clothes.

He was not an animal. He’d repeat it to himself as often as necessary. He would get the damn massage, and he would not get an erection. This was for the sake of relaxation, not stimulation. He was thirty-two damn years old, not fifteen. He could control himself while a gorgeous woman rubbed her hands all over his naked body.

He folded his clothes quickly and stuffed them along with his shoes in a messy pile in the corner. Then he dove under the waiting sheet draped over the massage table, and focused on getting his breathing, and his gutter-brain, back to some kind of normal.

O
ut in the reception area, Lisa tossed the clipboard onto the counter, where it landed with a clatter. “I need to swap with Willow.”

“Why?” Clare asked, without looking up from the mirror she was using to tweeze the already perfect lines of her eyebrows.

“I’ve got a DNA match in there.”

Clare didn’t immediately react to Lisa’s code phrase she’d invented when she first started working at Indulgence—a “DNA match” referred to a client that was just too attractive on an animal level to make for a professional, detached massage environment. It was a rare occurrence, but it happened enough that Lisa had taken it upon herself to come up with a name for it, and a protocol: When one of the massage therapists had a DNA match, another would take over the appointment, no questions asked.

Instead, Clare calmly arched a brow at herself in the mirror, and then answered after a long beat. “Will’s already in seven with Longbaugh. Their session started five minutes ago.”

“Crap.” Lisa puffed out a breath, wondering if her cheeks were still pink. “You should see this guy. He’s like somebody out of
GQ
. His body is like those David Beckham underwear ads, minus the tattoos.”

Unlike Willow’s, Clare’s tastes in men ran a lot closer to Lisa’s. She finally stopped staring at her reflection and pretended to melt in her chair. “Oh, I am so wishing I’d finished my massage certification right about now. I would do that guy for you in a second, and I do mean
do
. God, you’re so lucky!”

Lisa let out a breath. Clare was right, even if she had an oversexed way of putting it. As much debt as she was in, she should take any job she could get, regardless of how tough it might be to stay professional.

And what was she, an animal? She could touch this guy without jumping his bones or drooling all over his perfect body. She would prevail over her traitorous DNA.

Clare frowned. “You know, he is basically a demigod, but it’s not really your style to fall into a guy’s lap like that. Maybe Willow’s right with all her crap about the stars. So?” She stared up at Lisa, as expectant as a kid in front of a Christmas tree that was just about to light up. “Is he just absolutely delicious?”

“Pretty much edible,” Lisa confirmed. “And, of course, I walked in right in the middle of him taking his clothes off.”

Clare squealed and bounced up and down in her swivel chair. “You saw him naked! You lucky skunk! What did he look like?”

“Not naked! Just shirtless. I’d think you, of all people, would’ve seen a man’s bare back before.”

“I’ve sure as hell never seen
him
naked before.”

“I told you, he wasn’t naked, he was still wearing his under—”

Clare held up her hands as if to shield herself. “No, don’t ruin my fantasy! In my fantasy, he’s completely in the buff. So what did he look like?” She leaned forward and lowered her voice to a sultry purr. “Make it juicy. I want details.”

“Details, like, he wears black Calvin Klein boxer briefs?” Lisa sighed. “All right, he looked...” Against her better judgment, she told the truth. “Like a Greek god who’s spent his life getting his muscles rubbed down with cocoa butter.” She lowered her voice. “His back was incredible. And his shoulders, oh, my God.”

“And you don’t even usually go for athletic types,” Clare breathed. “God, I wish I could take the appointment instead of you.”

“Yeah, so do I.” Lisa stared down the hallway toward door number four.

“Hey.”

When she looked up, Clare was watching her.

“What’s the matter?” Clare asked.

Lisa paused before answering, because admitting it aloud was almost too difficult. Definitely too embarrassing. On the other hand, she knew she could tell her friend anything.

“Another reason I didn’t want to do the massage was...” She swallowed. “I was planning to go to Rodney’s place this morning. Try to get some money out of him.” She frowned down at her shoes. “It’s ridiculous, I know.”

Instantly Clare was on her feet, rounding the reception desk to drop into a crouch in front of Lisa. “Oh, honey,” she said, giving Lisa’s wrists a commiserating squeeze.

“Yeah.” Lisa glanced wryly at her. “Bet you didn’t think I could get much more desperate, did you? Neither did I.”

“You must have heard about his new yoga studio,” Clare said, neatly avoiding commenting on Lisa’s level of desperation.

Heard about it
wasn’t exactly accurate, but Lisa wasn’t about to admit she’d been Facebook-stalking her ex for months, whenever she went to check email at the library. “I take it you heard, too.”

“Wonder which students he’s lining up to boff this time.”

Clare was just being a loyal friend. Lisa knew that. Still, her derisive attitude toward Lisa’s ex stung a little. The reminder of Rodney’s penchant for extracurricular sex with his yoga students stung even more. “Actually, I hear he moved in with his new girlfriend.”