Mister Match (The Match Series Book 1) (8 page)

“See,” Adam cut in, “that’s where a lot of people get tripped up in their quest for a life mate. They think those are the things that matter: having religions, goals, even musical tastes in common. I’ve studied enough intimate relationships to know that that stuff is the frills—the exterior.”

Kiki James frowned. “I’m not sure I follow.”

“Don’t get me wrong, it’s important, but that’s all the kind of stuff that, if you’re getting along with your boyfriend, if you have open lines of communication, those things don’t matter as much as you might think. Not like the little, day-to-day stuff does—the things you don’t think twice about. The personal habits and little quirks that speak to a larger truth. A personal values system, if you will. Take question forty-three on The Questionnaire,” Adam suggested.

Kiki’s eyes went as wide as Bambi’s. “You’ve memorized The Questionnaire?”

“I wrote the thing, didn’t I?” Adam said with a laugh.

“That’s right.” Kiki checked her note cards. “Your bio says you studied at Dartmouth and got your Masters in Psychology from Harvard.”

“That’s right. And I spent years developing The Questionnaire and my matchmaking system, and I based them both on the most current human relationships research available. So, question forty-three. How do you respond when the phone rings at seven-thirty in the morning?”

There was a pause. Then Kiki pressed a hand dramatically to her chest, drawing a burst of laughter from the audience. “Wait, do you want me to answer?”

Adam nodded. “Sure, if you would, please.”

“Well, if the phone rings at seven-thirty I probably won’t answer, because I’m more than likely here, in makeup. Rene would murder me if I took a call while he was doing my foundation.” The audience laughed and clapped.

Adam gave a polite laugh as well. “Well, you’ve just made my point for me. Your answer indicates a lot about you—maybe more than you realize. The fact that you’re up and out of the house early every morning, preparing diligently for a show that, have I got this right?—that you created yourself? That shows you’re a very hard worker, ambitious, career-oriented. You might not match up very well with someone who answered the same question by saying he cursed the ringing phone and pulled his pillow over his head.”

Kiki nodded. “Or, maybe he would be a good match for me, depending on my answers to other questions. Like, maybe I indicate in The Questionnaire that I like to get up and eat breakfast alone in the mornings, and get out of the house before anyone else is awake.”

Adam nodded approvingly. “Exactly. Counter to your career-driven image, you’d actually match up really well with that lazy bum who doesn’t roll out of bed till noon.” The audience laughed once again.

Adam felt warmth spreading through him. He loved making people laugh, and he especially loved talking about his favorite subject—his theories about people and relationships, and what made them tick.

Kiki James must have psychically picked up on his thoughts, and on the fact that he was feeling loose and relaxed, because her next question took him completely by surprise.

“So let’s set The Questionnaire aside for a minute,” she said, and uncrossed her legs briefly to cross them again in the other direction. “Let’s talk about what everyone really wants to know.” She leaned in. “You’re notoriously private about your relationship status, but I am determined to find out. Has Mister Match made his own love match?”

Adam’s smile dimmed just a bit around the edges, and the warmth inside him cooled a degree. He started in with his stock answer to relationship questions: “Well, I normally make it a policy not to talk about my personal—”

“Oh, Adam, please.” Kiki leaned in conspiratorially, as if they shared a secret. “My assistant showed me the photos. You can come clean. It’ll just be between us.” She gave a big, hammy wink to the audience, who suddenly seemed to Adam to be grinning like wolves, panting and salivating as their teeth glinted under the studio lights.

“Um. The photos?” He ran a finger under his shirt collar. He was actually starting to get a little sweaty under these lights.

“Come on,” Kiki purred. “Who is she? Who is this mystery woman?”

Chapter
8

____________________________________

M
ystery woman?
Damn. Kiki had gone there—she’d brought up the photos, the ones from February, taken in Dallas with his stepsister and her son.

“You mean, Jess?” Adam shook his head with a laugh. “No, no, she’s not my mystery woman. I mean—I don’t have a mystery woman. Jess is my—”

“Oh, now, now, don’t lie to me.” Kiki’s smile was sweet and her eyes as crafty as a witch’s. “I saw the pictures. Looks like you two had a pretty intimate little lunch together, hmm?”

Actually, they’d met for coffee that day in Deep Ellum, and Benny had had a chocolate-chip cookie as big as Adam’s palm. He’d gotten chocolate all over his face and hands, and Adam and Jess had laughed and laughed. “Well—”

Kiki turned to the audience. “Looks like Adam is having a hard time remembering just a few hours ago, so let’s give him a little help, shall we?”

The audience cheered, and Adam frowned. Mystery woman...lunch...a few hours ago? The paparazzi had been outside the restaurant earlier, of course, but—things didn’t move that fast, did they?

“Look at the monitor,” Kiki was instructing him, pointing to his right. He squinted against the lights to see what was on the screen, and was dimly aware of the audience’s “Ooh”s and “Ahh”s and squeals of delight.

It was Lisa on the screen, of course. Not the photos of him and Jess and Benny from months earlier. These were the photos of him eating lunch with Lisa, just a couple of hours ago.

Freaking technology,
he thought distractedly, as Kiki James told the audience, “Now, these photos were just released, less than an hour ago, and my sources tell me this was just earlier today.” The smile she gave Adam was triumphant. “Adam Match, looks like you’ve got some ’splainin’ to do.”

She’d pinned him like a bug to a shadow box. Still, he told himself, he could get out of this. He could turn this ship around.

“Now, you know Mister Match would never kiss and tell,” he started, and the audience hooted, and Kiki James’s gaze narrowed shrewdly.

“So you’re on kissing terms with this mystery woman,” she said, and Adam did his best not to wince. Why, oh, why had he used that particular phrase?

“So this is Jess.” Kiki asked. “Tell us all about her.”

“No, no—Jess is—this isn’t Jess.” He was stammering, getting flustered. He needed to take back control of this thing. If he’d ever had it in the first place.

“This isn’t Jess? Okay, so Jess must be the woman we all saw you with over Valentine’s Day,” Kiki said smoothly, and suddenly the photos on the monitor switched to the ones from February, in Dallas.

“Seems you have several women waiting in the wings,” she said archly. “A ship in every port, perhaps?”

The audience’s
ooh
-ing and
ahh
-ing kicked up a notch.

“Not in the least,” Adam said shortly. He’d just about had enough of this.

“Then tell us,” Kiki said. “I want all the dirty details—in PG terms, of course,” she added, with a wink for the audience.

“There’s nothing to tell,” he insisted, striving to keep his tone light but firm.

Kiki wasn’t having it. She turned to the audience again. “Adam Match is playing hard to get,” she told them. “I guess that means it’s up to me to lay it all out for you. I mean, if you’re interested. Tell me, are you interested?”

The audience clapped and cheered, and each chanting shout of “Yes!” made Adam feel a degree more panicky.

“Sounds like they want to know the truth,” Kiki said to Adam, over the audience’s roar. “And since you won’t tell it to us...” She shrugged. “I’ll just have to share what I’ve learned.”

What, exactly, did the woman think she’d learned?

“So there’s this mystery woman...” Kiki was saying, as the monitors switched back to another photo of Adam and Lisa, from earlier, when he’d held the door to the restaurant open for her to enter. She’d been smiling up at him, and he’d been smiling back, and though they hadn’t been touching, Adam had to admit, as he looked at the photograph, there was something undeniably intimate between them. The connection they shared was unmistakable.

“And then there’s this mystery woman,” Kiki James continued, “from February—that’s just two months ago, folks.”

The monitors displayed another shot of Adam, Jess and Benny.

He rolled his eyes. This was too much. “Hey,” he started, “please, could we just—”

“And then there’s
this
mystery woman,” Kiki said, and Adam frowned—who else could they have possibly photographed him with? Aside from today’s lunch with Lisa DeLuca, he hadn’t been out with a woman in what felt like forever.

And then the monitors displayed a photograph of Adam, looking a little younger, his hair a little shorter, laughing as he held a gorgeous, exotic beauty in his arms. The woman gazed up at him with a saucy grin that he remembered all too well.

His stomach suddenly felt as if he’d eaten concrete for lunch instead of sushi and miso soup.

It was Ivana. Somehow, they’d found out about Ivana.

Dan’s not going to like this,
Adam thought, as the concrete in his stomach solidified.
He’s not going to like this at all.

T
wo hours later, he actually had to hold the phone a few inches away from his ear, so Dan’s shouting wouldn’t hurt his eardrum.

“How the hell did they get pictures of you and Ivana?” his partner was yelling. “I thought you burned them all.”

“I did,” Adam said. Shortly after the divorce, he’d tossed all the photos he had of his ex-wife into the fire pit in Dan’s back yard. Dan had been there, himself. He knew perfectly well that Adam, in his heartbreak and the haze brought on by several cans of cheap beer, had made that rash move.

“Then how?” Dan insisted.

“I have no idea.” Adam rubbed the bridge of his nose. He was already tired of this whole thing, and it had only just begun. What he wouldn’t give to go back in time, just a few hours, back to his lunch date with Lisa. He wanted to be there again, with her, happy and relaxed, enjoying the company of a woman he’d felt inexplicably drawn to.

Not here, now, wondering how a woman he hadn’t seen in five years had managed to find a brand-new way to screw him over. Not wracking his brain about how to get out of the mess he’d made by making one stupid mistake after another in the interview with Kiki James.

“Ivana must have sold that photo to a tabloid site,” he said. That was the only explanation. Some celebrity gossip website had approached his ex-wife, and she’d handed over photographs and information about Adam in exchange for money. It was just the type of tawdry thing she would do.

Now that he thought about it, he was surprised it hadn’t happened sooner. He wondered dully whether Ivana had told them the whole, sordid truth—that she’d cheated on him repeatedly, and he’d actually been stupid enough to try to patch things up with her—or if she’d sold them lies about him.

Probably the latter. Ivana had never been overly attached to honesty, and the way things had ended between them, she’d probably welcomed the chance to stick it to him, even several years after the fact.

Now, all there was left to do was damage control.

“Look,” he said, cutting into Dan’s tirade about the Kiki James interview and Adam’s apparent innate idiocy. “Let’s not waste time trying to figure out what happened or how. Let’s just figure out what we’re going to do about it.”

“Yeah, let’s,” Dan snarled sarcastically. “Why in the hell did you think it was a good idea to tell that idiot woman you were engaged to this—this Lisa person?”

Adam winced and banged a fist against his forehead.

In the heat of the moment, when Kiki James had put him on the spot and had him squirming, he’d somehow let it slip that Lisa was his fiancée.

It had been a complete accident. It was as if his mouth had moved faster than his brain. One second, Kiki had been calling him a failure at relationships and regaling the live audience with the story of how she’d received a very interesting tip from an intern about Adam’s ex-wife and the new mystery woman he’d taken to lunch mere hours before the interview—as if Adam weren’t allowed to have lunch with whomever he wanted—

And the next second, he’d blurted it out. “She’s not a mystery woman,” he’d announced. “Her name is Lisa, and she’s smart and successful and beautiful, and she’s going to be my wife.”

Kiki James, of course, had pounced. As the audience had hooted and shouted and clapped, and as Adam had mentally kicked himself for blurting out such a ridiculous lie, the interviewer had started firing questions at him—where had he and Lisa met? How long had they been dating? When was the wedding?

Each question, and each answer he’d fumbled through, had led him deeper and deeper into the hole he’d dug.

Now, he had to figure a way out of it, and not just for his own sake or the sake of the website. He had to do it for Lisa. Somehow, he’d managed to ruin her life, even as he’d attempted to salvage his own.

“On the other hand,” Dan was saying, and his tone was actually a bit calmer now. “Maybe that was sort of an inspired move, on your part. I mean, if this Lisa person is willing to cooperate. Did you have her sign a CDA?”

“A what?” Adam shook his head. Dan had been a lawyer for five years before partnering up with Adam to found Mister-Match.com. Even though now he was just an investor and no longer a practicing attorney, he was still Mr. Legal, always talking contracts and non-disclosures when Adam just wanted to focus on the business.

“A confidential disclosure agreement. If you’re going to pretend to be engaged, we need to be sure she’s not going to spill the beans to the highest bidder.”

Adam’s stomach clenched. “I didn’t have her sign anything. We didn’t discuss anything. We just had lunch. And then my big, stupid mouth took over in a tense moment, and...” He waved a hand, let it drop. “Here we are.”

“Well, you’re going to have to talk to her,” Dan said shortly. “I’ll email you a form for her to sign. We need to be absolutely sure she’ll play along, with our version of the story—not her own.”

Crap.
Adam needed to stop doing live interviews. Or just stop doing interviews altogether. Somehow, he always managed to bungle things up.

“I’ll talk to her,” he agreed, banging his fist against the side of his head. He’d wished for a reason to talk to Lisa DeLuca again. Even before their lunch date had ended, he’d started trying to think of a way to see her again, to spend more time with her.

This wasn’t exactly what he’d envisioned.

T
hat night, Lisa went to sleep thinking about Adam, and woke up late the next morning, sweaty, with Reese on her mind.

She glanced at the clock and then sat straight up in bed. “Shit. Shit!” She had to shower. She had to get dressed. She had to get down to Sweetish Hill Bakery by nine.

Her cat, Mr. Monkey, let out a feline version of a growl as Lisa jumped out of bed and hurried into the bathroom.

After a quick shower, she dressed carefully, resisting the urge to call Clare for clothing advice. Skirt or pants? It was definitely hot enough out for a skirt, of course, but she was heading to work afterward. Better to go with pants, at the risk of Reese thinking she was a little too stiff and formal for a May morning.

On the other hand, she reminded herself, the man’s name was Reese. She probably didn’t need to worry about him judging her as stiff and formal. She’d already judged him as being the same, based on his first name alone.

She ended up in gray linen Capris and a sleeveless rose-colored shirt that, she hoped, showed off her upper arms and lifted the color in her cheeks. But when she glanced in the mirror, she found the effect to be more PTA-president—all bright and preppy and spring-like, with her hair in a thick, bouncy ponytail.

“Ugh.” She already had a boring life. She didn’t need to dress ten years older to prove it. Hurriedly, she yanked off the shirt and pulled on a plain black knit one instead.

She checked the mirror and saw that it wasn’t a whole lot better. She turned away, annoyed with herself. “This is fine,” she said. She never paid much attention to her clothes. It was ridiculous to do it now, for someone she didn’t even know.

At Sweetish Hill, she parked and then stood out on the patio, looking around for a single man with red hair, as Clare and Willow had instructed. Her stomach was doing cartwheels—she seriously felt as if she’d eaten something bad the night before, except microwave popcorn didn’t normally cause food poisoning—and she kept tugging at the hem of her shirt, which seemed suddenly to have shrunk several sizes.

“Are you Lisa?”

She turned at the sound of the tentative voice behind her.

At first glance, it appeared her stiff-and-formal prediction had been a little off. He appeared shy, but not stiff, and he was conservatively dressed, but not formal. He was taller than she’d expected, and his short, gingery mop of hair was cute. He wore a short-sleeved shirt with an alligator on the chest, and held a pair of sunglasses in his hand. He was fiddling with one of the earpieces with long, pale, sensitive fingers.