Love Game (4 page)

“I
am
a matchmaker,” I reminded her. “As a
matchmaker
?” I repeated to Uncle Harry.

“Sort of, Legs,” he said. “It’s complicated.”

We were interrupted by an old man tugging a portable oxygen tank behind him, the wheels squeaking loudly. “Where the hell is everybody!” he yelled. “I don’t have all day, you know.”

“Blow it out your hole, Marty,” Uncle Harry shot back. “You have all day and you know it. All day, all week, all year, if you live that long. Grab yourself a scotch in the game room.”

“If you only got that single-malt crap, I’m never coming back,” he spat, but he turned down the hall toward the game room.

“I got a problem, and I need you to fix it,” Uncle Harry told me when the squeaking receded into the background. “Luanda has her hooks in me, and I need you to unhook me.”

“Who is this Luanda?” Lucy asked in my direction. She raised her eyebrows to just under her hairline. Her face turned purple, and she rooted around in her clutch purse for what I hoped wasn’t a firearm. Lucy was scarily protective over Uncle Harry.

I racked my brain. Who
was
Luanda? Grandma knew so many people, but I was terrible with names.

“I don’t know Luanda,” I assured Lucy.

“She’s one of you people. Another crazy matchmaker.
You know,” Uncle Harry said, making a circling gesture with his finger against his head. “Screw loose,” he added, as if that explained it all.

As far as I knew, Grandma was the only crazy matchmaker in town. It was a small town. Crazy or not, she was the only matchmaker in Cannes, if you didn’t count me, and practically nobody counted me.

“You’re speaking Greek,” I said.

“The Indian woman with the clothes, the one who speaks to dead people. She wants to fix me up with Ruth Fletcher. You got to get her to stop.”

“Ruth Fletcher!” Lucy screeched. “That woman! I will not stop killin’ her.”

“Hold on, Annie Oakley,” I said. “First of all, you almost did kill her today, if you remember, and second of all, what are you talking about, Uncle Harry? Dead people?”

“She’s very persistent, and it’s bad for business,” he said, pulling a cigar out of a box on the coffee table. “You get me? The matchmaker Indian is calling nonstop, coming over and bothering me. Blathering about soul mates. This is a place of business. I can’t have crazy people traipsing around my place of business.”

“Where the hell is the toilet! Harry, a place is too big if you can’t find the damned toilet.” The old man was right behind me. I hadn’t heard him coming, because he’d left his squeaky oxygen tank in the game room, and I now noticed that he was wearing slippers, the kind the hospital gives you.

“There’s a toilet in the game room, Marty,” Uncle Harry told him.

“That’s a toilet?” Marty asked.

“What did you think it was?”

“How the hell should I know? I’ve never seen that much marble before.”

“It’s a toilet!”

Marty grunted and shuffled back toward the game room. Uncle Harry lit his cigar, puffing rapidly.

“So what do you want me to do?” I asked.

“Convince Luanda that Ruth is not my soul mate.”

“Of course she’s not your soul mate, darlin’,” Lucy announced.

The doorbell rang again, and I heard the front door open and close. “Let me get this straight,” I said. “Instead of matching you, you want me to
unmatch
you?”

Grandma wouldn’t approve. It would be against the matchmaker code or something. Besides, I had no idea who Luanda was, and if Ruth Fletcher had her sights set on Uncle Harry, I wasn’t about to block her. After all, she already blamed me for destroying Tea Time and her livelihood. And she could be ornery, to say the least.

“I’ll triple your normal fee, whatever that is,” Uncle Harry offered.

“Done,” I accepted.

I got a whiff of expensive cologne, a cloud of familiar yummy manliness that shifted my estrogen production into high gear. Obviously, Spencer had finished working up his courage.

“What’s done?” Spencer asked. He walked into the living room and took a seat next to me on the couch. He put his arm around my shoulders. “What’s done?” he whispered into my ear.

I sucked in air, and my hair curled. Spencer had a
bad effect on me. He made me want to get naked right there between cigar-smoking Uncle Harry and green-eyed Calamity Jane. But he was poison. An Olympics-worthy womanizer. He was the Usain Bolt of players. But I wasn’t going to let him catch me.

“The toilet is in the game room,” I said, for no apparent reason.

Uncle Harry pulled three hundred dollars out of his wallet and handed it to me. “Here you go, Legs. A down payment. I’d appreciate it if you got on it quick-like.”

I clutched the money in my hand. Cash. It was the most money of my own that I’d seen in one place in forever. I mean, in my whole life. I could afford real cashmere now. I was almost a one percenter. I was Donald Trump with better hair. A tear threatened to roll down my cheek. I tucked the bankroll in my pocket.

“We’ll get on it immediately,” Lucy announced, standing. She tugged at my hand to leave.

“We?” I asked, but there was no way I could get rid of Lucy. She wanted first dibs at shooing away any of Uncle Harry’s potential suitors. Attraction is a weird thing. There’s no accounting for it.

“Hold on.” Spencer pulled my arm away from Lucy. “We need to talk. It will just take a second.”

He led me out to the balcony. I got a rush of vertigo and turned away quickly from the view of the canyon below us. I clutched Spencer’s arms and closed my eyes, willing the world to stop spinning.

“We need to talk,” he repeated. I opened my eyes. He had leaned down, and his face was inches from mine. He smelled good. Better than good, and he was
focused on me. Earnest. He absentmindedly slipped his hands around my back and caressed me with slow, circular movements.

He wasn’t going to leave me alone until we cleared the air. “You had a concussion,” I said.

“I had a concussion.”

“They didn’t catch it at the hospital.”

Spencer nodded. “I should sue them!”

“Yes, you should. They shouldn’t have let you out.”

I wasn’t lying. Spencer had his skull bashed in by a bad guy, and the hospital let him out the same night. “And you fainted,” I said.

“I didn’t faint. I lost consciousness.”

“You lost consciousness.”

“When you were kissing me.”

“When you were kissing
me
,” I lied. I had gone to him with a clear intention. It was my idea. I wanted him, and I initiated the kiss.

He had let me into his house, and before he could close the door behind me, I slipped my arms around his neck and pulled him down to my lips. I had kissed him once before, and my memory of that first time was fireworks on the level of the Fourth of July. It turned out my memory was dead-on, but the second time the fireworks were accompanied by a passion I wasn’t expecting.

The kiss went on and on. We connected so perfectly that I didn’t know where he left off and I began. I stepped forward and moaned. He put his arms around my back and let his hands slip lower. I knew we were going to go beyond the kiss, go all the way, as they say at prom.

I was powerless to stop the momentum. My head
was invaded by a buzzing that clouded my judgment, drowned out reality, and disoriented me. To make a long story short, I was lost.

Being lost in Spencer’s arms was dumb. He regularly lost women, and they didn’t show up again, at least not as themselves but more like lunatic stalkers who couldn’t find themselves after the lip ninja had dumped them for the next hapless female in line.

I didn’t want to be lost. I had a lifetime of being lost. I wanted to be found. But the buzzing got louder, and I knew I was out of luck.

Then I won the lottery. Just as I began to forget my name, Spencer froze. His lips slid off my face, and his hands dropped to his sides. A second later his knees buckled and he slumped over me. I managed to hold his weight for a moment, confused, but quickly I realized that Spencer was no longer conscious, and we fell together onto the maple-colored laminate flooring in his narrow entranceway.

The hospital kept him for three full days. I sent him flowers, but I stayed far away. While he recuperated at a safe distance, I Spencer-detoxed. I was partially successful. I still heard the low-level echo of the buzzing, but I knew my name and I knew where I was.

Also, I was delighted I had made a man pass out merely through the power of my kiss. He might be the lip ninja, but I had magical lips. As much as I wanted to tell everyone about my magical lips, I thought it was wiser to pretend the whole thing didn’t happen. A weak moment. An almost disaster.

“I have magical lips,” I told Spencer on Uncle Harry’s balcony.

Spencer smirked. “I concur. How about we see
what other body parts of yours have magical properties?”

I sighed and pushed him away from me. “No way. I had a lapse in judgment, but my lapse is over.”

Through the window behind Spencer, I could see Uncle Harry and Lucy deep in conversation. I wasn’t clear on the parameters of their relationship, and I wondered what they were talking about. Lucy had a major crush on Uncle Harry, but he didn’t show much interest in her beyond mild flirtation.

I worried that she was lost, that Spencer wasn’t the only man in Cannes who had the power to make a woman forget who she was. I also worried that Lucy would incite a knock-down drag-out fight with Ruth Fletcher, and, despite Lucy’s Southern-belle strength, she was no match for the eighty-five-year-old tea enthusiast.

I also worried about Luanda. Could she be the changing wind Grandma spoke about?

I watched as Harry’s poker buddies filed into the house. He offered them cigars, and they lit up. Something about that stimulated the anxiety receptors in my brain.

“Other men would call you a tease,” Spencer said, drawing my attention back to him.

“Whatever,” I replied. “I’m not jumping into bed with you. I’m a relationship girl.” If you didn’t count the happy-hour incident in February, the Lady Gaga concert in Des Moines, and more or less the entire year of 2010. Besides those indiscretions, I didn’t engage in meaningless sex.

“Like your relationship with Holden?” he asked.

Ouch. I hadn’t heard from my sort-of boyfriend
and sexy neighbor Holden in weeks. He was out of town, trying to get his life back on track, but his leaving had derailed our relationship.

“Yes, like my relationship with Holden,” I told him.

“A relationship you thought you’d take a break from with me? Hey, come to think of it, where is Pretty Boy?”

“He’s not pretty; he’s gorgeous. He’s Adonis. He’s Mr. Universe. He’s Treetop Lover. He’s—”

Spencer raised an eyebrow. “Fine, you win. I can do relationship.” He ground his teeth, and his eye twitched.

“What do you mean, you can do relationship?”

“Dating, wooing, courting. You know, the whole bullshit.”

“Why, Spencer, I didn’t know you were a romantic.”

“Call me Nicholas Sparks.”

“Doesn’t someone always die in his stories?” I asked.

“That shouldn’t bother you, Miss Marple. You seem drawn to dead people.” That wasn’t completely true. I just happened to stumble on the occasional corpse.

I searched Spencer’s face for signs. His eyes flashed, dilating and contracting, like he was signaling ships. He really was handsome, sexy, like a Marlboro man without the horse and cigarette. I would have paid money to see him in chaps. The corners of his mouth slowly turned up into his usual smirk. I punched his arm.

“That’s what I figured,” I said. “Spencer, you are so full of crap. You ‘can do relationship.’ Yeah, right.”

Spencer’s mouth dropped open, but he seemed to have stopped breathing. He blinked twice, and then he shrugged. “Yeah, well, you know me.”

“After last month, I would think you’d want a break from women.” Spencer had gotten in trouble for being involved with too many girlfriends at once. It had been a pretty dramatic situation.

“Exactly,” Spencer agreed. “I’m focusing on other things for the foreseeable future. Women are more trouble than they’re worth. I was only tying up loose ends where you were concerned.”

“Uh-huh.” I watched through the window as more of Uncle Harry’s friends lit up their cigars and blew out smoke. Again I felt anxiety, but I didn’t know why.

“Anyway, I don’t have a lot of time to follow you around like a puppy dog,” Spencer continued. “I’ve got to handle all the Apple Days events, I’ve just hired a new detective, who’s on a probation period, and there’s a wild rumor about mad cow disease in town I need to squelch.”

“Mad what?”

I spotted one of Uncle Harry’s friends put a cigar in his mouth, grab the crystal lighter off the coffee table, and disappear down the hall toward the game room. Suddenly I realized why I was anxious.

“I hope Marty found the toilet,” I said.

That’s when Uncle Harry’s house blew up.