The Matchmaker Meets Her Match (3 page)

“What?”

“Sit on the damned table if you have to. Or take up darts. Just do something besides drinking three beers a night for the next ten years.”

“First you tell a guy to start hanging out in bars. Then you tell him he can’t drink. You’re no fun.”

“I don’t have to be fun.”

“But would it kill you to try?”

“Very probably,” Rilka said. “So your first assignment — ”

“Yeah, I get it,” Jeremy said.

“If you’d like some company, I’ll go with you a time or two until you get comfortable.”

“All part of the service?” He waved a hand at her. “How can I pick up chicks if you’re sitting next to me?”

“That could be a problem. I could sit two bar stools over. You know, supportive but not confusing to the female clientele.”

“I’ll get my brother to go.”

“Good idea. He won’t interfere with the picking up of chicks, will he?”

“Nah. Nate’s a great wingman.”

“Okay. So give me a call in a couple of weeks, let me know how it’s going.”

“That’s it? I can hang out in bars without your help.”

“Your approach has been working so well for you, hasn’t it?” she snapped.

“You know, if I went with that online service, I wouldn’t have to put up with the snarky comments.”

“Yes, but you wouldn’t get the personal touch you so desperately need,” Rilka said. “Look. Just do what I suggested. Then we’ll take the next step.”

“Which is?”

“Depends on what you report.”

“Yes’m,” he said, snapping off a crisp salute.

“That concludes our business,” she said with a grin. “You can go away now.”

“Good to meet you, too,” he said, flicking the brakes off his chair and wheeling out of the room.

When she’d closed the front door behind him, she leaned against it for a moment and heaved a deep sigh of relief. He was going to be a problem child and not just because of his missing legs. It would take a special woman to get through the attitude and make the effort of getting to know him, not dismissing him on first meeting.

She knew what he wanted and it wasn’t just getting laid. He wouldn’t have shown up at her door if that was what he wanted. But if he couldn’t even admit to himself that he wanted a life partner, how was he ever going to meet one? And what Rilka had to believe was that beneath the flippant remarks there existed a man worth knowing. She hoped so, anyway. If only she could find the woman who didn’t mind wading through the thorns.

There’s someone for everyone
, she reminded herself. Her grandmother had really believed that, but Rilka no longer did. She herself was an excellent example. She was thirty-seven and working on her sixth year of celibacy. She’d never found “the one.” Gran used to say love didn’t blossom only between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine, and that you never knew …

To Gran, that was the beauty, the promise, the hope, of her work. To Rilka it was a depressing commentary on it. You didn’t know there was someone for everyone. You just had to believe it. Or not.

Rilka glanced at the brass mantel clock and saw she’d have time for a quick sandwich before Duncan’s early afternoon appointment. Good. She was going to need sustenance to deal with him.

Jeremy rolled down the sidewalk to where his truck was parked at the curb. When he got back to work, his brother was going to ask him how it went, and Jeremy was going to say, “It went weird.”

Not what he’d expected when Nate had handed him a card with an address, a name, and a time, and said, “I made the appointment for you. Be there.”

A flare of anger had burned low in his stomach and Nate, correctly anticipating that, had said, “Look, I met Sandra on an online dating site. How pathetic is that?”

“Pretty pathetic,” Jeremy had agreed.

He hadn’t tried the online route because he knew if he disclosed his … situation, he’d get the two kinds of women he’d already had enough of, but if he didn’t disclose his situation, he’d have to go through the shocked surprise with every woman he met. Rilka had managed her reaction pretty well, but most people didn’t. What he couldn’t stand was when someone seemed disappointed to meet him. He had a fairly sturdy ego, but he got tired of that.
Really
tired of that. Bad enough at the shop when customers weren’t sure he could do the work. It was plain depressing in his personal life when women wrote him off before he opened his mouth because he wasn’t what they pictured when they pictured what true love would look like.

Rilka had been expecting a regular Joe but she hadn’t been
disappointed
in him. Of course, she hadn’t been looking at him as a potential mate.

“You need someone to weed out the jerks,” Nate had said.

So Jeremy had sucked it up and he’d gone, exposing himself and his insecurities and his vulnerabilities to the matchmaker, whom he’d assumed would be something along the lines of an elderly Jewish grandmother. His heart had thudded way too happily when he’d seen the dark-haired woman about his age open the door. Like everyone else, she’d looked first where he would be if he could stand, then dropped her eyes to where he sat.

Which meant Nate hadn’t mentioned about the wheelchair, or the missing legs, both above the knee. But he understood it was kind of hard to work into ordinary conversation.

Jeremy had bantered with her about getting laid, his stomach twisting into a knot because he kept thinking,
It’s not just sex I want.
But he didn’t know how to say that. Especially not to Rilka, who seemed to hate men, women, and love. Sort of not the mindset he’d expected from a matchmaker.

Yeah,
it went weird
pretty much summed it up.

• • •

Every time Rilka opened the door to Duncan O’Hayre, he took her breath away. He was gorgeous, in a knee-weakening, resolve-undermining way, all dark hair and sleepy eyes and sex. He dressed like a man on the cover of GQ, even when he was just strolling to the corner grocery for a quart of milk. He had charming manners, a body like a Greek god, and he smelled good enough to make her want to strip and roll in him. His voice, deep and husky, sent a shiver down her spine. The icing on the very yummy cake was that he was straight, so when you had a fantasy about him, you thought,
Hey, it could happen.

Unfortunately, he was — well, there was no politically correct, perfectly sensitive way to put it. He was dumber than a box of rocks. He could get dates, he just couldn’t get girlfriends, and he had come to Rilka to change that.
I want someone to grow old with
, he had said soulfully and at the time she hadn’t understood how that could be hard. So far Rilka hadn’t been able to get him past a third date and most of the time not past a first.

He had a successful modeling career only because his manager ran herd on him, assigning him an assistant to make sure he got to his shoots on time and followed directions appropriately. He was such a sweetie. He tried so hard. And yet. His current assistant was sitting behind the wheel of the town car parked at the curb. Rilka waved at the girl and shut the door.

“How’s it going?” she asked Duncan as she headed down the hall.

“Fine,” Duncan said vaguely, following her into the kitchen. He took the chair she offered and smiled pleasantly at her. It really took someone special to be too dumb to model without help.

You look and you look
, Rilka thought,
but there’s no one home
. She sighed. From long experience, she did not offer him refreshment. He would not be able to decide between tea or juice without debating the pros and cons of each beverage at interminable length.

“How did your date with Cynthia go?” she asked cautiously, sitting across from him at the table. Cynthia had already reported in.

A frown marred his perfect forehead. Then, as if he had become aware of it, he immediately smoothed the expression away.

“Cynthia,” he said with a bone-melting smile. “Cynthia, Cynthia.”

Rilka helped him out. “Tuesday. The Grill Room. Tall redhead.”

“Oh, yes.” His lips twisted in a grimace. “Oh, my. Oh, my.”

“So you didn’t really hit it off.”

“Oh, my. No. We did
not
hit it off.”

Cynthia had already said that she’d ditched him by going to the bathroom and not coming back, a dating infraction that usually earned a long lecture from Rilka and the threat of being dropped as a client.
We must be polite to one another
, Rilka always said.
Be direct but polite
. Ditching dates was neither polite nor direct. But Rilka could hardly blame Cynthia. Rilka sometimes wished
she
could escape Duncan by going to the bathroom and not coming out.

What am I going to do with you?
She leaned forward and patted Duncan’s hand. “Have you thought any more about taking those night classes to obtain your GED?” Maybe it would improve his powers of concentration. You never knew.

He focused briefly on her. “I went one night, you know. But I’m not really an intellectual person,” he explained.

Well, that was true.

“Okay,” she said. Time to regroup. What now? She had to think of something. Unfortunately, the number of women lining up for men who were dumb as boxes of rocks was strictly limited. If Duncan were a woman, he’d have been taken off the market months ago. Men had absolutely no problem with women who were beautiful and dumb. In fact, that very much appeared to be their preferred combination of traits. But women couldn’t stand it. Rilka supposed this was social conditioning, but what did she know.

“How long have I been coming here?” Duncan asked suddenly.

“I’d have to look it up,” Rilka said, wondering what brought that on. She remembered when she’d first met Duncan and thought he might be the man of her dreams. “About a year.” It felt like a decade. Week after week of trying to figure out what to do with Duncan. Surely Gran would have hit upon the solution by now.

Duncan nodded. “Jenny — out in the car — or, wait, is it Andrea today? — anyway, she mentioned that it’s been two years.”

“Could be,” Rilka admitted. One year, two years, ten years, what did it matter? She was never going to find a match for him.

“Will I really find someone?” he asked, making her wince. “I mean, I know I’m not the most — . And sometimes I’m — .” Rilka focused on giving him a supportive smile. Her teeth hurt. “But — I always — .” He trailed off and looked at her expectantly. She rubbed her temples. Flipping burgers at a fast food joint would be worse than this how?

“I’m not sure I understand your question,” she said in the most encouraging tone she could produce.

“Is there really someone for everyone?” he blurted out. “Even me?”

She let out a breath. How often had she shaken her head after he left, wondering if he really knew how hopeless he was? A pretty package, that was all he was. How many times had he reported a delightful first date ending in delightful sex only for the delightful woman in question to disappear after the second or third date? And he’d be heartbroken. He liked people — especially women — and it was acutely painful to him to be rejected not because of something as superficial as appearance — that would obviously be a failing on the superficial person’s part — but because of who he was. His very essence. If poor Duncan even had an essence. With less attractive people she could always fall back on
he has a terrific personality
. But she couldn’t do that with Duncan.
He’s decorative
. That was what she had.

“Gran used to tell me, ‘The most important thing to know about this business, Rilka, is that there’s someone for everyone,’” Rilka said, Duncan’s
even me?
twisting unhappily in her gut. “She really believed it and she did this work all her life.”

“What about you?” he asked. Of course. Her personal belief, or lack thereof, was the one thing she’d tried to avoid bringing up. “You know me. What do you think?”

She took a deep breath and looked up into that breathtaking face and tried to remember not to become sexually aroused. A tear glimmered on a soot-black lash. Damn, he even looked hot when he was crying, noble and dashing and heroic. She herself got red and blotchy, not to mention disgustingly wet and sticky when she cried, which didn’t exactly make people want to comfort her. She wanted to take Duncan into her arms and soothe him because he was so attractive. Then they’d end up in bed and by Wednesday she’d be ducking his calls just like all the other women she derided for being such pigs. She kept her hands firmly in her lap. His lip trembled the tiniest bit.

He must be made to stop. He was going to give her a heart attack.

“Duncan,” she said impulsively. “Someday you’ll see her. You’ll walk into a room and there she’ll be. And you’ll know it. And she’ll know it too.”
Good lord
, Rilka thought,
what have I been smoking?
“Can you imagine that? It’ll happen, Duncan. You just have to believe.”

“I believe,” he said fiercely. “Thank you. For a moment my faith wavered, but
I believe
.” He pressed his hand over his heart to symbolize his belief, and gave her a sunny smile that made her want to strip off her clothes as much as the tremulous tear had.

Of course you believe,
she thought, seeing him out the door.
Because you are so easily led.
She waved to Jenny — or perhaps Andrea — then shut the door behind him.

What had she been thinking? She should have broken it to him gently.
You know, Duncan, some of us are meant for the single life. Have you thought about getting a dog?

No, scratch the dog. She couldn’t recommend a dog. He’d forget to feed the dog and then she’d have a dead dog on her conscience. Maybe she could buy him a robot dog. The Jennifers and Andreas could keep him supplied with batteries.

• • •

Her last appointment of the day, Rilka thought thankfully, opening the door to Hilda Glazer. Hilda was a forty-seven-year-old scientist whose buttoned-up ways had made it hard for her to connect with anyone. Rilka had started by setting her up with other buttoned-up types, whom Hilda called rigid, frigid prudes. “I’m precise, not rigid,” Hilda had said when Rilka had questioned her about the differences between her anal-retentive behaviors and those of her dates.