MAKE ME A MATCH (Running Wild) (4 page)

Clara Beckford, her boss and the owner and founder of Synchronicity, Vancouver’s Most Personal Matchmaking Service, usually kept Tessa on the straight and narrow. Clara made a habit of reminding Tessa that kissing a smoker was like licking old ashtrays, and the smell of smoke was not an aphrodisiac, and if she wanted a meaningful, longtime, committed relationship like she said, she should plan on having lungs that went the distance. And that if she ever caught Tessa smoking
in the office, it would result in instant dismissal.

But Clara hadn’t been at work for six days now, and the steady stream of complaints from the matches Tessa had lined up was enough to make the Dalai Llama light up.

“I honestly had no idea Louie had dentures,” she said to Rebecca Hyacinth, who, thank god, had phoned instead of barging in to complain the way others had done. “He didn’t mention them on the information sheet. I have it right here.” She rustled a blank piece of paper—the relevant bloody files were lost somewhere in the bulging file cabinet—and listened as the forty-three-year- old woman went on and on about eating dinner and having the chompers suddenly fall half out, which put Rebecca off her food, because they apparently were well laced with globs of spinach. What in blue blazes were they doing eating spinach on a first date? Honestly, people were unbelievable.

“He wore a green suit and blue socks with brown shoes? No, he didn’t mention being colorblind, either.” Rebecca did have a point there, but Re
becca herself had a shoe polish black beehive hairdo and a high, round belly that could have held an eighth month pregnancy, which made her just that teensy bit hard to match up.

Tessa didn’t say so, of course, which should have earned her at least one good lungful of nicotine as a reward. Instead, all it got her was another set of teeth marks on the pencil she was chewing. She had excellent teeth at the moment, but pencils could change that.

“No,” she explained for the seventh time that morning, “Clara isn’t in. She’s recovering from a bad case of the flu.” She wondered whether to give Rebecca Clara’s home number, and decided against it.

“It’s personal, my business,” Clara was fond of saying. “People don’t want to leave messages on some machine when they’re feeling excited or discouraged about romance. They want to talk to me. I don’t mind having them call me at home.”

No doubt about it, Clara was a bit of a megalomaniac. But things weren’t normal with Clara right now, so Tessa wasn’t sure what to do.

“Yes, Rebecca,” Tessa cooed, “I’ll be happy to put your membership on hold until Clara gets back and personally arranges a match for you, and in the meantime I’ll pass along your concerns to her.” She hung up the phone and blew a raspberry.

“Eat glass and die, Becky, baby.”

In the ten months she’d worked for Synchronicity, there’d been other occasions when Clara left things in Tessa’s less-than-capable hands, but there was a frightening difference this time.

Tessa figured her boss was having an emotional meltdown. In the last month, it seemed as if a light had been switched off in Clara’s gypsy dark eyes. Gone was her vivacious attitude, her bouncy walk, her optimism, her decided opinions. She didn’t come in, and she didn’t seem to give much of a damn when Tessa called to update her on what was going on.

What was going on was a filing disaster. Clara had her own peculiar system when it came to keeping track of clients, and as long as she was on deck, it worked. In the past week, Tessa had spent untold frantic hours trying to figure out who had been matched with whom and when. She’d finally figured out that a good portion of the information must be floating free form in Clara’s head.

The truth was, Tessa was beyond exasperated with Clara’s point-blank refusal to use computers or even let Tessa have one in the office, insisting that computerizing the business would make it the same as every other slick commercial dating service. Tessa figured it would simply yank Synchronicity into the twenty-first century where it belonged. The business had upward of a hundred-fifty members; it begged for an efficient cross referencing system, which at the very least would prevent matching another poor unfortunate guy, wearing dentures and blue socks, with Rebecca.

And it would allow her to make faces at photos on the screen while being bitched deaf, dumb, and cross-eyed on the phone.

At first, Tessa had been totally disillusioned to find out that matchmaking involved more complaining than it did hearts and happy endings. Clara had explained the Zen attitude, where the matchmaker simply did the best possible and didn’t dwell on the fact that only one or two percent of the people who joined actually found someone to ride off with into the sunset.

The fact was, Synchronicity made a living on those who sought without finding. They were the ones who renewed their membership regularly. Not that she and Clara ever stopped genuinely trying to find mates for people, goodness gracious, no. But it was impossible to succeed for everyone, even God didn’t do that, Clara had been known to declare.

But Tessa didn’t think God spent the major part of Her day listening to endless grumbling while She tried to figure out who to slap together next in a relationship sandwich, either.

She poured a cup of coffee, picked up a fresh pencil to chew, and dialed Clara’s number. She
needed to know where the missing files were, when Clara might be planning on coming in, and how many members had called to tattle on the miserable matches Tessa had made for them.

When the phone was picked up on the fourth ring, however, the voice on the other end wasn’t Clara’s.

It was Clara’s husband, Bernard Beckford, and Tessa felt her hackles rise. Clara’s husband was the exception to the rule that everyone had some good in them. Bernard Beckford, excuse the language, was a prize asshole.

“Is Clara there, Bernard? It’s Tessa.” She knew she sounded snippy, but every time she heard Bernard’s smarmy tenor she flashed back to the Christmas party last December when she’d stepped out of the upstairs bathroom at the Beckford house and straight into Bernard’s muscular arms. A chef had no business being that strong. He’d imprisoned her, and before she could even struggle his mouth came down on hers, open and wet and guppy cold.

Tessa shuddered at the memory and rubbed a hand across her mouth.

His hands had cupped her bum and pulled her in against his crotch, banging against her rhythmically like a dog in heat. This was no easy feat considering the roundness of his gut, but the size of his erection exceeded even his girth.

By the time a plump, reasonably attractive woman reaches her thirty-fourth year, she’s had some experience with being groped. Tessa certainly had, but being groped by the husband of a woman she adored, a woman who also happened to be her boss, made the situation tricky.

Normally she’d have resorted to the old knee to the groin and hard smack on the face routine, but
Bernard had ambushed her when she was least expecting it, and she was off balance. She tried to be moderately polite, which proved a mistake. She closed her mouth, turned her head and shoved at him, but he was tenacious as a magnet with iron filings. His tongue, overly long and thick, probed her lips, and she gagged.

She pushed with all her strength against his chest, and at the same time brought up her knee, narrowly missing her target but at least getting his attention. What made him pull away wasn’t Tessa’s guerrilla maneuvers, though. It was Clara’s voice, dangerously close.

“Bernard, sweetie, are there any more of those luscious cream cheese things?”

“Sorry, sugar, duty calls,” he’d whispered wetly in Tessa’s ear, for all the world as if she were the one who’d started things. That same oily voice now said, “Clara’s still in bed, honey, why don’t you call back later?”

Tessa put the phone down hard without saying another word.

“Honey, ” she muttered with indignation. “You fat prick, where do you get off calling me honey?”

The door buzzer sounded from downstairs, no doubt signaling yet another disgruntled client. The new pencil she’d been chewing in lieu of a cigarette now had tooth marks all down it.

“Come right up,” she said into the intercom, using a mock cheery voice, pasting a smile on her face. A few moments later the door swung open.

“Good morn—” the rest was lost in a horrified gasp.

Tessa stared up at Eric Stewart, and she felt her eyes bug out as her brain went blank. Her heart began to hammer, and she had to swallow several
times before she could get any of her faculties working again.

Suddenly, Bernard Beckford wasn’t first on her list of losers.

If you were talking despicable, this guy beat Bernard, no competition.

CHAPTER FOUR

Time wounds all heels

Tessa hadn’t seen Eric Stewart since she’d left Vancouver at the age of eighteen, and Clara had promised she wouldn’t have to deal with him at Synchronicity.

When his sisters bought him the membership, Clara had promised Tessa she’d personally and forever after deal with Eric Stewart, and now here he was and where was Clara? At home with loser number two.

“Holy shit. ” His appalled and involuntary exclamation told her he was as shocked as she, but he recovered faster. His voice took on a phony heartiness. “Hey, it’s Tessa McBride.”

“Good memory, Eric.” Unless he’d studied at the Actor’s Guild while running a garbage company, he hadn’t known till this minute that she worked at Synchronicity. “Karen didn’t mention I was working here?”

He shook his head. “I guess she thought it would be a surprise.”

Some surprise
,
Tessa thought
. Why the hell hadn’t Karen told him?

“So how are you, Tessa?”

She cleared her throat, looked straight at him, and tried for grown-up and civilized. “I’m very well, thank you, Eric.”

No thanks to you
.  “Won’t you sit down?”

He did, and she took a closer look at him. In the years since she’d last seen him, surely the rat should have acquired the face and body he deserved. Instead he was still tall, broad shouldered, height and weight proportionate. And his body wasn’t just adequate. The years hadn’t budged him from the upper percentile of male hunkiness. Although they were seriously bloodshot, he still had those lazy cobalt blue peepers that looked at you as if he knew way more than you wanted him to know. Which, when it came to her, he did.

Tessa swallowed hard.

He said, “So I guess you and Karen have been in touch? Since you moved back here?”

“Not really. We met by chance at Oakridge Mall one day, a couple of months ago.”

Before that, they hadn’t talked in years. They’d lived in different cities, married, had kids, not had kids, divorced.

Over coffee, they’d tried to recapture something and failed.

Karen was different.

Tessa was different.

During their conversation, though, Karen had talked about Eric. After all, he was her brother. She’d said he’d stayed single. And if she hadn’t told Tessa that his garbage company was thriving, the way he looked today Tessa would have guessed that Eric had fallen on hard times. He wore jeans that were way beyond worn and well into ragged; his tee had once been navy, but it had lost a battle with bleach. His eyes had purple bags underneath them, and he’d given up shaving recently, maybe because his jaw was swollen on one side. He sounded as if his tongue was in the way of his teeth. One big work roughened hand had a strip of gauze across the palm.

“You have an accident, Eric?”

He grimaced. “Nope, an altercation.”

He didn’t say she should see the other guy. Well, well. Maybe karma was a reality.

“So, Tess, have you seen a lot of Karen since you got back? When you were kids, you two used to be like Siamese twins.”

“Just that once.” It hurt a little that Karen apparently hadn’t mentioned meeting Tessa.

“I thought you were living in Calgary. Didn’t I hear you got married? So your name’s probably not McBride anymore?”

He still had that bloody smile, that sardonic half grin that suggested he was thinking about sex when the truth was he was probably thinking about—sex. Eric was nothing if not single-minded, she had good reason to know that.

“I kept my own name, which saved a lot of paperwork when the marriage ended. I moved back to Vancouver thirteen months ago.”

She’d lost a husband and he hadn’t even lost his hair, for pity’s sake, which would seem only fair if bad guys got what they deserved. It wasn’t long and tied back with a leather shoelace anymore, but there was plenty of it. It was conservatively cut, curly and thick and sun-streaked and golden. Messy. Sexy. There was no justice.

“Sorry to hear that your marriage didn’t work.”

“It was a learning experience.” Like you were, Stewart. She remembered being eighteen, at a

party where she’d just broken up with her steady. She’d just graduated high school. She was just barely not a virgin. Ripe pickings.

Eric had breezed in with some of his friends, black leather jacket, Elvis lip curl, skin-tight Levi’s, cowboy boots. She knew the rumors, her mother had warned her. Eric Stewart might be a good brother to his sisters, but at heart he was a hooligan. He was dangerous, and far too old for Tessa to date. Why didn’t mothers realize that guys like Eric were the drug of choice when you were eighteen?

“No kids?”

“Nope.” So it took her seven years to figure out that “Not just now, honey,” on the subject of kids really meant “Not ever, sucker,” at which point she’d found that ball breaker of a divorce lawyer.

“No kids.” It always stung to admit it, but she’d be nuts to show him any weak spots. “How about you, Eric?”

“Kids? God, no. Footloose and free, that’s my style.”

Ahh, yes, how well she remembered his style.

He’d asked her to go for a ride that night, and she said yes. He parked and kissed her, and when he slid his hand under her new pink sweater and undid her bra, she still said yes. She moaned it, actually. She practically yarded up her sweater and begged him to suck. He had style, all right. It was spelled s-e-x.

And right now, a hot, traitorous tingle went sliding from her right nipple to her groin at the memory. She felt herself getting damp, and it infuriated her. She felt like cursing at the injustice of life. Why should she still be able to remember how his lips felt on her nipples? How his hand had slid inside her panties and found the exact right place, first try?

She couldn’t remember things like that about Gordon, her ex, and she’d been married to him for seven goddamn years while she was learning firsthand the meaning of Marry in haste, repent at leisure.

Gordon hadn’t found the right place even when she pointed it out with the light on.
She couldn’t for the life of her remember at this particular moment what it felt like to have Gordon inside her, and he must have been there a few times, even taking into account his weenie little sex drive.

But her groin, traitor that it was, remembered all these years later exactly how Eric had felt. Thick and hot and throbbing, like her head at the moment. She needed to get on with the job and get this man out of here.

“So, Tess, how come you ’re working here?”

Trust him to make it sound like she was running the local whorehouse. He was still an expert at the art of mortification, but now she was immune.

At eighteen, she hadn’t been. He’d lectured her about being easy after sex that made her scream for the first and only time in her deprived life. This, after him throwing back his own head and making a sound like a cement grinder that went on and on, the turncoat. The smug, pious, self- righteous bastard.

The client, who, Clara insisted, was always right. She tilted her chin up and put extra starch in her tone. “Ms. Beckford needed an assistant. I needed a job.”

Idiot. Why did people usually work? Mind you, she’d also thought working for a matchmaker would make it easier to find the rich, attractive, intelligent, sexy, funny man who was her destiny.

Ha bloody ha to that fantasy. There were men, sure, but so far, even with Clara’s advice and assistance plus free access to the files, Tessa hadn’t come across one man of any age with even two of her basic qualifications.

“You enjoy working here?”

“I love it.” It was losing appeal by the instant.

He obviously didn’t know what else to say, and she couldn’t speak because she was experiencing a moment of pure, out-of-control rage at Clara, who had faithfully promised Tessa she’d never have to have a thing to do with Eric Stewart, and here she was, being interviewed by him.

“Now, Eric, I’ll just have you fill in this form.” Aspartame was the name of the game, so deceptively sweet on the tongue it masked the bitterness underneath. With one finger—thank heaven she’d had a manicure on the weekend—she slid a personal profile form across the desk along with a pen, careful not to touch a single one of his skin cells.

He shoved it back without so much as a glance. “This was all a misunderstanding, Tessa.” He shook his head, and for one insane instant she thought he meant their personal history. But of course he didn’t.

“My sisters made a big mistake, buying that gift certificate,” he said. “See, I don’t need the services of a matchmaker; it’s a big waste of everyone’s time to continue with this. The best thing is just to drop it. So could I get their money refunded? Or at the very least, transfer the membership to Sophie or Karen? They’re both single; they’d probably benefit from it way more than I would.”

He hadn’t lost that little boy charm, dipping his cleft chin and looking at her from under those obscenely long lashes, softening his voice until it was husky and endearing. He was using testosterone full strength, and it would have worked on any other poor unsuspecting female. Tessa was proud of being impervious to it. Maybe they could draw her blood and create a vaccine to protect her gender from the likes of him.

“Oh, no. I’m afraid that isn’t possible.” It felt so good to thwart him. “I’m sure you read the fine print. It specifically states that we don’t give refunds or allow the membership to be transferred once the contract is signed. I know Clara went over every detail with your sisters, and she would have insisted they take at least forty-eight hours to really think it over before any money changed hands; she always does. And there’s the three-month clause as well; I’m sure you saw that if you read the fine print.”

“Yeah, I did, but let’s just review it here. If you can’t find a suitable match in three months, you refund the money, right?”

“Not quite. Synchronicity has three months to find possible companions for you before the contract is voided. If we can’t come up with anyone for you to date in three months, then we refund your money.”

“And how many times has that happened?”

It isn’t always true that the truth will make you free, dearie.

“In the two years I’ve been here, never.” She gave him a wide-eyed crocodile smile. “Clara is the best in the business; we have lots of members. We don’t guarantee you’ll meet your ideal companion in three months, that’s not realistic. But we’ll certainly put you in touch with people we think would be compatible.” And for you, Stewart, that will be a challenge. “If the candidates we send you are totally inappropriate, of course we don’t expect you to go on seeing them, but we do ask that you give each new contact at least three opportunities to get to know you. Meeting strangers is nerve-racking, and we’ve found that the three date rule prevents a lot of impetuous mistakes.”

“What if the lady refuses to see me again?”

“That’s her privilege, of course. And yours as well, but we do assume that applicants are willing and eager to make a connection. That’s why they come to Synchronicity.”

He leaned toward her and looked earnest. “Look, Tessa, I’m gonna be up front with you here. The last thing I need is a matchmaker. I do really well all on my own.” A modest and rueful shake of the head. “A little too well, truth be told.”

Arrogant asshole alpha male.
“Your sisters seem to think differently.”

“Yeah, well, they don’t exactly follow me around. So Tess, just tell me straight up how to get their money back.”

“Well, Eric, you’d have to discuss that with Clara. But I’d give some thought to how that’s going to make your sisters feel. They did give you the membership as a gift.”

Good one. His eyes narrowed and his jaw tightened. “I could have my attorney contest the conditions of this contract. I don’t believe it would stand up in court.”

Probably not. Tessa wondered about the legalities of the contract herself. Clara definitely ran by her own set of rules, but Tessa wasn’t about to admit to Eric Stewart that she had misgivings about anything.

“Of course, you’re free to do whatever you choose,” she said in a haughty tone, tilting her chin high and forcing herself to meet his gaze head on. “Go ahead and treat your sisters’ gift with disrespect and contempt. Personally, I believe you have a moral obligation to them to give this a fair shot, but if you want to hurt them by…” she almost said being a jerk, but caught herself in time…“by rejecting a generous, thoughtful gift, well, it’s entirely up to you.”

She gave him a look that she hoped would imply that she expected nothing more than crass behavior and utmost rudeness from him anyway, and it must have been effective, because he blew out a breath and nodded.

“You’re right, it was a gift.”

Good. He had the faintest vestige of a conscience; mankind was progressing. She shoved the form back across the desk.

He pulled his own gold pen out of somewhere and flipped through the form, muttering, “Guilt, guilt, how come all you women come hot-wired with the guilt gene?”

Survival 101, dear heart
. She watched as he read for a moment, scowled, and then went back to the first page.