Meeting His Match (A Match Me Novel) (Entangled Lovestruck) (4 page)

Chapter Five

Addison’s world caught fire at the feel of Caine’s lips against hers. It burned through everything she thought she knew, through her expectations, and finally, through her body itself. All in the space between one heartbeat and the next. Every cell of her being wanted to throw herself at him and hang on until the fire raged out. Because it had to rage out eventually. An attraction that flared this strongly off a single kiss couldn’t possibly last for more than an instant.

But what if it didn’t?

That question had her shoving him away so hard that her back hit the wall. He barely moved, just stood there, ruining her life with the desire written over his face. “Addison—”

She couldn’t catch her breath. She couldn’t think. Letting her client—even a reluctant client—kiss her was breaking her rules. Wanting to do it again? Unforgivable. “You’ve got to stop doing this.”

“Doing what? This is the first time I’ve kissed you.”

“You know what I mean. Stop trying to bully me.”

“Do you really want me to?”

Yes, she did. Hadn’t she just said that? But she couldn’t quite make herself let go of his shirt. In fact, she found herself pulling him closer, inch by inch, as if drawn by a gravitational pull she couldn’t resist. He’d undone the top few buttons at some point during the day and that slice of skin at the top of his chest called to her.

Maybe Regan was onto something with her theory about pent-up sexual frustration, because Addison suddenly couldn’t think of a single reason why she shouldn’t kiss Caine again.

So she did.

She went up onto her tiptoes and pressed her lips to his. It was nearly as innocent as what he’d just done to her, but it didn’t stay that way. The fire that had banked when she pushed him away flared back up with a vengeance. She parted her lips, and he took full advantage, stroking her tongue with his, exploring her mouth as if he had every right. And Addison could only cling to him and return the favor.

He backed her against the wall, pinning her there with the weight of his body, keeping one hand on her hip and the other buried in her hair. It felt good, but she needed more. She needed
touch
. Skin on skin. The slide of his body against her own. She needed it so much, she could barely breathe.

Caine kissed along her jaw and down her throat, but stopped just short of the strap of her dress. She wanted to tell him to keep going, to not stop until she was lost. Damn it,
no
. This was wrong. She’d had her chance at love and it had ended all too soon. She wasn’t going to ruin Caine’s just because he made her feel good.

Soul mates only came around once in a lifetime.

“Stop.”

He immediately backed off. Her knees tried to buckle, but she leaned against the wall and managed to avoid falling. Any hope that he missed the move died at the grin on his face. “You taste better than I’d guessed.”

Don’t blush, don’t you dare… Crap
. She looked away. “Now that you’ve satisfied your curiosity, we can move on.” A little part of her died at the thought of never having his hands on her again, but she silenced it. She wasn’t here to kiss Caine—or do anything else with him. She was here to help him find his soul mate. End of story.

“Oh, darlin’, I don’t think so.”

She jerked around so fast, she cricked her neck. “What?”

His smile widened. “All you’ve done is whetted my curiosity. It would take a whole lot more to satisfy it.”

Unbidden images thrust themselves to the forefront of her mind of just what that might entail. Sex. Definitely sex. She let herself consider it for half a second—of having a fling with him until she found him the right woman—and then made herself discard it. If one kiss could have her thinking about compromising her hard-and-fast rules, sex would throw them out the window completely.

That wasn’t an option. “No.”

“No?”

“That’s what I said. This was a mistake. It’s not happening again.” Maybe if she said that enough times, she’d actually start to believe it.

From the look on his face, he didn’t believe it any more than she did. “I’ll make you a deal.”

“I’m listening.” Just like before, his doing a one-eighty only meant trouble for her. She was sure of it. For someone with a relatively clean reputation business-wise, this man sure was sneaky.

“I won’t kiss you again.” Before she could breathe a sigh of relief, he continued, “But next time you kiss me, all bets are off.”

Addison’s jaw dropped. “I’m not kissing you again.” Her entire body perked up at the thought, but she told it to shut the hell up.

“I guess we’ll see, won’t we?” He picked up the briefcase he’d set on the floor while she’d introduced him to Gollum. “Have a good night, darlin’. I trust you’ll be sleeping just as well as I will.”

Only if he meant he wouldn’t sleep a wink. She refused to show just how much his calm determination threw her, though. “Like a baby.”

“Whatever you have to tell yourself.” He turned and walked up the staircase, and damn her self-control, she checked out his ass the entire time. It was only after he disappeared down the hallway at the top of the stairs that she managed to move.

God, she was in so much trouble.

Needing to put as much space between them as possible—and there was a hell of a lot of it in this place to put between them—she made her way to where she’d set up beds for Gollum and her pups. It was on the far side of the house, right next to the door to both the greenhouse and the rest of the grounds. She let the dogs out, pausing to pat Gollum on the head, and then settled down on the fainting couch with her computer.

Obviously she couldn’t be trusted to spend more time with Caine than strictly necessary, so she had to get a move on with finding him his match. Easier said than done. It was more than his questionable answers about what he wanted—there was the distance factor as well. Ninety percent of Connected at the Lips’ clients were in the New York tristate area, which was a hell of a long way from Tennessee.

So the first thing she had to do was narrow the field down to women who would be willing to move. Caine wasn’t going anywhere, so she refused to waste time with something that would turn into a long-distance relationship permanently. But she had a decent number of candidates who could—and would—move.

The trick was making Caine an attractive enough catch to get them down here in the first place.

Her face heated. He definitely had his high points, but she couldn’t exactly list his kissing skills as an asset. And as she’d told him, the money wasn’t enough, either. There were plenty of men with money in the city. His appearance was a good start, and the man could dress. Her fingers twitched, it being all too easy to recall how good his shirt felt beneath her hands.

And, Lord, was he driven when he put his mind to something. Having all that attention focused on her was enough to make her wonder what he’d be like in a relationship…

“Get a grip and focus.” She took a deep breath and got to work. She had her list narrowed down to eight women when the dog scratched at the door to be let back in. Addison smiled at the trail of puppies behind her. She hadn’t meant to end up with a herd of animals, but the thought of separating a mother from her babies had hit her in the chest. They were nearly weaned, but they’d cried when the guy took Gollum out of the cage. She couldn’t leave them behind.

Caine wasn’t too happy about them being here, but he would just have to deal with it. A mother shouldn’t have to be separated from her babies.

She recognized her vehemence on the subject as a little bit irrational, but it was too late to worry about it now. He needed things in his life to make him more approachable, and Gollum fit the bill.

Now, if she could only fix his sexual underhandedness and stubborn streak as easily.

…

“That woman is on the phone again.”

Caine rubbed the bridge of his nose. Ever since Addison had sneaked into his office, Agnes refused to call her by name. With yet another stack of contracts on his desk and an angry developer on his back, he didn’t have time for this. If one element of the Richards deal fell through, the entire thing would turn into a shitstorm. “Put her through.”

“Who does she think she is? You don’t have time for her to be calling every three seconds. She’s a disrespectful little—”

“Agnes.” He’d known she didn’t like the woman, but this was beyond what he’d expected. Which meant he had to smooth Agnes’s feathers or she’d be mother-henning him for the rest of the day. Goddamn it. “I’m sorry you don’t like her, but she’s a business associate.” Who was making his life a hell of a lot harder than it had to be.

“She’s interfering with your day and you’re a very busy man, Mr. McNeill.”

And this conversation wasn’t helping. He bit back a sigh. “Please put her through.”

“Yes, sir.”

The line clicked. “Addison—”

“I only have fifteen minutes and your receptionist took up twelve of them.”

When had his life come down to women battling over his time? If someone had told him this would happen five years ago, he’d have laughed and patted himself on the back for being a lothario for once in his life. In reality, they pulled him out of his office only long enough to suit their needs—and argue over him like dogs with a bone—and then they kicked him back out again. It wasn’t the high point of his life, that was for damn sure. “You know, I have a job that requires my attention.”

“I’m aware. But unless you want to spend the rest of your life sleeping on that couch, this also requires your attention.”

It had been two days since their kiss, and she’d successfully retreated behind a professional mask. He didn’t like it one bit. But he’d told her he wouldn’t touch her again until she kissed him, so he wouldn’t. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t push her a little in the meantime. “I have something else that requires your attention.”

“That’s cute, but no, thank you.” And then she carried on without missing a beat. “I’m arranging for a woman to fly in next week, so I need you to put her on your schedule.”

Holy shit, this was actually happening. He’d gone along with the matchmaking questions, mostly so he could spend more time with Addison, but actually having to go on dates was another thing altogether. “I don’t think—”

“That was not a request, Caine. I’ve already booked the flight. If you don’t meet her, she’ll have come down here for nothing and it will be a black mark on my reputation as a matchmaker. I might even lose her as a client.”

Christ. He wanted to tell her that he didn’t give a damn…but it would be a lie. What could a few dates hurt? “Fine.”

“I’ll email you the day and time, though I’d appreciate if you suggested a restaurant since I’m not familiar with the area. Something expensive but understated.”

“Jean Claude’s.”

“I’ll take care of the reservations.”

He didn’t like this painfully cold woman on the other end of the line. If she kept up this matchmaking business, eventually she was going to… He paused. Going to what? Leave and head back to New York? What else would she do? He might be attracted to her, but that didn’t mean he wanted her as a permanent fixture in his life. Caine cleared his throat. “Do I get a chance to look at this woman and the ones that come after her? Or do I not have a say?”

“If you remember correctly—and you should since it was two days ago—you told me you don’t have any preferences beyond her being beautiful. I can assure you that anyone I bring down here will be beautiful.”

He shoved any thoughts of Addison out of his head. The least he could do was actually go on the dates. It didn’t mean that he was going to marry whomever she paraded in front of him, and
not
cooperating meant she would eventually get fed up and leave. He wasn’t ready to see her walk out of his life just yet. “I’ll make sure to clear my calendar.”

“Good.”

“Good.” He hung up, hating the feeling in his chest. It was like a toothache, but there was no definitive source. It didn’t matter. He had too much work to do to worry about whatever Addison was getting up to in his house without him.

Or how empty it would be when she finished her mission and left.

Chapter Six

Addison set the phone down and tried not to notice how much her hands shook. She’d gone out of her way to avoid Caine since their kiss in the foyer, but apparently two days wasn’t enough to dampen the memory. Which meant she needed to get her first candidate down here sooner, rather than later.

Because it had been difficult
not
to search him out last night. Especially when she’d accidentally-on-purpose picked a room to do her work in that overlooked the massive driveway. When his headlights had cut through the darkness, her traitorous heart actually skipped a beat. She’d had a white-knuckle grip on her papers as she’d listened to his footsteps echo over the tiled floors. Part of her had wanted
him
to search her out, and she’d wanted that desperately.

But he’d given her space, or whatever he’d been trying to accomplish. It should have filled her with relief that she wasn’t going to spend any more time than necessary in his unnerving presence, but the emotion clogging the back of her throat wasn’t relief.

It was disappointment.

“Damn it.” She paced a quick circle around the room and dropped back into the love seat where she’d set up her command central. “Focus on the match. The sooner you get him set up with someone else, the sooner you can go home.”

Home to her empty apartment and half-dead fern. She used to love her cozy little loft in the East Village. It was something she and Aiden had always planned on when they were in high school—a loft in the colorful part of the city where there was always something going on at any hour of the day. The perfect place to live life to the fullest and try new experiences. They were going to have countless adventures. The kinds they told their grandchildren about.

But there were no grandchildren. No
children
. No adventures. The ink on their home contract had barely dried when Aiden was gunned down in combat in Afghanistan, leaving her a twenty-one-year-old widow. She hadn’t had a chance to truly start living before it was all taken away.

Addison sighed. Life could be cruel sometimes. She’d moved on, and thrown herself into helping people find the one thing she’d never have again. Gollum must have sensed her spiraling mood, because the dog trotted over and laid her head on Addison’s lap. She absently petted the white fur. “It’s okay, girl. I’m just being melodramatic.”

Because the truth was that helping other people find their soul mates didn’t fulfill her like it used to. She used to be able to almost—
almost
—feel what they felt as they went through the first steps of falling in love. But she hadn’t had that fluttering feeling in her stomach for a long time now.

Until Caine.

The problem was
he
gave her the fluttery feeling. The last person who affected her so completely was
Aiden
. It didn’t make any sense. People only got one chance at their soul mate. One try and if it ended early, at least they were blessed enough to have felt that all-encompassing love for even a short time.

There were no second chances.

Hadn’t Grandmother told her that over and over again as she was growing up? Her grandparents had had a love story for the ages—meeting on the cusp of World War II when her grandmother was a nurse and her grandfather was a pilot. After a whirlwind courtship and quick marriage, they spent years apart exchanging some of the most romantic letters Addison had ever read. And when the war was done, they had ten years together full of joy and children before her grandfather passed away of a heart attack, leaving Grandmother as a widow and mother of three at thirty-five.

She could still remember sitting on her grandmother’s knee and listening to the story, the smell of cookies baking in the oven and the chimes softly ringing on the front porch.
Plenty of people thought I should remarry and give a father to your mother and uncles, but I told them the same thing I’m telling you—John was my soul mate. He was the love of my life, and you only get one of those. To marry someone else would be a betrayal to that and to the poor man who put a ring on my finger
.

Grandmother had turned ninety this year and she still got that sad smile on her face when she talked about her soul mate.

“God, I
am
a downer today.” She nudged Gollum’s head off her thigh and pulled her computer into her lap. She already had the eight profiles up, so it was a matter of setting them side-by-side. As promised, all were beautiful and all were successful in their own right. They ranged from blond to brunette to redhead, so there should be something to his taste no matter what it was.

Her skin heated as his voice coursed through her memory.
I seem to have developed a keen fascination with redheads.
He’d been trying to make her uncomfortable. She had to keep that in the front of her mind, because she wasn’t reacting to him like she usually would with a pushy alpha male. Normally, it’d be easy to put on the cold front and shove him back to where he belonged. She’d never had to worry about
her
losing control before.

It wasn’t a comforting thought.

Giving up work for the time being, she kicked off her shoes and went to sit on the floor in the midst of Gollum’s pups. They each had very a distinct personality and she’d privately dubbed them after the Ninja Turtles after she found them digging a pizza out of Caine’s trash can yesterday morning. It was silly, but the names fit in their own way. Mikey was a goofball who could barely walk without tripping over his wide little paws, Leo always seemed to be leading them into mischief, and Donnie was already too smart for his own good. Raph… She leaned over and tapped the floor. As usual, he was sitting back and watching his siblings play rough-and-tumble. “Come here, fella.”

He reluctantly made his way over and sniffed her fingers, which the other three took as an invitation to play. They piled into her lap, wiggling and yipping and generally being so cute she wanted to take them all home with her when she left. Addison laughed and played with them, letting her stress melt away. There wasn’t much that could worry her in the face of so much puppy love.

“Is puppy the new black?”

She screamed, scaring the pups so badly they all started barking. Gollum moved before she could, knocking her to the ground and standing over her and the puppies. Masculine laughter rocked the room—or maybe that was just Addison’s heart. She shoved her hair out of her face and then had to part Gollum’s dreads to see Caine. “What are you doing here?”

“I live here.”

Why did he always have to be so difficult? “It’s not even dark yet. Why are you home?”

“I reckon I can come and go as I please, seeing as how I own the place.” He eyed the dog nearly pinning her to the ground. “How exactly are you going to convince some poor, unsuspecting woman that I actually own this dog when it—
she
—looks ready to take a chunk out of me every time I get too close?”

“You—” Having this conversation with the dog in question on her wasn’t really a good way to make her point. She wiggled out from beneath Gollum, praying the dog didn’t decide to just lie on top of her and hold her in place. It took a little longer than she’d have liked because she didn’t want to crush whichever puppy was halfway beneath her hip. Talk about undignified.

Addison got to her knees and had to shove her hair out of her face again. Wonderful. “If you weren’t skulking about, she wouldn’t feel the need to defend her territory.”

“One, I don’t skulk anywhere. Two, how many times do I have to explain that this is
my
territory? She’s the newcomer.”

“Feel free to tell her that.” Her gaze landed on one of the puppies starting to squat. “Raphael, don’t you dare!” She lurched to her feet, scooped him up, and ran for the door. Thank God she’d picked a room with easy access to the backyard. Once she’d deposited the puppy outside, she left him to do his business.

“Rafael.” Caine’s mouth twitched like he was trying to hold back a laugh. “What are the other fluffballs’ names?”

She really, really didn’t want to tell him. But from the look on his face, she wasn’t getting out of this even if she tried to change the subject. “Michelangelo, Donatello, and Leonardo.”

The muscle in his cheek starting jumping faster. “Did you name them after Renaissance painters or the Ninja Turtles?”

Would she save face if she claimed the former? She started to do just that, but she couldn’t lie under the weight of those gray eyes. “The Ninja Turtles.”

“Whose mother is Gollum.”

It sounded particularly ridiculous coming out of his mouth. She raised her chin, determined not to feel stupid—and failing. “It fits.”

“Oh, I have no doubt.” He took the love seat. She tensed when he glanced at her computer, and then felt even more foolish. What was she going to do? Run over there and grab it out of his hands if he decided to snoop? The women he’d see were ones she was considering flying down here to meet him, so trying to keep them from him didn’t make any sense.

Flustered and hating that he made her feel that way without actually doing anything, she set about trying to smooth the wrinkles out of her dress. It didn’t work. No matter how hard she ran her hands over the fabric, the wrinkles jumped back into evidence. Addison had no idea how long she’d been rubbing at herself when he cleared his throat. “Tell me about this first woman.”

He kept flip-flopping between being a control freak and not having enough time to actually deal with the tasks she set for him. It was enough to give her whiplash. “I already went into this on the phone. You didn’t give me a lot to work with.”

“And I’m not judging. I’m asking what it was about her that made you pick her for me.”

She hesitated, but there was nothing on his face but genuine curiosity. Since he was apparently ready to let the dog names go without poking at her further, she decided to answer the question. “I’m trying to develop a baseline, though I certainly hope you connect with someone as quickly as possible.” The words tasted flat, but she charged on, determined to ignore the niggling worry in her stomach that she was somehow screwing this up. “Your first date is Sarah Roberts, a CFO for Free Thinking Inc. She was listed as one of New York’s most powerful women under thirty.” And she was one of Addison’s problem clients. The woman was capable enough, but she had a list of her future husband’s necessary traits as long as her arm. The only reason she’d considered Sarah at all was that Caine matched nearly 75 percent of them and that was a hell of a lot better than the other men Addison had tried to push her toward. Even as picky as she was, Sarah had been excited at the prospect of meeting him when they talked yesterday.

Then again, who wouldn’t want to meet him? He was gorgeous and successful and had a sterling reputation. If he was also an overbearing ass, well, that shouldn’t surprise anyone.

“Sounds promising.” And he didn’t sound the least bit interested. “Though that doesn’t tell me a damn thing about her.”

She froze. “What?”

“You just recited her job and that she’s beautiful. Why did you pick her for
me
?”

God, she just wanted to smack him in the face. And then kiss him. It was that impulse more than anything else that had her backing out of the room. “You’ll see for yourself when you meet her. Please let Rafael back in when he’s done.” Needing space, she turned and marched out of the room. But she didn’t march fast enough.

“You don’t have to run from me, darlin’. I already promised to keep my hands to myself. Unless you’re feeling a bit out of control right around now?”

The only way she could prove him wrong was to go back into that room, and she couldn’t trust herself to do that because they’d keep arguing and then she’d get so angry, she’d do something she was bound to regret. Even knowing that, it still took more effort than she liked for her to keep walking.