Heartstrings and Diamond Rings

by Jane Graves

  “Forget ordinary. You should be looking for something extraordinary.”

  “Nope. I just want a nice, normal life with a nice, normal man. If a little bit of blah comes with that, so be it.”

  Blah. She hadn’t put that on her questionnaire. Maybe he needed to keep that in mind for the future.

  “I don’t know why I didn’t see what kind of guy he was,” Brandon said. “I mean, I had no trouble reading you, right? So why couldn’t I read him? Or Greg, for that matter?”

  “I don’t know,” Alison said. “All I know is…this isn’t working.”

  That hit Brandon right between the eyes. She was right, of course. And it probably never would work. Not just his attempts to match Alison up, but the business in general. Yeah, he’d finally had a couple of successful matches, but his ad had flopped, he wasn’t finding any more new clients, and he didn’t see any way on earth to make this business the short-term success he desperately needed. At the very least, he needed to stop trying to set Alison up before he humiliated her one more time.

  Brandon sighed. “Maybe it’s time I gave you your money back after all.”

  Alison glanced at him, then looked away again. “Yeah. Maybe that would be best.”

  Brandon was surprised at just how rotten that made him feel. Yeah, he’d just been using this business as a means to an end, but he hated failure in any form. To have to throw in the towel when he’d barely gotten started ate away at him like nothing else. He’d hit rock bottom in real estate, and now he was failing at the one thing that was supposed to help him bring that back. Where was he supposed to go from here?

  “If you’ll give me a minute,” he said, “I’ll go inside and write you a check.”

  When Alison nodded, he rose from the swing and went inside. He walked to his office at the back of the house and flipped on a single dim lamp. He sat down at his desk and pulled out his checkbook, only to stop and look around the room. And suddenly he was overcome with that same feeling he’d had as a teenager, that gut‑level feeling that he couldn’t do a damned thing right—a feeling that had been hammered into him by his father from the time he was five years old.

  Then his thoughts took a different turn, this time to his grandmother. He remembered watching her at this very desk, her bifocals low on her nose as she pored over the file in front of her. He wondered if she’d ever screwed things up with a client as badly as he’d screwed things up with Alison. Probably not. He couldn’t imagine a guy like David getting past her.

  Just write the damned check. And then tomorrow you need to shut the whole thing down and move on to plan B.

  Unfortunately, he didn’t have a plan B.

  When he came back outside, Alison was still sitting on the porch swing, rocking it aimlessly back and forth with her toe. His grandmother had rocked that swing the very same way as she’d spent long, leisurely summer evenings drinking sweet tea and chatting with her neighbors. “Come sit with us, Brandon,” she’d say whenever he came home, “and I’ll get you some tea.” But he’d been sixteen years old, all swagger and attitude, with a chip on his shoulder the size of a redwood tree. He’d always just mumbled something indecipherable and disappeared into the house, where he went upstairs and whacked a few pool balls around as he plotted what he was going to do when he was out of this hokey place.

  But now, as he looked at this hokey place through the eyes of an adult, he saw something else. For all the trouble he gave his grandmother during the two years he’d lived there, she was the only person on earth who’d ever cared enough to give him something resembling a normal life.

  He held out the check. Alison stared at it a long time before finally taking it. He waited for her to put it in her purse and walk away, and in that moment he knew just how much he was going to miss her and how much he hoped she’d eventually find the man she was looking for.

  Instead, she tore it up.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Never mind what I said before. I want you to try again.”

  Brandon’s mind spun with disbelief. His first thought was that she was giving him a shot at redemption, which meant his matchmaking business might not be dead after all. His second thought was, Are you out of your mind?

  “I don’t understand. I sent you on two terrible dates, and now you want a third one?”

  “I know that doesn’t make much sense, but…” She shrugged. “I just got to thinking about it, and if David really didn’t tell you how short a time he’d been divorced, you couldn’t have known what a flake he was.”

  “But it’s like you said. I should have asked.”

  “But didn’t just the fact that he wanted to go out on a date say, ‘Hey, I’m over my ex‑wife’?”

  Brandon sat down beside her. “You actually want me to set you up again?”

  “I know how much you want to make this work. It was your grandmother’s business and you want to do right by her. You just need to get the hang of it. I wouldn’t feel right not giving you another chance.”

  Brandon couldn’t believe this. She needed to take that check to the bank first thing Monday morning and never look back. Couldn’t she see she’d been right in the first place? Couldn’t she see that every date he set her up on was going to end in disaster?

  Couldn’t she see he was a big, fat fraud?

  “Alison,” he said, “you’re being way too nice.”

  “You know, people tell me that a lot.” She shrugged. “It’s not like I don’t try to be nasty, but I just can’t get it to come out right.”

  “You need to stop trying. It’s hopeless.”

  “Hey! I told you off pretty good the other night after my date with the drug dealer, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah, but then you gave me another chance. And here you are doing it again.”

  “See? See? No matter how hard I try, I just can’t hold on to nasty.” She sighed with resignation. “It’s my tragic flaw.”

  “Stop trying. I’ve known a lot of nasty people. Nice is better.”

  “But that’s the problem,” she said. “I’m nice. Men don’t like nice. They want hot and sexy. They want bad girls. Blonde bad girls. I tried blonde once. I looked like Lady Gaga. After she’d eaten a truckload of Twinkies.”

  “Are you always this down on yourself?”

  She shrugged. “Truthfully? These days, yeah. Sometimes I am. I mean, look at what happened tonight. David left me to go into a bathroom stall to bang his slutty ex‑wife. Men say they want nice girls, but most of the time they’re lying. What they want is a lady in the living room and a whore in the—well, in David’s case, the bathroom.”

  Brandon thought about the women he’d been with in his life. He wouldn’t have classified any of them as “nice girls.” Most of them were shrewd and savvy and a little rough around the edges. They knew the score because they were playing the same game he was. Nothing lasting, nothing permanent, nothing connecting them in any meaningful way.

  And then there was Alison.

  He’d never spent time with a woman like her, a woman whose only goal was to have a normal life with a nice guy, a couple of kids, and his and hers minivans. There had to be plenty of men on this planet with the same goal, so it was unbelievable to him that some guy hadn’t already grabbed her.

  “The right guy is out there for you,” Brandon said. “Trust me on that.”

  “I know. And you’ll find him for me, won’t you?”

  She looked up at him with plaintive eyes, her lashes so long they brushed her cheeks, which were flushed pink from the warm, sultry evening. For the first time he noticed how the moonlight cast a pale golden glow on her ivory skin, making it look so warm and touchable that he imagined pressing his hand to her upper arm and dragging it all the way down to her wrist just to see what it felt like. Most men wouldn’t say she was beautiful. Not in the conventional sense. But there was something about her that appealed to him in a girl‑next‑door kind of way, and that had never been his type before.

/>   “I’m going to try,” he said.

  She gave him a smile of encouragement. “You’ll get the hang of this business. Practice makes perfect.”

  “Yeah? Well, first I have to have somebody to practice on.”

  Alison blinked with surprise. “But you have lots of clients, don’t you? You told me you had room for only two new ones this month.”

  Shit. He’d roped Alison in by telling her his schedule was filling up fast, and now he was telling her he didn’t have enough clients?

  Time for some fast thinking.

  “I have so many of my grandmother’s clients who were already in place to deal with that I thought I wouldn’t have time for many more. But if I’m going to get this business off the ground, I have to find some new clients.”

  “Oh. So how did your grandmother solicit business?”

  “She didn’t. She was strictly word of mouth.”

  “Then you need to build a reputation as good as the one she had.”

  Nope. That wouldn’t work. He didn’t have the time to build this business with the glacial speed his grandmother had, if he could even build it at all.

  “I did run an ad on Dallas After Dark,” he said, “but I’m not getting much response.”

  “Well, at least you’re advertising in the right place,” Alison said. “Dallas After Dark definitely targets singles.”

  “Then why aren’t those singles calling me?”

  “Some of your ad elements may be wrong. Or it could be placed wrong. Any number of reasons.”

  “Oh, yeah. You’re in marketing, aren’t you?”

  “Show me the ad. Maybe I can give you some advice.”

  Brandon grabbed his phone and pulled up the website, his phone glowing softly in the faint porch light. “There. In the right column.”

  She took his phone and looked at the ad. “Oh. No wonder.”

  “What?”

  “This is blah. Ordinary. Lost in the middle of ads for stripper bars and psychics. And why are you still calling it Matchmaking by Rochelle?”

  “I was afraid people wouldn’t call if they knew a man was running things now.”

  “Wrong. The best thing you have going for your business is you.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. You have no competition.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you know of any other male matchmakers?”

  “I’ve always thought of that as something I needed to overcome, not something in my favor.”

  “Nope. You should always be looking for that one thing that sets you apart from the competition. You already have a niche because you offer the same personalized service your grandmother did. Toss in the fact that you’re a man, and you’ll get attention. Add the fact that you’re a young, attractive man, and you’re definitely one of a kind.”

  “Wait a minute. You came to me only because you thought I was a woman. Then you freaked out when you found out I was a man.”

  “Freaked out? I didn’t freak out.”

  Brandon smiled. “Yeah, you did.”

  “I was just a little surprised.”

  “Nope. It was a bona fide freak-out.”

  “Oh, come on! You’re acting as if I ran screaming from your office.”

  “No. But you should have seen the look on your face.”

  Alison slumped with resignation. “You know what? Just once I’d like to put something past you. That would make me really, really happy.”

  “Well, you’ve got me where marketing is concerned. I still don’t see how being a man is going to give me an edge.”

  “When I came to your office the first time, the shock of it just about made me turn around and leave. I wasn’t prepared for what I got. But if you present yourself properly, people are going to know in advance exactly who you are and what you can do for them.”

  “And just how do I go about presenting myself properly?”

  “I can take care of that.”

  “You can? How?”

  “I’ll show you. But first…” She raised an eyebrow. “What’s in it for me?”

  “Uh…”

  “How about we barter? Your services for mine. You comp your matchmaking fee for me, and I’ll bring you all the clients you can handle.”

  No cash on the table? That got his attention. Of course, it meant he’d have to take cash back out of his pocket. But if she could do what she said she could, it would be like trading one client for several clients. Mathematically speaking, unless it netted him absolutely nothing, he couldn’t lose.

  “Hold on,” he said. “If you’re talking about placing more ads, I can’t afford that.”

  “No problem. You never should have paid for advertising in the first place.”

  “How else am I supposed to get potential clients through the door?”

  “With PR. You don’t pay for that. I’ll write you a press release. Send it to several media outlets. Once they read it, I guarantee the local press will run stories about you.”

  “Because I’m a man who’s a matchmaker?”

  “Exactly. Journalists need content, and they’re always looking for an angle. A slant. A great hook that’ll get people’s attention. We’ll provide them with one. I’ll e-mail it to a bunch of magazines, bloggers, radio stations, all that. With exposure like that, I guarantee you’ll have all the clients you could possibly hope for.”

  Brandon felt a little thrill of anticipation. He’d lost hope. Now, with Alison’s help, he felt as if he could actually pull this off.

  “Now, the question is, are you ready to be interviewed?” she asked.

  “Interviewed?”

  “That’s what’s coming.”

  “Uh…yeah. I guess.”

  “Just talk to people the way you talked to me the first time I came to your office, and you’ll have the singles in this town wrapped around your little finger.”

  Brandon liked the sound of that, too.

  “Another thing,” Alison said. “You need a new name for your business.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.”

  He gave her a sly smile. “I could be the Love Doctor.”

  She screwed up her face. “Get serious. You know that’s been used about a thousand times before in a thousand different ways. Radio shrinks…advice columnists…”

  “Porn sites.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Porn sites?”

  “Oh. Didn’t I tell you about my doctor-nurse fetish?”

  She looked at him dumbly. “You have a hard time focusing, don’t you?”

  “Not at all. What you’re telling me is that I need a name that’s uniquely mine.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Any suggestions?”

  “It’s all about emotion,” she said. “Your name needs to reflect that. Put yourself in the position of somebody who’s looking for their soul mate.”

  Well, there was something he had no idea how to relate to. “I’m drawing a blank.”

  “Think about how relationships feel in the beginning. There’s that whisper of love in the air. That sense of hope. That tiny little tug on the heartstrings. That feeling that this person just might be the one.”

  Now he really felt like a fraud. How was he supposed to sell the prospect of love everlasting when the longest relationship he’d ever had consisted of a three‑day weekend in Vegas?

  Suddenly Alison smiled and snapped her fingers. “That’s it.”

  “What?”

  “That’s your new name. Heartstrings.”

  “Huh?”

  “It has all kinds of positive connotations. You’ll need a good tagline, but it’s something you can work with.”

  “Wrapping people in strings? Sounds like you’re trapping them.”

  “People come to you because they want to be trapped. They want to be wrapped up in soft, fuzzy little strings from their heart to their soul mate’s heart. That name could be good. It could be great.” />
  But Brandon wasn’t convinced. “Sounds kind of…I don’t know. Weak?”

  “Well, I suppose you could call it Brandon’s Great Big House of Burning Love. How’s that work for you?”

  He grinned. “Now you’re talking.”

  “Men. God.” She shifted around on the swing to face him, talking with her hands now. “Listen to me. It’s not weak. It’s gentle. Big difference. You have to think how people who want to fall in love think. They want to feel the warmth and safety of a relationship. They want to feel the soft, comforting touch of a partner, that one person on earth who will always be there for them. And not just women, though they’re the only ones who’ll admit it. Guys, too. That’s what they’re looking for.”

  She spoke with such passion that he knew the words came straight from her heart. She wasn’t only telling him what women in general wanted. She was also telling him what she wanted.

  “So are we going with Heartstrings?” she asked.

  He appreciated her help. Hell, he was dying for it. But what was she going to say in a few months when he bagged up all the profits from this business and hit the road for Houston?

  It didn’t matter. He needed new clients, and Alison was a pro who was willing to help him get them. He’d be out no cash because he was comping her fee, and she swore to him that a free press release would be far more effective than expensive advertising. So what else was there to think about?

  Maybe the fact that he was being just a little bit dishonest.

  Then again, so what if he closed his business in a few months? He’d traded her even up, hadn’t he? His services for hers? This was business. Nothing more.

  “Heartstrings it is,” he told her. “So tell me what this press release is going to say.”

  “You leave that to me. I’ll run it past you before it goes out. And I’ll need a photo of you to send along with it. I’m pretty good with a camera, so I can handle that. But you’re also going to need a new logo to go with your new name so you look professional.”

  “But that’ll cost me. I already told you I don’t have money for that.”

  “All it will cost you is a box of Godiva chocolates. Can you handle that?”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “You don’t have to. I’ll take care of the rest. You’re going to have all the business you could ask for.”