Mister Match (The Match Series Book 1)

by Morris, Catherine Avril

  He arched an eyebrow at her. The look in his eyes as he looked down at her was pure heat, and she felt her stomach do that drop-and-thrill thing it had taken to doing about every other second that she spent in Adam’s company.

  He appeared to be about to respond when she heard her name called out in an incredulous and all-too-familiar deep voice.

  She froze, and then winced. “You have got to be kidding me.”

  Adam’s expression sobered. “What’s wrong?” He took her hand. “Are you all right?”

  She rolled her eyes, at herself, at her reaction, at the utter randomness and stupidity of the situation. “Of course. Of course. This is just so—”

  “Lisa, is that you?”

  She turned, squinting against the sudden pain hammering behind her right eye. “Rodney. We really have to stop meeting like this.” What the hell was he doing here? Out of all the places in the great state of Texas, how had he ended up in this exact hotel, on this exact night?

  Rodney was making a big show of laughing, his over-large Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat, as if he were pleased at the coincidence of running into her for the second time in a week. “Well, well. You’re all dressed up. I had no idea you even owned a dress.”

  It was a well-aimed jab. When they were dating, he had often accused her of not caring enough about her appearance and the way she presented herself to the world. She still had lingering insecurity about her looks and her fashion choices as a result.

  She managed a tight smile, even as she envisioned shoving a stick of dynamite down his throat, or better yet, up his ass. At least this time, running into him, she didn’t feel sick, unlike last week, when seeing him had made her want to throw up. Although, if she did start to feel queasy, she would definitely aim for his shoes.

  “Adam,” she said, mechanically, “this is my ex. The one I told you about.”

  “Oh.” He said it significantly, and slipped an arm around her waist.

  She blinked at the sudden, intimate warmth, and felt a flush bloom up her neck.

  Rodney was looking Adam up and down, and then he was staring again at Lisa. “Is this your—”

  “Her fiancé. That’s right.” Adam extended a hand for him to shake. “Adam Masters.”

  An intense wave of giddiness rushed through Lisa as the two men shook hands. Adam was her fiancé. It was all she could do not to yell out, In your face, Rod!

  “Rodney Otis.” Rodney raised his eyebrows at Lisa. “So, twice in a week, we’ve run into each other. That’s a record. Are you following me around, or what?” His laugh boomed out again, big and sickening.

  Following him around? That burst her giddy bubble. She was going to murder him. “Don’t flatter your—”

  Adam’s grip around her waist tightened, just enough. “We actually just came down for the weekend. I’m on business, and I missed my girl. So, I flew her down to be with me.”

  His girl. Lisa smiled guilelessly at Rodney, and rested her head on Adam’s shoulder for effect.

  In any other situation, coming from anyone else, the smug, entitled possessiveness of what he’d said—“my girl... I flew her down...”—might have rubbed Lisa the wrong way. But in this particular situation, with Adam, she could not have imagined a better way for him to put Rodney firmly in his place.

  Take that, Rod!

  She tossed her hair over her shoulder and leveled as confident an I-don’t-give-a-flying-crap-about-you, you’re-less-than-a-bug-squashed-under-my-heel look as she could manage at Rodney. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

  He smiled blandly. “Yoga conference. I opened a new studio. You probably heard about it. It’s getting some pretty great reviews.”

  She couldn’t help it—she spoke before her brain could instruct her mouth to stay firmly shut. “I did hear about it, actually. Can I assume this means you’ve got some extra cash to start paying me back what you owe me?”

  In the moment of awkward silence that followed, she mentally shrugged her shoulders. No going back now. She tilted her head. “No, I guess not. Which makes sense. I’ll bet it’s all tied up in the new business, or at least that’s what you’ll tell me. I’ll probably never see a dime of that money. Am I right, or am I right?”

  Rodney’s face went stiff, then angry, but he didn’t get a chance to retort as Adam pulled her even closer to him.

  “Give my best to Becca—no, wait, Bambi,” Lisa said, snidely. “I’m sorry, it’s hard to keep your bimbos’ names straight—”

  “We really should get up to our room,” Adam cut in, with a bland grin for Rodney. “Big night ahead of us, if you know what I mean. Hey, really nice to meet you, Roger.”

  “It’s Rodney,” Rodney ground out, sounding pissed. “And Barbie.”

  The elevators were still being hijacked by what was probably an entire herd of yoga gurus, so Lisa let Adam propel her toward the door marked “Stairs.”

  Once they were alone in the dim stairwell, she went straight for the wall and smacked her palms against it. “God. God! I can’t believe it—two freaking times in a week,” she fumed. “All this time we’ve been apart, and suddenly he’s goddamn everywhere. And just when things are starting to go a little bit better for me. It’s like a reminder from the Universe—Don’t get too happy, Lisa, don’t get too comfortable—”

  “Whoa, whoa.” Adam’s low voice had an instant soothing effect. “Want to give me a little more background info, here? Just to make sure I’m on the same page as you.”

  She shook her head. “I’m just an idiot, that’s all. I can’t believe I ever even got involved with that guy. Did you see his pants? They were purple! And baggy, and gathered at the ankle.” She scowled. “He’s like an evil genii that somehow managed to sneak out of his bottle.”

  Adam only halfway smothered a laugh. “I just assumed that was his yoga guru outfit.”

  She glanced at him in surprise. “That’s what I call him. The yoga guru. Clare calls him the Rod.” As suddenly as her anger had exploded out of her, she surprised herself by giggling. “And you called him Roger,” she managed between hiccups of laughter. She collapsed against the wall. “Was that accidental or on purpose? God, the look on his face was priceless.”

  Adam grinned and shrugged. “I know how to get in a little dig here and there, when I want to.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut, sobering as she pictured her ex again. “I can’t believe I ran into him again. And out of town, even.” She opened her eyes to look at Adam. “And that it had to happen with you.”

  He moved closer. “Who better than me?”

  “Well. That’s true, I guess.”

  She looked up into his eyes. Suddenly, all in a moment, things felt a whole lot more intimate. And she wasn’t sure what to do about it. They were alone, here, in the stairwell, for one thing. No reason to keep up the pretense of being a couple.

  She eased away from him and raised a hand, let it fall. “So, that was Rodney. My ex-fiancé and business partner.” She let out a breath. “As you can tell, he screwed me over professionally, financially and emotionally, and I’m still picking up the pieces, a year later.” She glanced at him, wryly. “Now you know why I’m such a ball of nerves around men.”

  “I hadn’t noticed,” he said gallantly. Then he squinted, as if trying to compute something that just didn’t. “So you were engaged to that guy?”

  She sensed he was asking more than just the obvious question. His nearness was filling up the stairwell, zapping the air with electricity and putting her on the alert in an entirely different way than the Rodney encounter had. “Yeah. For a little while. And now he’s engaged to someone else. Her name is Barbie.” She snorted, humorlessly.

  “Let me guess,” Adam said. “Barbie’s a little younger and a lot dumber than you, and she has a fake tan.”

  Lisa frowned, watching those pretty, crooked lips of his as he spoke. “How’d you know?”

  He shrugged, a slow, languid movement of his muscular shoulders. “Not too hard
to guess. You can tell what your ex is like just by looking at him. He’s the type of guy who would go for young, dumb and shallow over an intelligent, independent woman like you. Barbie’s probably a hell of a lot easier for him to mold than you ever were, and easier to take advantage of.”

  Which left the obvious, unanswered question: How had Lisa been blind enough to fall under his spell?

  The question irritated her, and she didn’t want to be irritated. She didn’t want to talk about her ex or money or betrayal anymore. Suddenly, all she wanted was to take Adam to her room, turn down the lights, and follow Clare’s instructions to jump his bones.

  The very idea of it made her nervous. She straightened and ducked past him. “We should get upstairs.”

  “I guess.” He watched her as she darted up the stairs.

  At the first landing, she took off her heels. “Whoever invented these things was a misogynist,” she informed Adam.

  “I believe it.” He looked dubiously at the shoes, as if they might explode. “Here, let me carry those.”

  Lisa giggled. “They’re not heavy.” Maybe the wine from dinner had belatedly gone to her head, or maybe it was just the aftereffects of a brush with the Rod, but she was suddenly feeling completely giddy.

  By the fourth floor, she’d gotten a hold of herself a bit.

  She pushed through the door into the hallway and then stopped for a breather. “Look, I’m sorry about that.” She gestured vaguely back toward the stairwell. “Until last week, I hadn’t seen him since we broke up. I guess a lot of old, bad feelings got dredged up.”

  “If you ever want to talk about it, I’m here.” Adam watched her for a moment. “There’s a mini-bar in our room. Want to have a nightcap?”

  The wine had definitely had a delayed effect, she thought, giggling again. “Who in the world uses the term ‘nightcap’ anymore?”

  His lips quirked in a grin. “I guess people on TV, mostly. And me.” He reached out and tugged at the tie around her waist. “Come on. Let’s go have a drink. You can tell me more about what just happened down there. Or...” He shrugged. “We can talk about something else. Or nothing at all.”

  She blinked at him, befuddled. She probably shouldn’t have another drink. She probably shouldn’t have had that third glass of cabernet at dinner. Was she imagining things, or was Adam Match making a play for her?

  And if so—why? It wasn’t as if their room were under surveillance by TMZ or E! Online. There was no reason to keep up their charade behind closed doors. Unless, of course, things had progressed beyond the charade, into the territory of reality.

  Adam was busy sliding the key card into the slot. She heard a little electronic beep and then the sound of the door unlatching, and then Adam turned to her again. Smiling, he reached out and took her hand in his.

  “Come,” he said, simply, and drew her into the room.

  Chapter 20

  ____________________________________

  Lisa stopped a few paces away from him and stood there, barefoot on the carpet, her arms at her sides, the strappy little shoes she’d refused to let him carry dangling from one hand.

  She looked uncertain. Adam, on the other hand, felt more certain than he’d felt about almost anything in his life: He wanted her. He wanted to be with her, to feel her in his arms, her skin beneath his lips. He wanted to see her eyes open in the morning as they woke up together.

  It was so simple, suddenly. And yet, so complicated.

  They were standing near the couch, where Adam had promised to sleep tonight. The door to the suite had been slowly and automatically closing, and now it latched with a hushed little click, shutting out the light and sounds from the hallway, leaving them alone together in the room.

  Lisa’s giddy mood of moments earlier seemed to have shifted into something more sober, intense. Adam felt a funny little rush as he looked at her, as if something had passed between them—some silent, unnamable passage to a higher level than the one they had just been on.

  There was a new, heightened intimacy between them. He could feel it in the room like a force field. All he wanted to do was step forward and take Lisa into his arms. But something in her body language made him think he should wait for her to come to him.

  “You know,” she said, her voice hesitant, her eyes enormous as she gazed at him, “dinner with you tonight... It felt real. I mean, like a real date. Not just pretend.”

  Her simple observation made his heart thrill, yet she didn’t look exactly happy about it. She looked pensive.

  He spoke without thinking. “If I could have my way, it would have been real. If I could have my way, we wouldn’t be worrying about paparazzi photographers and gossip magazines and keeping up appearances, and all that crap.”

  “No?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper. “What would we be doing, instead?”

  The question hung between them, and he hesitated between answering with complete honesty or trying to keep things light for some reason he could no longer name.

  And then he realized it just didn’t matter. Since the first moment he’d laid eyes on Lisa, he had been following a certain and inevitable path, directly toward her. All he had to do, right this second, was take the next step forward.

  “If I had my way,” he said, and took a step to close the distance between them. “We’d be doing this.”

  He reached for her and pulled her to him.

  Adam’s arms went around her, hot and hard and insistent. Then he lowered his mouth to hers and kissed her so hungrily, it was almost like he was biting into her. Lisa nearly cried out with the ferocious intensity of it.

  Since their first, public kisses, she had wanted to kiss him again, away from any cameras and stares from strangers. She’d imagined doing so, about a thousand times. But she had never imagined the joining of their mouths would be like this—all heat and unrepentant demands and take, take, take.

  She gasped as he moved her backward through the rapidly darkening suite into the bedroom, and then toppled with her to the bed. His hands were everywhere, and so were hers—on his chest, her fingers sneaking under his collar to touch his hot skin, then skimming down his body, yanking at his waistline to pull his shirt out of his slacks. She wanted to touch him, his bare, naked skin, his back, his hard stomach, his chest. Every bit of him, every part she’d been imagining in detail for the past week.

  “God,” she heard him breathe—it was nearly a grunt, and she grinned wildly. She had elicited that depth of wildness and need from him. She was making him feel as wild as she felt.

  “Oh, Adam,” she said, and pulled at the buttons on his shirt, nearly popping them off in her frenzy.

  He laughed down at her and moved to help with removing the garment. “Lisa. I have to tell you, I’ve imagined this moment probably a thousand times over the past week, but I never imagined it would be like this.”

  She’d had nearly the exact same thought just moments before, yet hearing him say it stilled her. She was being so aggressive. Maybe he wasn’t into that. “Am I—is it too—”

  He stilled as well, and his smile turned to a quick frown. An instant later, he was kissing her cheeks. “No. Whatever you were going to say, whatever you were worried about, the answer is no. You’re not too anything. You’re just right in every way. You’re perfect. God, you’re amazing. So powerful and vital and—” He stopped talking and just kissed her, making her blush, making her swoon—

  But she hadn’t been with anyone since Rodney, and he used to tell her she got too worked up during sex. He’d even made fun of her red face and huffing and puffing a time or two, when she’d really worked at having an orgasm instead of just letting him have his release and not worrying about attaining her own, as she normally did. And if she got too worked up then, with the Rod, well—now she must be totally in overdrive. She hadn’t even touched a man in almost a year. She hadn’t had any intimacy of any kind except with her vibrator. Most of all, this was Adam, the man who had dominated her dreams and fa
ntasies for the past week.

  She pushed out from under him and yanked at the hem of her dress, which had somehow slid up to puddle around her waist. “Wait. Whoa. Wait just a second.”

  “What’s wrong?” He sat up with her. He was breathing heavily, and his shirt was hanging open, exposing that incredible chest. His pants were adorably full at the front, with what looked like an extremely healthy erection.

  Lisa made herself look away. “Nothing’s wrong.” She shook her head, pulling at her dress again, trying to make it cover her up, the way it was supposed to. “Damn DNA match, that’s what’s wrong,” she muttered.

  “DNA match? What’s that?”

  She felt herself blush. She hadn’t meant to say that out loud. “Um—”

  A grin crept over his face as he watched her squirm. “Come on, you can tell me. What’s a DNA match?”

  “Well.” She debated in her head for a whole second whether to tell him the truth. “Willow and Clare and I have this system at work. If someone’s really, really, way too attractive, it can make it sort of hard to maintain a professional atmosphere during a massage. So we call that a DNA match.” At Adam’s confused expression, she laughed and elaborated. “You know how they say if you think someone smells good, or if you just feel an animal sort of attraction to them, it’s probably because your DNA would be a good match with theirs?”

  He laughed, too. “Who says that, again?”

  “You know,” she said, suddenly flustered. “Scientists.”

  “Oh, scientists. Right.” Still grinning, he reached out to brush a wayward lock of her hair behind her ear. “Please, go on.”

  The brief touch of his thumb to her cheek had her whole body standing at attention, clamoring for more. She swallowed.

  “Well, so, on the rare occasion that that happens, we can invoke the DNA match clause and swap clients. It works out pretty well, since Will and I have totally opposite tastes in men.”

  Adam nodded again. “Sounds reasonable, in an insane sort of way.”

  Something about him, about this moment with him, was making her downright giddy. She tried not to giggle like an idiot. “Not insane,” she insisted. “Necessary.”