Mister Match (The Match Series Book 1)

by Morris, Catherine Avril

  “Well,” Clare said to Lisa, “at least you got some hot sex out of it before the deal went south. I know this isn’t the point, but I just have to know—is the man just amazing in bed, or what? Ten bucks says he’s amazing.”

  Lisa tried to look haughtily outraged, but after a moment, all she could manage was a grin. “Yes, the sex was amazing. Like, mind-blowing.” She leaned in and whispered, “He gave me multiple orgasms. Multiple times!”

  Clare clapped her hands gleefully. “I knew it!” She tapped her plastic cup of wine against Lisa’s. “Cheers to that! So is he kinky? I bet he’s just a little bit kinky. Tell me everything, and I mean everything.”

  “Clare,” Lisa protested, “I have a really big problem on my hands.”

  Clare frowned. “What, you mean the fact that the guy who gave you earth-shattering orgasms all weekend long, the guy who is so clearly head-over-heels in love with you, seems to have gotten his poor widdle feelings hurt because you had a couple of crummy dates before you and he were even involved? Don’t worry about it. He’ll get over it.”

  Lisa blinked. “He’s not in love with me. And he didn’t just get his feelings hurt because of my dates with Reese and Jacob. And...” She took a deep breath. “That’s not the problem I’m talking about.”

  “There’s more?” Clare demanded. “Tell me. Now.”

  “I really don’t know if I should,” Lisa hedged.

  Willow’s delicate eyebrows drew together. “Lisa, if something happened—if you’re mixed up in something you shouldn’t be, we can help you.”

  Lisa smiled tiredly. Willow might seem as soft and delicate as a flower petal, but she knew how to fight for her friends. “Look, I’ll tell you guys, but you have to swear you won’t say anything to anyone. I don’t even think I’m supposed to be talking about it.”

  After taking a fortifying gulp of wine, she told them about the email to Mister-Match.com, threatening to expose nude photos of Mister Match’s fiancée to the press.

  “Some dude has nudie pics of you?” Clare shrieked.

  “No, of course not. What kind of person do you think I am?”

  “Uh...a sexual one? I thought everyone took nudies with their partners.” Clare looked first at Lisa, then at Willow. “No? Seriously? Oh, you guys, you are so missing out on some truly erotic foreplay.”

  “If you don’t mind,” Willow said primly, “I think we ought to get back to the subject at hand.” She turned to Lisa. “Does Adam know who sent the email?”

  “He said it came from someone named Jacob,” Lisa said. “And I don’t know why, but I just have the worst feeling that it’s Jacob from last week.”

  “The fake restaurateur?” Clare asked, and hooted with laughter. “He sent an email trying to blackmail Mister Match from his real name? Oh, little man, getting too big for his britches. That is too hilarious!”

  “It’s not funny,” Lisa said. “It’s serious.”

  “You said he doesn’t actually have nudie pics of you,” Clare said. “Correct?”

  Lisa nodded.

  “So he’s just blowing smoke up their asses. He’s an opportunist. He probably saw one of the celebrity gossip stories that have come out lately about you and Adam, and now he’s trying to get some money out of the deal.” She shrugged a shoulder carelessly, as if that kind of thing happened all the time.

  “Okay,” Lisa said, “but what can I do about it? I want to fix this. I feel awful about going out with that loser in the first place, because it hurt Adam’s feelings, and it might even lead to more bad press for the site.”

  “You know,” Willow said thoughtfully, “they always say there’s no such thing as bad publicity.”

  Lisa frowned. “I don’t know, Adam seemed pretty upset about it. Well, his partner, Dan, did, anyway.”

  “Yeah, because Dan’s the money guy,” Clare said. “Isn’t that what you said? He’s a former lawyer, and now he’s the website’s big financial backer? I’ve known so many guys like him. Guys who think that once their money is behind something, it should be untouchable. They’re the same kind of guys who think that once they’ve had sex with a woman, no other man should get to even look in her direction.”

  Lisa squinted in her effort to follow her friend’s logical leap.

  “Anyway,” Clare went on, “Adam’s not upset because he’s worried about the future of his dating site.”

  “He’s not?”

  “Of course not. He’s upset because he thinks the woman he loves banged some other dude.”

  Lisa winced. “I didn’t ‘bang’ anyone. And I told you, Adam’s not in love with me.”

  Clare didn’t listen. “And if it really was your Jacob who sent that email—”

  “He’s not my Jacob,” Lisa interrupted grumpily.

  “—then fixing this is gonna be easy-peasy.” Clare stood, grabbed her cup of wine and went to her computer.

  “Fixing this?” Lisa looked up. “How can we fix it?”

  Willow had already joined Clare at her desk. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” she asked Clare.

  “If you’re thinking we should ask dear Jacob to meet us at the Dive Bar in an hour,” Clare said, tapping at her keyboard, “then yes.”

  “Meet us?” Lisa squeaked, jumping up. “No! What? Why? We can’t!”

  “Oh, yes, we can,” Clare said, with relish. “I’m messaging with him right now.”

  Willow leaned in to read along as Clare typed.

  Lisa’s eyes popped. “You’re messaging with him from my Mister-Match account?”

  Clare frowned at her briefly over her shoulder. “Of course not. Then he’d think it was you. I’m on iChat.”

  “On what?” Lisa shook her head. “Wait—you have his cell number?”

  “I’ve been messaging with him on Mister-Match.com for weeks,” Clare said. “Of course I got his number. What do you think I am, an amateur?”

  “But...” Lisa was still thoroughly confused. Over the reception counter, she could see little message bubbles pop up on Clare’s computer screen—Clare’s right-aligned, in blue, and the answering messages left-aligned, in gray.

  “She’s logged into her text messages through her computer,” Willow explained, still reading over Clare’s shoulder. “It’s an Apple thing.” To Clare, she said, “Oh, that’s good. That’s really good!” She clapped her hands and did a delighted little dance behind Clare’s desk chair.

  “What’s good?” Lisa asked, but Willow didn’t answer and Clare kept pecking at the keyboard.

  “Just to be clear,” Lisa said after a beat, “Jacob doesn’t think he’s texting with me, right? Because I don’t think that’s a good idea at all.”

  “Apparently,” Willow said, a gleeful edge to her gentle voice, “Jacob thinks Clare is someone named Destinee.”

  Clare giggle-snorted, tapped a few more keys on the keyboard and then sat back triumphantly in her chair. “Done. He’s meeting us at the Sidecar in half an hour.”

  “The Sidecar? That must be his standard pickup spot,” Lisa muttered. “Why are we meeting with him? I really don’t think this is a good idea. The guy could be dangerous. Maybe we should just let Adam and Dan work it out on their end, with the police—”

  “Lisa.” Clare rounded the desk and put an arm around her friend. “You worry too much. Willow and I have it all planned out. All you have to do is come along and watch the poor sucker go down.”

  Chapter 28

  ____________________________________

  “Wow,” Jacob was saying, “you’re even hotter than I expected.”

  Lisa hid her scowl in a swig of her Negra Modelo.

  She sat with Willow just one table away from where Clare was seated with Jacob, in a dark corner of the Sidecar. Lisa’s back was to them, in hopes that Jacob wouldn’t see or recognize her. But she’d stolen a few surreptitious glances over her shoulder, and had seen Clare leaning seductively toward him, crossing her arms under her breasts to showcase her cleavage.

&
nbsp; “Well, you’re exactly as hot as I expected,” she heard Clare drawl.

  Willow giggled and then clapped a hand to her mouth, like a schoolgirl trying not to laugh aloud during a test.

  “So should we get out of here?” Jacob was saying. “My place is really close. We could head over there and...get to know each other a little better.”

  His greasy voice was making Lisa’s skin crawl. “What are we supposed to do?” she whispered to Willow.

  “Just wait,” Willow murmured serenely, under her breath, and took a sip from her drink.

  “I don’t know,” Clare was saying, coyly. “I don’t normally go home with felons.”

  Lisa’s heart froze for one long beat. Here we go, she thought.

  Jacob seemed to pause for a half-beat. “With what?”

  The poor guy. Lisa couldn’t help but feel just a little bit sorry for him. Clare was playing with him like a cat batting at a mouse. He didn’t even seem to realize he was staring into the jaws of his own demise.

  “With felons,” Clare repeated, sweetly. “I did a little research while I was waiting for you to show up this evening. Did you know that blackmail is a felony in the state of Texas?”

  Covertly, Lisa shifted in her seat just enough to see Jacob in profile, right at the moment that his smile gave way to confusion.

  “So what?” he asked.

  “So,” Clare said, with a shrug of her pretty shoulders. “I thought that was interesting. If you try to blackmail someone for over twenty thousand dollars, it’s a second-degree felony, and you can get at least five years in prison. Or even up to life, if you already have a record, or if the judge gets a bad impression of you.”

  “What’s that got to do with me?” Jacob said, hotly, as if a petty show of bravado could conceal the fact that his face had turned a guilty shade of gray.

  Clare nodded at Willow, who smiled at Lisa.

  “Let’s join our friends, shall we?” Willow said, not bothering to lower her voice now. She stood and moved her chair to sit at Clare and Jacob’s table.

  Ignoring the quaking in her stomach, Lisa followed her lead.

  “What the hell—” Jacob started, but then stopped abruptly when he saw Lisa. “You,” he hissed. “What the hell is this?”

  “Aw, poor sweetie,” Clare said. She reached out and patted his hand. “It’s okay, take a minute. I know it must be a shock, to come face-to-face with the woman you tried to use in your ridiculous plot to blackmail Mister Match.”

  “I didn’t blackmail anybody,” Jacob hissed, and shoved his chair back as if to leave, but Clare pinned him with a deadly stare.

  “Sit down,” she commanded.

  To Lisa’s great surprise, Jacob sat, like a naughty little boy being chastened.

  “We all know exactly what you did,” Clare went on. “And for future reference, if you’re dumb enough to try a ridiculous stunt like this ever again—not that you should, because as I said, blackmail is a felony offense. But since you very well might be just that dumb—can I suggest that you create a dummy Gmail account first, so it’s harder to trace your email back to you?”

  Jacob winced.

  “You know what else I discovered,” Clare went on blithely, “when I was Googling ‘blackmail’? I found out that in the state of Texas, when you try to blackmail someone via email, it bumps your crime up to a federal offense.”

  “A fed—a federal offense?” he stuttered.

  Lisa was finding it harder and harder not to feel sorry for the poor idiot, and harder and harder not to laugh.

  “That’s right,” Clare said. “See, the Feds are the ones who own the Internet, and you just used their property to commit a felony. That’s a huge, huge no-no, Jacob.”

  “Huge,” Willow agreed.

  “It’s called Internet fraud,” Clare added. “It can tack five to ten years onto your sentence.”

  Lisa stifled a snort. She was fairly certain “the Feds” didn’t “own” the Internet, which called the rest of what her was saying into question. But Jacob didn’t seem to notice the potential factual flaw. On the contrary, he seemed to be falling for every word.

  For a moment, no one spoke. Then Jacob’s face fell. “I was just trying to get a little money,” he said, his whining tone as pathetic as his demeanor. “I ran up my credit cards, like, way too much, and then I saw a thing on E! News the other night about that dating site guy and his fiancée who’s been cheating on him. And it was you.” He scowled at Lisa. “And you’d just gone out with me, so I knew you were a cheater. I can’t stand women who cheat.”

  Outrage burst hotly in Lisa’s chest. “Well, I can’t stand men who lie through their big, white teeth,” she hissed at him. “You said you had nudie pictures of me.”

  Jacob’s face fell again. “I had an old girlfriend once who looked a lot like you. That’s why I was so excited to meet you, when we started talking on Mister-Match. I always thought she was really pretty. And then when I found out you were just like her, a dirty cheater—”

  “Excuse me,” Lisa interrupted, outraged all over again, but Clare placed a quelling hand on her arm.

  “Let the poor man speak,” she said, giving Lisa’s wrist a purposeful little squeeze.

  “I just figured I could use the pictures I had of me and Angela,” Jacob went on miserably, “and get a little money out of the deal, either from Mister Match or from whatever celebrity website wanted to buy the pictures from me.”

  He pronounced it “pitchers,” which, for some reason, made Lisa’s anger toward him dissipate a bit. He was like a little boy—albeit a very ignorant, dangerously misguided one.

  “Aw.” Clare tilted her head. “Such a bummer that your idiotic little plot didn’t work.” She placed her cell phone on the table and tapped its screen with scarlet fingernails. The look she gave Jacob appeared genuinely sympathetic. “And now you’ve gone and dug yourself an even deeper hole. See, I just recorded everything you said and texted the audio file to Willow, here, and to Lisa, and also to Adam Match. In case you don’t quite understand what that means, it means we have your confession on tape.”

  Lisa felt oddly breathless. When Clare had said fixing her mess would be easy-peasy, Lisa hadn’t actually believed her. But now, less than an hour later, her brilliant friend had gotten the poor fool to admit everything, and had recorded the entire thing.

  Jacob was blinking hard, clearly trying to wrap his brain around this turn of events.

  “There’s a police station two blocks away,” Clare went on, calmly. “You can come with us, right now. We’ll head over there together and tell them the whole story. I can have Adam meet us, so he can show your email to the cops, and we can get everything all straightened out. Who knows? If this is your first offense, maybe you’ll end up getting a light prison sentence, like five years instead of fifteen or twenty.”

  Jacob was looking positively ill.

  “Or,” Clare said, and smiled sweetly. “You can do us a teensy, weensy little favor, and I can make this whole mess go away. It’s your choice.”

  “Favor?” Jacob repeated. His suspicious gaze slid to each of them in turn. “What favor?”

  “All you have to do,” Clare said sweetly, “is sell a story to the press. Not your bogus story, of course. Our story.”

  He was watching her with distrust, but Lisa could see defeat plain on his face.

  “All right,” he said, finally. “What do I have to do?”

  Clare smiled, Willow clapped her hands, and Lisa found herself actually starting to feel hopeful.

  Two days later, she groaned as she stepped into the women’s locker room at the Town Lake YMCA and sank onto a bench. Why she’d agreed to meet Clare and Willow for a Pilates class after work, she had no idea. Maybe it had been some misguided attempt to follow through on the resolution she’d made days earlier, in the car with Adam, to say yes to life instead of living the cautious, lonely existence she’d gotten so used to leading.

  If sore, aching muscles and
thighs that felt like quivering jelly were the consequences of saying yes to life, maybe she should just go back to saying no again.

  “Wasn’t that awesome?” Clare said, stripping off her sweat-soaked tank top before grabbing the remote control that was Velcro-ed to the wall and pointing it at the television mounted above it.

  “That was almost better than yoga,” Willow enthused, stretching her willowy arms above her head.

  “That was almost better than sex,” Clare said, punching buttons on the remote. “Wait, what am I saying? No, it wasn’t.”

  “Ugh,” Lisa grunted. “I’m never doing that again.”

  “What, sex or Pilates?” Clare asked. “Oh, look,” she went on, without waiting for a response. “Here we are, just in time. Let’s see how our boy did.”

  She used the remote to turn up the volume on the television.

  “Get the latest on Mister Match,” the announcer was saying, “from the man who tried to break up the dating site mogul’s engagement. Was it simple jealousy? A personal vendetta? Or something more? Find out, after the break.”

  Lisa sat up straighter, wincing as her muscles protested the sudden movement. “Is this it?” she asked, tensely.

  “Yep.” Clare’s eyes were glued to the screen, even though it had switched to a commercial about Ford trucks. “This channel does their celebrity news updates at seven, so I figured a six p.m. Pilates class would be a good way for us all to loosen up and get some good endorphins pumping through our systems. That way, we’re prepared to handle whatever might happen.”

  She sounded almost grim, which wasn’t encouraging. Lisa’s stomach quaked. If Clare wasn’t entirely confident, then Lisa definitely wasn’t.

  “I’m going to rinse off,” Clare said. “Don’t let anyone touch that remote.” She swished off toward the showers.

  Two minutes later, she was back, dripping water onto the floor and the bench.

  “Just in time,” Willow said, grabbing the remote to bump up the TV volume a few bars higher.

  The same, skinny announcer reappeared on the screen. “A cheating scandal has taken Adam Match, founder of dating site Mister-Match.com, by storm,” she said.