They were going to tour the Smithsonian before hitting the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial—highly touristy choices for a Dream Date, in Adam’s opinion, and not at all the most romantic ones. But where they went was the couple’s business, plus, it was beside the point.
“Then I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how it goes with Roberto,” Willow sighed.
Roberto. He already hated the guy. He heaved a sigh as the untethered balloon his heart had been flying around on suddenly popped. “I don’t even know if she wants to see me.”
“Adam, would you mind if I offered you a little unsolicited advice?”
“Whatever, go ahead.” What could it hurt? He’d made such a mess of things on his own. He needed all the advice he could get.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Willow advised. “Lisa is in love with you. Obviously she wants to see you. Don’t make her wait any longer than she has to.”
Hearing her vote of confidence in Lisa’s feelings for him meant a lot... Except that, in the end, Willow’s opinion didn’t really matter. Only Lisa’s did.
Which was why Adam would take her advice, no matter what it cost him.
“I’ll be there,” he said.
Chapter 32
____________________________________
The dial tone on Lisa’s phone was in stutter-mode when she got home from work Friday afternoon, indicating a voicemail message was waiting for her. Her heart bumped up into her throat, despite herself. Adam. He’d called to ask her to join him in San Francisco for the next Dream Date.
Except, as she found when she listened to her voicemail, he hadn’t called. Clare had.
“Hey, girl. I’ve got a surprise for you, so call me! Ciao.”
Lisa frowned. She’d just seen Clare at work, an hour ago. And, a surprise? Whatever it was, she instinctively felt resistant to it. She punched the button to erase the message and then hung up the receiver.
Just then, the phone rang, making her jump.
It was Clare, again. “Good, I’m glad I caught you. We don’t have long.”
“Don’t have long for what?” Lisa kicked off her shoes and padded over to turn on the box fan before heading to the couch.
“My surprise for you,” Clare sang.
Unexpectedly, the old spot behind Lisa’s right eye gave a throb. She pushed a thumb against the brief pain. Funny; that hadn’t happened in weeks. “Can you please just tell me what you’re talking about? You’re giving me a headache.”
“Hey, you haven’t complained about your headaches in weeks.”
Lisa lay back on the couch, trying to pretend the air in the apartment was pleasantly cool rather than warm and muggy. “Yeah?”
“That’s very interesting,” Clare went on. “I think you stopped complaining about them right around when you met Adam Match.”
“That’s not true,” Lisa denied automatically.
“Whatever you say. Anyway, I have to work late tonight, but I have a break right now. Maybe I’d better just come over and tell you about my surprise in person.”
Lisa sighed, frustrated. “Fine. Come over. It’s not like I’m doing anything, anyway.”
Clare made the drive in eight minutes, which Lisa knew because she sat on her couch the entire time, staring at the blinking digital clock on her VCR. She’d done six massages that day, and hardly had any energy left. Besides, she felt weirdly depressed.
Every day she’d come home this week, she’d expected a call from Adam, and every day, she’d been disappointed.
She heard a brief knock at her apartment door, and then Clare walked in.
She looked around the room as if just the sight of it offended her. “Seriously,” she said, “don’t you think it’s about time to start using the A/C?” Shaking her head, she pushed the door shut behind her.
“I’m trying to save money on the utility bill.” Lisa’s head was really starting to throb. Maybe her friend had a point. A hot, stuffy apartment probably wasn’t helping.
Clare went to the kitchen and returned with two glasses of iced water. She handed one to Lisa, gave the couch the side-eye and sat down on the little armchair next to it. “All right. Tell me everything. What’s wrong?”
Lisa shook her head. “Nothing.”
“Bullshit. Try again.”
“Fine. I haven’t heard from Adam since last week. When I got your voicemail earlier, I thought it was going to be him. But it wasn’t. So now I feel kind of bummed out. Okay? Whatever your surprise is, it’d better be good, because I’m feeling crappier by the second.”
“Have you tried calling him?”
Lisa scowled. “Of course not. If he wanted to hear from me, he would have called me.”
“I thought you said he did call, last week. And you didn’t call him back.”
“What, you mean when he left me that voicemail at a time when he knew I’d be at work, telling me not to bother coming to New Orleans?” She gave a humorless snort. “He didn’t ask me to return his call, so I didn’t.”
Clare raised an eyebrow. “If you’re trying to play hard-to-get, you’re actually doing a really good job of it.”
Lisa gave her a look and then glanced away.
“He’s probably scared to call you again, anyway,” Clare pointed out.
“Why would he be scared?”
“Duh.” Clare sounded exasperated. “Because you’ve been dating other people.”
“I went on two dates,” Lisa said defensively. “Weeks ago.”
Clare cleared her throat, and said brightly, “Well, now you’ve got a third.”
Lisa’s stomach clenched. “Excuse me?”
“His name is Roberto.”
“I’m not going out with someone named Roberto.”
“Actually, you are.” Clare grinned. She didn’t even have the decency to look sheepish. “That’s my surprise for you. Since you’re not going to D.C. for the Dream Date this weekend, I set up a date for you to meet Roberto, tonight.” She checked her watch. “Actually, it’s a happy-hour thing, and you’re supposed to be there in about forty-five minutes. Come on, I’ll help you get dressed.” She stood and held out a hand as if to hoist Lisa up from the couch.
“Clare!” Lisa said—shrieked, really. “You can’t just blaze in here like this. This is too much! You can’t just message these random men and set up dates for me and just expect me to—to—” She stopped, unable to put into words the enormity of the not-right-ness of what her friend was doing.
Clare seemed completely unfazed. “Oh, you can handle it. Let’s go pick out something sexy for you to wear, because Roberto looks hotter than—”
“No!” Lisa sounded like a toddler having a tantrum, and she didn’t care. “This is not how I want to do things. Clare, you can’t keep doing this. God! I’ve been all hung up on Adam all week. All I want to do is talk to him, not go out with some asshole prick I’m not even going to like.”
“Have you ever heard that song that goes ‘If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with’?” Clare asked, completely unhelpfully.
Lisa shot her the dirtiest scowl she could muster.
“Willow said you and Roberto will be perfect together,” Clare added.
“Willow said that about the first two guys, and she was dead wrong.” Lisa plopped her head into her hands and muttered, “And besides, I’m already perfect with Adam.”
“But Adam’s not here, sweetie,” Clare said—rather gently, for her. “Roberto is. And any other guy on Mister-Match.com that you might want.”
“Except I don’t want any of the guys on Mister-Match, except Mister Match himself.” Lisa looked up at her friend gloomily. “I’m sorry. I can’t go out with Roberto. You’re going to have to cancel.”
Clare looked at her for a long beat and then sat down.
“Lisa,” she said, “it may be time for me to come clean about something.”
Lisa’s stomach clenched again with foreboding. “What?”
“Well...” Clare hedged. “Remember when Willow and I said we were your Fairy God-Cupids?”
She actually looked nervous. As far as Lisa knew, Clare was never nervous about anything.
Lisa sat up. “What did you do?”
“It wasn’t just me,” Clare said hurriedly. “It was also Willow. It was actually her idea. Although, I did go along with it.”
“Tell me everything,” Lisa ground out. “And don’t leave anything out.”
Lisa was going to kill Willow. Right after she killed Clare. But first, she had to meet Roberto.
No more lies, she thought as she drove downtown a half-hour later. No more false pretenses. Whoever this Roberto guy was, it wasn’t his fault he’d somehow had the crappy luck of getting matched up by a computer algorithm with a woman who had two of the most meddling best friends in the entire universe.
Actually, “meddling” didn’t even begin to describe what Clare and Willow had done.
“Matching me up,” she muttered, “on purpose, with guys they knew from the start I wouldn’t like.” She yanked Betty’s steering wheel to make a sharp right turn.
She needed to calm down. It wasn’t Betty’s fault; no sense in damaging her poor car just because she was monumentally pissed off. This wasn’t Roberto’s fault, either. And she was going to straighten this whole mess out, once and for all.
The whole mess. Start to finish. On the off-chance that any paparazzi happened to show up this evening, Lisa would tell them she had a statement to make, and she’d tell them the whole damn story, starting with Adam Match’s very first lie to the Access Austin interviewer, a month ago.
She squeezed Betty into a tiny spot on Fourth, grudgingly fed money into the parking meter—God, how she missed the good old days, when street parking was free after six p.m.—and then found Lotus, the bar where Clare had set up her tryst with Roberto.
She was beyond caring how this went. She hadn’t even changed her clothes or tried to look nice for it. Why should she? All she was here to do was set the record straight, and avoid leaving Roberto hanging. She saw no reason he should get hurt, just because Clare and Willow had no sense of what was and was not appropriate.
Even if he did turn out to be another sleazebag, like Jacob. Or another uptight bore, like Reese.
There was no tattooed bouncer waiting at the door of Lotus, which made the place a definite step up from her last date at the Sidecar. She walked right into the dim, blue, aquatic-themed interior, and immediately spotted a man who looked like an underwear model, aside from the negligible detail that he was fully clothed. She could see at first glance that he was well-built, muscular, tanned. He was dressed in black slacks and a cream-colored shirt, his dark hair was brushed back from a smoothly-shaven face, and he was smiling at her.
He stood, and his tentative grin widened. “Lisa? You’re even prettier than you look in your photos. I’m Roberto. It’s so great to meet you.”
Chapter 33
____________________________________
“Wow.” Thirty minutes later, Lisa shook her head again and took a sip of her second glass of sparkling water with lime. “I’m sorry, but I just can’t believe how nice you seem. How...normal.” Especially, she thought, for a guy who was hotter than her apartment in August.
“Well, thank you. I think.” Roberto laughed. “Although I’m not sure that’s such a good thing. It sounds too close to the kiss of death in the dating world—being told I’m a nice, normal guy.”
“It’s a good thing,” Lisa assured him. “Believe me. I don’t mean to get too personal, but why in the world would a man who looks like you need a dating site to meet women?”
He laughed, sounding slightly uncomfortable. “I could ask you the same question.”
Which was very gentlemanly of him. She shouldn’t have said that. It was probably best to get off the subject entirely.
“Look, it’s none of my business.” She shook her head. “Just take it as a compliment. And let me just tell you, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being a nice, normal guy.” She snorted. “You should see the last guy I went out with through Mister-Match. Let’s just say, he wasn’t above making sexual innuendoes about me, when we’d only just met.”
Roberto’s eyebrows raised a fraction of an inch. “Wow, that’s...classy. So, have you been on a lot of dates lately?”
Oops. “Oh—no. Not really. That guy, he was no one. We just had a drink together, and that was it.” Lisa smiled at Roberto, inwardly cringing at her slip-up.
Everyone knew you didn’t talk about other men on a date with someone new. Not that she was on a date with Roberto... Except, he thought she was, since she still hadn’t gotten around to telling him the truth about why she’d come here. She should be letting him off the hook so he could go meet someone else, and start a real relationship with someone whose friends weren’t pulling the puppet strings.
Except he was just so nice, and so easy to talk to. The fact that he was incredibly handsome didn’t hurt, either.
Roberto was nodding. “I know how it can be. Sometimes I wish I could just line up dates like interviews. Like, bring the speed-dating model to Internet dating, since you can usually figure out within five minutes whether it’s someone you’d like to spend more time with or not.”
“Five minutes?” Lisa snorted morosely. “I usually know within thirty seconds.”
Roberto laughed. “So, how am I doing? I mean, you’re still here—” He checked his watch. “A half-hour in. Should I take that as a good sign?”
She smiled back at him. He was definitely incredibly good-looking. Maybe even more handsome than Adam. Not that she was comparing.
She wasn’t comparing, she told herself fiercely. She wasn’t even thinking of Adam. Adam Who?
“You’re doing great so far,” she told Roberto truthfully. “Not at all what I expected.”
“Sounds like you must have been dating down,” he observed, and watched her over the rim of his glass as he took a sip of his white wine.
“Dating down.” Lisa considered it as she played with the damp napkin that served as a coaster for her drink. “Maybe so. On the other hand,” she joked, “when you’re basically washed up at twenty-nine, maybe you have to take what you can get.”
“Washed up?” Roberto repeated. He laughed, a hearty sound that came from deep in his chest. “And taking what you can get. Gee, thanks, what a compliment.”
There was no offense in his tone, which was a miracle, since Lisa was busy cramming her foot into her mouth left and right. Plus, Roberto was right. She was being absurd. Twenty-nine was still young, Roberto was a definite catch, and Lisa had her whole life to find The One.
Except I already found him. And he doesn’t want to be with me.
The thought was utterly depressing.
“Hey, I didn’t mean that seriously.” Roberto looked concerned. “I just had to laugh at the idea of a beautiful, intelligent woman like you being ‘washed up.’ You’ve got everything a guy could want. How could you think it’s all over for you?”
Lisa twisted her mouth. “Because—”
She almost told him. She almost spilled her guts about Adam, about their deepening friendship and their brief, thrilling, incredible affair. About how she’d fallen head-over-heels in love with him.
About how it had fallen apart just as suddenly and unexpectedly as the relationship had arisen.
Instead she took a big gulp of sparkling water, and was almost grateful when the carbonation scratched her throat and made her cough.
“Uh-oh. Did it go down the wrong pipe?” Roberto stood. “Let me get you some regular water. That might help.”
Did getting her a glass of water count as wooing with food? Lisa felt even more depressed at the thought, as her eyes watered and her throat smarted. Roberto was a perfectly nice, intelligent, handsome guy. He even seemed to be forgiving all her social gaffes, which were many and counting.
And all she could seem to do was hold him up against the
standard that Adam had set, and only Adam could meet.
When Roberto returned with a glass of water decorated with a slice of lemon, Lisa had recovered enough to smile and apologize.
“No worries,” he said easily as he slipped back into his chair with a grin. “Happens to the best of us.”
“No, actually...” She took a deep breath and mentally crossed her fingers. “I owe you an apology for this whole evening.” Roberto started to frown and shake his head, but she plunged on ahead. “No, I do. You’re obviously a great guy. Sweet, helpful, smart, great-looking—”
“Hey, don’t build me up too much, here.” He laughed nervously. “I’m not as normal as you think.”
“No, you are. You’re exactly the kind of catch millions of women would be thrilled to land.”
He shook his head slowly. “You’re wrong.”
“Roberto, you’re gainfully employed, you can string more than two sentences together, you address my eyes, not my breasts, when you talk to me, and plus, I mean, bonus, you’re totally, incredibly hot—”
“I’m a stripper,” he blurted out.
Lisa felt her eyes pop wide. “I’m sorry. A what?”
“A stripper,” he repeated miserably. “An exotic dancer. I work for Hard All-American Hunks.”
All she could do was stare.
Roberto seemed to be the type to babble under pressure. “I hire out to bachelorette parties, you know, birthday parties, whatever, and do my thing. I know it’s not completely orthodox but it pays the bills, and I like to think it brings a lot of people happiness—”
“Whoa, whoa, there, cowboy.” Lisa finally found her words and held up a hand. “It’s all right. You don’t have to explain.”
Roberto looked both uncomfortable and sad. “Well, you have no idea how many women turn around and run in the opposite direction when they find out about it.”
Mister Match (The Match Series Book 1) Page 28
