by Sandra Kitt
“Don’t look so shocked,” Eric said with a chuckle. “It was all quite legit, aboveboard—for the most part.”
Val rolled her turn, landed on Free Parking and pocketed the handful of cash. She grinned and winked at Eric as she counted out the money and added it to her substantial pile of paper currency.
“Are you the great-great-granddaughter of a robber baron?” Eric asked.
“I warned you. I’m good at this game. Roll your turn and tell me more about this escort business. What exactly did you do?”
“Well, I escorted women to and from social functions. Sometimes a little acting was involved.”
“Meaning?”
“Sometimes I’d play the role of a husband or fiancé, sometimes a lady wanted me to pretend to be her boyfriend. I even got to play the role of sheikh once, that was for a masquerade ball. The fact that I’m fluent in a couple of languages increased my marketability. I made pretty good money for the two years I did it.”
“Didn’t you feel cheap or used?”
Eric shook his head. “There was nothing involved that made me feel that way. Now, granted, a couple of the older ladies were willing to pay extra for additional services rendered, so to speak.”
Val glanced away and then looked at him. “And did you make a lot of extra money?”
“That wasn’t my thing. I wasn’t doing the job to get involved with anyone or to do anything that went against my principles. As it turned out, my initial reason for answering the ad proved to be less of a reason for continuing. I started because I wanted pocket money to hang out with the guys, take a girl out on a nice date. But most of the escort work ended up being on the weekends and I wound up not having time to do a lot of hanging out. I learned a lot about social situations and diplomacy while working as an escort.”
Val reached for popcorn at the same time Eric did. Their hands collided in the bowl. Delicately choosing a popped kernel, Val held it out to Eric.
With a steady gaze that brooked no refusal and a gentle hand that held her true, Eric closed his lips around the popcorn and the tips of her fingers. White heat engulfed her. Val tried to ignore the flames of sensation that just his touch elicited. He licked the tip of one finger, then released her hand.
“Was the fine art of eating popcorn one of the things you learned?”
Eric smiled, male and predatory. “No. I’m learning those lessons right now.”
The game forgotten for the moment, Val sat back. “What are you doing to me, Eric Fitzgerald?”
He leaned back, sizing her up. Val got the distinct impression that he imagined how she’d fit and feel in his bed. That’s certainly the path her own errant thoughts kept wandering down.
“What do you think I’m doing?” he countered.
“If I had an answer, I wouldn’t have asked.”
“Then what are you thinking?”
“I was wondering if you were sizing me up and measuring me for the fit in your bed.”
The candid response surprised Val. She hadn’t planned on saying that. Not at all. But something about Eric made her feel that he would understand and not try to take advantage.
“Do you want my honest response to that most provocative image you just provided?”
Val folded her arms and bit her lip. “I don’t know,” she said honestly.
“I want you. I knew that the moment I set eyes on you in that community center last night. We’re both adults and can do whatever we mutually choose to do. My desire is to get to know you. You’re making it hard on me, pun intended, to keep my intentions noble.”
“I’m not a tease.”
“Netanya wouldn’t have introduced me to you if you were.”
“You two are very close.” Val posed the question as a statement.
“We’re like white on rice,” he said. “Netanya is my girl. I don’t know where I’d be today without her.” Eric picked up the dice. “Whose turn was it?”
“I don’t know. You go ahead.”
Eric tossed the small squares and moved his piece forward on the board. “I got the idea to start a matchmaking company when I realized just how many people were out there looking for love, lots of times, as the song goes, in all the wrong places.”
Val leaned her elbows on the table.
“I talked with some of my so-called dates from the escort business and really got to know them. Some hired an escort just so they wouldn’t have to go to a party or a wedding alone. Others just wanted a tall, good-looking—” His eyebrows flickered in a silent encouraging question.
Val giggled. “Fishing?”
Eric wisely held his tongue.
She nodded. “Yeah, good-looking,” she conceded.
Amused and satisfied, he smiled and continued. “A tall, good-looking man draped on their arm. I had regulars and got to know them pretty well.”
“When did you launch A Match Made in Heaven?”
“About a year after I graduated. I was working as a manager in a retail store, when I decided I wanted to be my own boss. I had a business degree and sat down to think of ways to actually apply it. The escort service scheduler called out of the blue and asked if I wanted to reactivate myself on an on-call basis. I said no. That’s when I started thinking about what some of those women had been telling me—that they just wanted a safe, reliable way to meet honest, decent men to go out with and have a good time. With no strings attached was frequently a caveat. The rest, as they say, is history.”
Eric’s doorbell rang. “That’s the food,” he said, rising from his chair.
A few minutes later he set the box on the table. A quick trip to the cabinets yielded plates, napkins and soda. As they made headway into the pizza, Eric dabbed the corner of his mouth.
“So, tell me about you. I noticed the office you have at your place. It looks like a mail-order operation.”
Val laughed. “Is that your way of saying I have a messy office?”
“No, no,” he insisted. “Lots of boxes and whatnot, as if you do a lot of mailing.”
“Actually, I do. I’m a court reporter.”
“You work for a newspaper?”
Val shook her head. “The other court reporters. The ones you see typing into the little machines.”
Eric nodded. “How’d you get started with that?”
Val laughed as she swiped a piece of pepperoni off a slice of pizza. “Bucking the trend and blazing new trails. I wanted to do something different from everybody else. My college degree was in literature and liberal arts with a focus on poetry, which left me eminently qualified to do nothing. I come from pretty traditional stock. My dad is a mail carrier and my mom is a teacher. That’s about as hard-core middle America as you can get. Middle America didn’t bother me so much as the lemmings-to-the-sea approach to a career.”
She reached for a slice of pizza and bit into it. After a moment she continued. “Didn’t want to be a teacher. Didn’t like to write, so I nixed the journalism thing. Thought about being a librarian for about three months. That just wasn’t me. So I took one of those job aptitude tests and ended up not liking the answers. I eventually heeded the call of the Peace Corps.”
“Really? That’s something I’d always thought about.”
“I loved it. I built houses. One year I even taught school. Teaching in a third-world country is far different from teaching in American public schools.”
“How’d you get from the Peace Corps to court reporting?” Eric got up and got more soft drinks and extra ice for their glasses.
She grinned. “Traffic violation. I got a ticket soon after I got back to the States. Driving on the wrong side of the road will do that.”
His mouth twitched in amusement. “How much time did you do?”
“The judge was lenient. He made me pay a fine and ordered that I go to driving school. When I left the courtroom I wandered around the courthouse. People were jostling to get in one of the rooms. Television crews were setting up. I walked in and took a set to see what all th
e excitement was about. Turns out it was a preliminary hearing for a big murder case. I was fascinated. Sat through the whole thing. From television shows, I knew what the woman up front was doing. I thought it might be neat to get to hear all of that testimony every day. Now, that, I figured, was a pretty cool job. I waited around and talked to her after it was over.”
“And now you listen to the details of gory murders every day?”
Shaking her head, Val rolled her eyes. “I wish. My average day is very unpredictable. The big murder trials are few and far between in this area. For the past few weeks I’ve been wrapped up in some divorce cases. I tell you, people can get pretty ugly and very, very petty when they are screaming at each other across the table and divvying up their china.”
Val shook her head again. “The worst ones are the couples who had the quickie weddings. Madly in love, they rush off to Vegas or Atlantic City and get married, and then six months or a year or two down the road I get to listen to them complain about who left dirty dishes in the sink or who didn’t take out the garbage.”
Eric listened to her and heard something that disturbed him. “You don’t believe in romance?”
Chapter 5
Quietly and with an intensity Val didn’t notice, Eric awaited her answer, her response important to him in ways he hadn’t even contemplated until that moment. It had never occurred to him that he’d fall for a woman who didn’t believe in romance the way he did. As for falling for Val, he accepted the fact that he was well on his way to being head over heels.
Eric had always believed that he’d recognize upon sight the woman meant to be his life partner. And he’d recognized Val as though they were soulmates through many lifetimes. The fact that he desired her only compounded the feeling of connectedness he had with her.
He watched her turn the question over. She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it. Big brown eyes looked at him over the table.
“That’s a tough question,” she finally said. “What do you mean by romance? What’s your definition?”
Surprised at the question, it took Eric a few moments to get his thoughts together. He and Netanya had talked around this issue over the years, mostly in the context of the matchmaking agency. He’d never been forced to put into words his actual feelings.
“Let me start with what romance isn’t,” he said, closing the pizza box and pushing it out of the way. “Romance isn’t sex and it isn’t one-sided. I should clarify that. True romance isn’t one-sided. Lots of times I’ve seen couples in relationships where she has to supply all the romance, or vice versa. Those relationships are seldom very healthy.”
Val leaned her elbows on the table and propped her chin up in her hands. “What else isn’t romance?”
“It’s not something you can take for granted. Sometimes couples fall into the trap of believing that because they have simply endured—that they have lasted—that that’s enough. They erroneously believe that endurance guarantees romance. Others think that because their relationship is new, romance is automatically a part of it. They confuse the physical urges with romanticism.”
“So what is romance?” she asked.
Eric reached out a large hand and captured one of her smooth ones. “Romance is holding hands. Romance is sharing silence and not being uncomfortable with the space. Watching rain fall together. Playing Monopoly and just eating pizza.”
He watched her as he said the last and wasn’t disappointed to see her small intake of breath. With his thumb, Eric began a slow, sensual caress of her hand.
“Expressions of romance take many forms. From the traditional flowers and candy that so many people will be receiving this Wednesday on Valentine’s Day to the...what? Why such a face for Valentine’s Day? Most people like Valentine’s Day.”
Val obviously hadn’t done a very good job of concealing her negative reaction to her nemesis. “I’m not most people.” She tried to pull away from his grasp, but Eric wouldn’t let her hand go.
“Why don’t you like Valentine’s Day, Val?”
This time when she tugged, she defeated him. Val sat back and crossed both her arms and her legs.
“When Netanya introduced us, she very graciously overlooked my full first name. I’m Valentine Sanders. Val is my preference though.”
Eric might have smiled at the revelation, except he sensed that to do so would be tantamount to stepping on a land mine. Val couldn’t see that her name was perfect for her: light, sweet and pretty. He instead asked what he hoped was a safe question.
“How did you come to be named Valentine?”
“You don’t really want to know,” she said with much maligned attitude.
Eric did smile that time. “Val, I really want to know.”
She sighed. Then with a huff and an expression that clearly stated she’d rather be talking about something else, she looked at him. He seemed as if he really wanted to know.
“Those couples I was telling you about...the ones who do the quickie marriages because they are so in love. Well, my folks won the grand prize in the ‘rushed and should have waited’ category.”
Eric moved the game board back into place and handed Val the dice. “What happened?”
She rolled the dice, moved her marker and landed on a piece of property Eric owned that had been developed with a couple of houses. He grinned and held out his hand.
Val smiled in spite of herself. “I’m still going to beat you,” she predicted.
“We’ll see.”
“My parents met on the escalator at a department store in Pittsburgh,” she said, handing him the dice. “That store has long since been closed. But my mother was going up, my dad was going down. He says he took one look at her and knew she was the one.”
Eric knew the feeling but kept his silence. He threw the gaming pieces but ignored them. He had eyes only for Val.
“My father tells the story of first trying to run up the down escalator to catch her, then elbowing his way to the bottom and dashing to the other side to go up and catch her.”
“And what did he find at the top?” Eric asked.
Val grinned. “My mother, leaning over the side, looking at him and laughing. My father proposed the next week, on Valentine’s Day. I was born a couple of years later. Unfortunately for me, it was on Valentine’s Day.”
Eric did smile then.
“If you laugh, I’ll find something to throw at you.”
“Valentine is a beautiful name for a beautiful woman.”
Shy now for some reason, Val glanced up at him, then looked away. “Thank you,” she murmured.
Eric got up. Before Val could determine his intention, he planted a quick, delicious kiss on her lips and sat down again.
“I just couldn’t help myself,” he said by way of explanation.
“Take your turn.”
Val liked everything about Eric Fitzgerald, from the spontaneity exhibited in the kiss that she really and truly wanted more of, to the kindness he’d displayed to the two women who needed help with their car. She watched as he stretched an arm corded with strength across the board to move his game piece eleven spaces.
The word that came to mind to best describe him was grounded. Gorgeous ranked right up there, too, Val thought, but grounded best fit the bill. He appeared comfortable but not pretentious with his success, settled in his approach toward life, and determined in his thrust-and-parry pursuit of her.
She ran hot and cold around him. Just when she got comfortable enough to let down her guard, Eric would turn up the heat a little more with a glance that lingered or a touch that spoke volumes, and Val would flush through and through.
“If you continue to stare at me like that,” he said, “I can’t promise that my intentions will remain honorable.” The husky baritone of his voice promised unspeakable joy.
Val blushed from head to toe. He’d caught her again! Accepting the dice from him with no comment, she trembled when his fingers lingered as he passed her the small squares.
More than an hour later, Val sat back, astounded.
“I don’t believe this. I never lose at Monopoly.”
“Maybe you were distracted,” he said with a sly smile.
“Mmm-hmm. Or something like that.”
Val glanced at her watch. “Oh, my God. You are not going to believe what time it is.”
“It’s after eight. I was sort of hoping you wouldn’t notice, or that if you noticed, you wouldn’t mind.”
Big brown eyes stared into equally dark ones. “I didn’t mind,” she said quietly. “As a matter of fact, I enjoyed the time...and the company.”
“Me, too.”
Val was the first to look away. “I—I have a ton of work to do. There’s a transcript I want to work on tonight. I promised my client I’d deliver it by Wednesday. I want to be early. The client is new.”
She helped him pack up the game board and pieces. As Val placed the top on the box, Eric reached for her hands. He pulled her to him, their bodies melding like two pieces of a puzzle.
Eric clasped his hands together at the small of her back. When he lowered his head, Val wrapped her arms around his neck and rolled her hips. Eric moaned.
The kiss held promise and commitment, tenderness and desire.
Eric came up for breath but didn’t release her. He stayed her hips. “You owe me a date.”
Val grinned. “So I do.”
“Ready to spin the wheels?”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“You established the stakes,” he reminded her.
“So I did.”
Val stepped out of his embrace and straightened her skirt and sweater. She hoped the sweater material was thick enough to conceal her body’s desire for him. But Eric’s gaze at her chest told her differently.
Eric swallowed, then reached for the A Match Made in Heaven date deciders. “This is going to be fun.”
“Do I get to do the spinning?”
“Of course. I wouldn’t want you somehow claiming that I’d rigged the outcome.”
Val placed the yellow wheel on the flat surface of the tabletop. The little pointer would determine where she and Eric would meet on their date. “I rather like the idea of meeting at the library or a bookstore,” she said, noting two of the choices on the circle.
