Make Me a Match

by Melinda Curtis

  “Not bad.” Tilda rolled her empty glass between her palms. “Score one for our boys.”

  Score none for Kelsey. This was nothing her editor wanted to read.

  A burst of laughter erupted from the foursome that Coop gathered at the table across from where Kelsey sat. One of the men slapped the wooden tabletop and shook his head. “Little T’s Pizza is the best in the county.”

  The produce shopper didn’t look convinced. “That’s good, but the sauce is better at Romano’s.” An argument ensued over the correct sweetness for the best sauce, the ideal thickness of pepperoni slices, the perfect crunch in a thin crust. Finally, all parties agreed to a taste off later in the week.

  “The boys are doing better tonight. Must be those improved questionnaires.” Tilda spun her stool around and ordered two beers.

  Kelsey surveyed the gathering. Where was the sticky mess? Why weren’t potential couples making out in the corner? Why wasn’t one of the mountain men tossing a woman over his shoulder to take her to his man cave?

  Right now Kelsey’s tagline read Local K-Bay Boys Make Good on Promise of Love. The vision of her packing up her cubicle into several boxes solidified in her mind. That she’d need only one and a half boxes for her stuff after almost ten years at the Beat made her frown.

  Tilda pressed a pint glass into Kelsey’s hand. “Maybe you’re the only jawbreaker here.”

  She was career focused like her mother and father. And if that made her hard, so be it. “Then, it’s good I didn’t fill out a survey.”

  “These boys might have the secret sauce to find the one meant for you.” Tilda tapped her pint against Kelsey’s glass. “Never discount the power of making a real connection.”

  Kelsey shook her head and then drank her beer. Real love couldn’t be trusted. She only had to read the interviews she’d done for her column to know that. Or simply look at her own family and her parents’ shell of a marriage. “I think I’ll leave love’s pain and misery to the lost souls here tonight.”

  “That’s only what’s on the surface. Get to the center and there’s the good stuff.” Tilda pointed at the brass bell over the beer taps. “That’s the stuff worth ringing the bell for.”

  Kelsey wasn’t interested in the bell or discussing love’s complexities with Tilda. But the older woman reminded Kelsey that good never existed without bad. It was her duty to discover the nasty inner core and reveal the truth inside. That was what the Beat promised their readers.

  The story wasn’t here with Tilda on her warm seat surrounded by her mountain men. And it wasn’t going to be discovered among the couples now debating puppy potty training at the table behind her. But Kelsey wasn’t giving up. She’d been raised surrounded by perfection; she knew firsthand that nothing was ever as it appeared. And tonight’s event was too perfect not to have a catch.

  Ty set a bin full of empty glasses onto the far end of the bar and stepped behind it as if he belonged there. He had always been a contradiction. Maybe if she confronted him, the story would reveal itself.

  Kelsey stood and picked up her beer. “Thanks for the drink.”

  She made her way to the empty stool at the bar’s corner. Ty filled an order from a waitress, moving with the ease and grace of a seasoned bartender. He only acknowledged her once to offer an abbreviated introduction to Coach, the owner of the Bar & Grill. Coach offered a measured smile, as if she were a star recruit and he didn’t believe the hype, before moving toward Tilda and her mountain men as they placed bets on the most likely matches in the crowd. Several were convinced there wouldn’t be any.

  Ty set a highball glass on a waitress’s tray and finally turned his full attention on Kelsey. A shadow passed through his expression.

  Kelsey’s reporter instincts pounced. She’d seen that look hundreds of times before. Shadows meant secrets. Kelsey brought forth her most easygoing smile. “So you work at the skating rink. You’re a matchmaker, and now it seems a bartender, too.”

  “Among other things.” He tore off a mint leaf and stuck it in his mouth. The shadow was gone.

  “Do you have time for that interview?”

  “How did you like your beer?” He motioned to her half-empty glass.

  “It isn’t as good as a mai tai.”

  He nodded to someone who called for another beer and drew it from a tap. “You’re out of luck, Kelsey. Paula over there just told Collin that she’s too busy for a relationship now.” His gaze narrowed and for the first time she noticed the irritation threading through his gaze, the small twitch at the edge of his right eye. Even his scar appeared deeper, more crimson, more pronounced. “All deals are off.”

  “Wait.” Too late. She knew he’d heard the desperation in her clipped tone. Inhaling a deep breath, she tried to push serenity through her limbs like her yoga instructor had drummed into her. She purposely slowed her words, striving to sound indifferent. “I could bring in different women, better women.”

  “I don’t know how.” He picked up her glass, poured out the beer and set the glass upside down in the stainless-steel sink. “Besides, it doesn’t matter. You came. You saw. There’s no story here.”

  That serenity chant ruptured into a scream, complete with double fist punches against the bar top. She squeezed her hands together in her lap. “I’ll decide when I have enough facts.”

  “You use facts now?” He set his elbows on the bar and leaned toward her. “And here I thought you finally wanted to write something with more heart.”

  Get to the center and the bell-ringing good stuff. Her gaze tripped over Ty’s face as she tried not to linger on his full mouth or notice the mint on his breath. Or wonder if the good stuff was still there, beneath that thick beard, deep inside him, waiting for her to uncover it.

  His smile angled slyly. He was wondering about the good stuff, too.

  She shoved her thoughts aside. This mutual wondering wasn’t doing her any good. She clenched her teeth together, reminding herself she was the jawbreaker. Tilda had that right. And she wasn’t far enough along in her career for soft centers. “And here I thought you would’ve let the past go. Your name was cleared after all. Isn’t that what this is about? A fresh start? New career? Plastic surgery for your—” her gaze drifted to his cheek “—image.”

  “Leave it, K.J.” He drew back and pressed his thumb into his right temple, no rubbing, no gentle massage, just a force of pressure to stop whatever pain pulsed there. And then he began mixing a drink.

  She’d touched a nerve, a deep one from the finality in his voice. She knew everything about his past injuries...didn’t she? “I came for the matchmaking story, but I’m guessing the backgrounds of the matchmakers are much more interesting.”

  He didn’t rise to the bait, but his gaze darted to his friends. He set the cocktail on a coaster in front of her. “I’ve got another customer. Take care.”

  She played with the straw and stirred her drink. “Is it last call, then?”

  “For you, it is.” Then he turned his back on her and walked away.

  “Do you know what the real test of true love in Alaska is?” Coach picked up a remote and aimed it at the TV hanging in the corner. A hockey game filled the screens on each of the televisions scattered around the bar, snaring the men’s full attention.

  Coop lunged across the bar and attempted to grab the remote from Coach’s grip like a parent snatching his child from an alligator pit. But Coop hadn’t been fast enough. Snubbed—in some cases, almost midsentence—a number of the women moved to a table near the door.

  Gideon and Ty hurried toward Coach.

  “Taught you boys to react better than this.” Coach shook his finger at them. “What did I used to tell you about game plans?”

  Gideon drummed his fingers on his laptop. “Hockey is a graveyard of the best-laid plans?”

  “Any breakdown
can be corrected with ice experience, not diagrams?” Coop captured the remote, changed the channel to the news and tossed the device into a cupboard beneath the bar.

  The three men turned to Ty.

  “Never underestimate the power of teamwork,” Ty recited, as sullen as a schoolboy.

  Coach’s laughter burst out in one blast like a low-budget hockey horn. “Game experience is different than any plan or diagram you might have. You’ll continue to fail until you understand what it means to win and lose at love.” He went into the kitchen.

  “The game isn’t over,” Coop stated.

  It certainly wasn’t. Kelsey was thrilled. Ty’s reticence. The matchmaking team’s tension. There was more to the story. She was betting her future on it.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “STILL LOOKING TO prove love by the book works?” Coach asked the next morning at the Bar & Grill. “There is no manual on love, fellas. No fancy equation. No mathematical formula.” Coach wiped down a blue vodka bottle and set it back on the shelves. “Take note for that article you have to write when I win our bet, boys. Fresh, clean air. That should be in the top-ten reasons to love Alaska. Can’t get air like this in the Lower 48.”

  Clean or not, Ty couldn’t breathe. The last he’d seen of Kelsey, she’d had that look in her eye, that mad-scientist gleam that said she’d shifted into the express lane.

  “But our surveys work.” Gideon dropped his laptop bag on the empty stool beside Ty. “The logarithms paired up our soccer couple, Paula and Collin.”

  Ty picked up his bowl of mixed nuts to give Gideon more room to spread out his surveys. Gideon shuffled through his papers and pulled two from the pile. “They match on every question.”

  “Perfect on paper.” Coach wrapped his white towel around the neck of a bulk-size whiskey bottle. “Then, why haven’t they rung my bell?”

  “They’re perfect, apart from the fact that Paula doesn’t want to be in a relationship right now.” Ty chose a few spicy peanuts from the bowl. “Maybe there needs to be a header—participants must be willing and open to being in a relationship right now, not ten years from today.”

  “Here’s another tip. Do you know what you can see later this month in Alaska?” Coach asked, grinning. “The World Ice Art competition. That should be on your list, too, of why you love living in Alaska. Don’t take the easy way and include all them obvious tourist places. We’re more than cruise-ship ports.”

  Coop walked out from the kitchen, waving a clean pacifier. His infant daughter was strapped to his chest in one of those baby-carrier contraptions. The days of chest bumps, fistfights and all-nighters were gone for his friend. Coop kissed his daughter’s head. Not that he looked the least bit miserable or remorseful. Still, the whiplash lifestyle change his friend had made confounded Ty. Fortunately, he intended to never make that kind of game change.

  Coop gave Zoe her pacifier. “We don’t need to write that list yet. We just need women who are ready to settle down.”

  “But we don’t need any more repeats, in women or survey questions.” Ty tossed a handful of peanuts into his mouth and chewed. The spices hit his stomach and rolled around like the ball on a roulette wheel. It’d been days since Trinity Matchmaking had made a match.

  Gideon opened his laptop and started typing. “Only some of the questions were the same from last week.”

  “Find last week’s questionnaire from our cashier, Nadine.” Ty set the bowl down and scanned the previous night’s surveys until he found the one he wanted. “I bet she gave different answers this week when we paired her with Derrick. Last week was...Wendell.” One guy was a truck driver and the other a restaurant owner. The two men couldn’t have been more different.

  Coop grabbed the two surveys and held them above Zoe’s head. “Last week she liked beer and spending her weekends fly fishing. This week it’s wine and preferring to be at home on the couch watching the sports channel. Nice attempt at gaming the system.”

  “Still didn’t work.” Gideon shrugged, his fingers tapping a rapid beat across the keyboard. As the town’s banker, and the guys’ financial guru, he certainly dressed the part. Now all he needed was a chance to run a professional-hockey outfit. “She wasn’t matched on the computer, this week or last week. We assigned her somebody last minute.”

  Didn’t that make them sound like losers?

  “So we agree that we need new fish for our matchmaking pond.” Coop stroked Zoe’s cheek. “Yesterday the beauty parlor on Birch Street refused to put up a new flyer for me.”

  “We’ve exhausted our contact list and our goodwill in town.” Gideon never looked up from his laptop. “And I swear someone in Bitzy’s Bling nail shop put the closed sign in the window just as I was heading over there with new flyers.”

  Coop cooed at Zoe, his voice sugared in baby goodness. “Kelsey Nash can find us more women.”

  No. Obviously all of Coop’s cooing had mucked up Ty’s hearing. His friend was on serious baby overload. Not every woman was as angelic as Zoe or as trustworthy as Nora, Coop’s fiancée. “Why would you say that? Look what she produced last night. Fish we’d already thrown back in the water.”

  “Kelsey has connections.” Gideon never slowed his keystrokes. “Here and in Anchorage.”

  “I think she understands now what we’re hoping for,” Coop said.

  She understood nothing. Or perhaps she understood too much. It didn’t matter. Kelsey Nash didn’t matter. Ty couldn’t allow this to happen. “She wants a feature story. You know what that means.” Him. She wanted a story on him.

  But his friends didn’t know that Ty still had a secret. One that would give Kelsey the headline she wanted and sever the guys’ friendship. A friendship forged on the third-grade playground during a dodgeball war against Randy Lee Jenkins, fifth-grade bulldozer.

  “Then, give her our story in exchange for her help.” Coop played peek-a-boo with Zoe.

  “It’s never that simple with Kelsey.” Ty shoved his stool back and stood. He washed his hands in the sink, willing his stomach to quit roiling as if he was out on a crabbing boat in a storm-tossed sea. “She has a way of getting people to tell her things.” And by people, Ty meant himself.

  Gideon stopped typing and followed him behind the bar and slung an arm around his shoulder. “At least this time she can’t make things up. Besides, she exposed all the skeletons in your closet years ago.”

  But she hadn’t.

  And once discovered, this truth would leave Ty more alone than he’d ever been. And that included the time his father’s body had washed up near the pier. Exactly one week after his father had conned his grandparents and several friends into investing their life savings in a mining venture. In three days his father had gambled and boozed away all the money. In three more days, he’d doubled his debt owed to a loan shark. On the seventh day, that debt had been paid.

  And Kelsey? Ty had been young when he’d spilled his guts to her. He’d have told her just about anything when they’d finally stopped fighting and teasing each other and put their lips together.

  He could stonewall one woman for two weeks until the bet with Coach was won. Once Kelsey left town and his friends had moved to the Lower 48, the truth wouldn’t matter. It’d stay buried for good. All Ty had to do was stay one step ahead of Kelsey, go on the offensive, call her out before she called him.

  Ty got out his cell phone and dialed the Sky Hawk Mountain Lodge. The receptionist connected him to Kelsey’s room. Two rings later and her sleep-tinged voice filled the silence.

  “It’s your chance at redemption,” Ty said. “Tomorrow night. Iceplex. Seven o’clock. And invite women comfortable outdoors. We’ve got an ice-fishing event planned for the next day.” He paused and rubbed his temple, trying to get rid of the image forming in his mind. “And, K.J., sharpen your blades. Your participation is required.” />
  He clicked the end-call button before he heard her reaction. Before the picture from the past came into full focus: midnight on a frozen lake, ice skates and stolen kisses.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “IF YOU WANT to return skates, you’re in the wrong line.”

  Not again. Not here. Kelsey tossed the end of her crimson scarf over her shoulder and leaned around Eleanor Clambert. Sure enough. There was Tilda working behind the outdoor ice-rink snack counter. The woman was like a slice of red bell pepper: overpowering, strong flavored and hard to digest.

  Tilda stared back at her through those wide, round sixties frames, her eyes like twin magnets, always tracking Kelsey. “This isn’t the skate line.”

  The women in front of her—Eleanor, the shyest girl in their high school class; Summer, the earth-tuned woman Kelsey had tracked down at her health food store, Lately Lettuce; and Holly, the elementary school music teacher with lavender-dyed hair whom Kelsey had discovered working the evening shift at the gas station—shifted as a unit to the other line. Kelsey stepped up to the snack counter. “You work here, too?”

  She should do a column on the K-Bay residents and their adaptability in the workforce. The town wouldn’t lack for qualified employees if all of the residents were as versatile as Ty and Tilda.

  “My other half likes to ref.” Tilda held a thick soft pretzel between stainless steel tongs. “And I like to help wherever I can.”

  And by help, Tilda meant sharing her numerous opinions without restraint. Kelsey assumed Tilda would opt for a job at any venue that granted her such freedom, even if it meant having to filet salmon in the harbor in her bathrobe.

  Tilda pointed at Kelsey with her tongs. “Unless you have skates stashed in that oversize tote you haul everywhere, and I doubt you do, you need to get in that line.”

  Kelsey had skates. In her closet. In her studio. Back in the city. Not that it was Tilda’s concern. Besides, Kelsey had invited more than enough women to grant her a no-skate pass, despite Ty’s orders last night. “There’s enough participants. I’d like a hot chocolate.”