Hi. Marry Me

by Kimberley Taylor

  Hi. Marry Me

  A dating app like no other. Skip dating, get married.

  A clean romance by Kimberley Taylor of BWWM Club.

  Tony Miran has already made it big with his dating app LoveMatches Inc.

  But now he wants to make it bigger!

  The hotshot billionaire has just come up with the algorithm that will match you with the person you’re going to marry…

  There’s just one small problem… He needs a success story!

  After she’s a bridesmaid yet again Diana Rohr decides to install the dating app on a whim.

  And when a random guy named Tony proposes to her the next day, she thinks it’s all a prank.

  But after he tells her who he is, she’s curious to see if the statistics of the app are true!

  After all, what does she have to lose?

  But as they get to know each other they can’t deny the burning chemistry between them…

  And perhaps maybe there’s something more…

  But is it just the algorithm saying that they are meant for each other?

  Or is it really true love?

  Find out in this clean romance by Kimberley Taylor of BWWM Club.

  Tip: Search BWWM Club on Amazon to see more of our great books.

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  Copyright © 2019 to Kimberley Taylor and AfroRomanceBooks.com. No part of this book can be copied or distributed without written permission from the above copyright holders.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

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  Chapter 1

  The blue light from his computer screen made the entire room glow eerily. Tony was slumped over one of his many monitors, his fingers clacking across the keyboard, his eyes roving back and forth, left to right, across the screen.

  Just a little bit more, he thought. Just one more line of code and then I’m there. He reached down, felt among the empty cans at his feet, and picked up one that felt not-empty. He rattled it. The liquid sloshed. He didn’t know what was in it. He drank anyway.

  Cheap version of roulette, he thought.

  The searing sweet of the soda made its way into him, and a few seconds later the wall of caffeine hit.

  He glanced at the lower right corner of his desktop. The time was 3:21AM.

  He looked back up at his code. Only a few lines left, he thought, and then he’d be done.

  Tony was a graduate student in the IT line, just a month away from graduating with honors. He was ready to make his way out into the real world, start to make a name for himself. He just had to make sure that the first time people read his name, it was for something big. He needed to wow.

  And he was so close.

  Only a few lines of code separated him from being finished with programming the alpha build of his brainchild, LoveMatches Inc.

  Tony had grown up listening to his older friends complain about dating apps. He’d taken all of that information in quietly, noting all the ways that people would have wanted their apps to be better—and he hadn’t forgotten it. Any of it. He’d enrolled into one of the best programming schools in the country and silently impressed all of his professors with his drive. And in his free time—all of it—he’d programmed. His fingers felt as if they were shaped for a keyboard and little else. He didn’t have much of a social life, but that was okay. He’d figure that part out later. He had the rest of his life to have friends, find a girl. Right now was for and app development. It was his time.

  Tony stopped typing, took another sip of mystery soda, and leaned back into his chair. He scanned his lines of code with a tired but practiced eye. There were no mistakes. He’d known that the first time; he never made any mistakes. But this wasn't something he wanted to do twice.

  He sat up, shook his arms out, and then pressed the Enter key on his MacBook Pro. Run.

  The lines of code began to dance on the screen. His desktop blipped out and was replaced by a retro-chic screen. 'LoveMatches Inc.', it said, ‘Where Love’s as easy as 1-2-3’.

  Tony sighed and then pumped his fist into the air.

  He'd done it.

  He had written the algorithm for love, and he’d found a way to program it into a nice, neat little package.

  A package that, in just a few short minutes, would be on its way toward every app store and then smartphone user on the planet. For a hefty fee, of course. But everyone would pay—because, truly, who could put a price on love?

  Tony could. He’d started his lowest package out at 7.99/mo.

  He leaned back in his chair again and drained his can, then crushed it in his hand. He grinned.

  Tony was going to be rich.

  *****

  FIVE MONTHS LATER

  “On the eve of unveiling the next project in the works for LoveMatches Inc—can you give us any clues as to what your latest sensational release will be?”

  A reporter stuck a microphone into his face. Her eyes were lit up with some mixture of excitement, desperation, and frustration. Tony had watched her fight her way up to him for a quote. He adjusted his bow tie and shifted uncomfortably in his bespoke slacks. Sometimes, you wanted something a little baggy, he thought. Outwardly, he flashed the world a brilliant grin.

  “Well, Wanda, I can’t tell you much,” said Tony, reading the reporter’s name off her lapel just in the nick of time. “I don’t want to spoil the events of tomorrow, not at all. But I can tell you that we here at LoveMatches, Inc., have decided to take a crack at one of the most lamentable aspects of modern love.” He shifted toward the microphone and deepened his voice. “Its impermanence.”

  The crowd oohed and ahed.

  Wanda leaned back into him, her eyebrow arched. “Tony—how on earth do you propose to do that?”

  Tony spread his arms before him, palms out, the suggestion of a smirk playing around the corners of his mouth. “It’s as simple as 1-2-3,” he said winningly, displaying his charming, ultra-whitened smile to its best benefit. The assembled crowd began to cheer. Tony nodded at the reporter and ducked back into the limo, off the red carpet, and he groaned.

  “Oh….my….” he said. “Just—wow.”

  His VP and best friend Danny Jackson slid into the car after him, having just blown a kiss at downtown New York just outside. “What’s wrong, Miran?” He grinned. “Red carpet too much for you?”

  “Maybe,” said Tony, giving his friend a look. “I tell you what, I can’t wait until after the new build drops tomorrow morning and we can be done with all of this publicity.”

  Danny chuckled. “You’re never done with publicity, my friend. Never. It goes with the high life—which you do want.”

  Tony was silent.

  “You do want the high life, don’t you?”

  “Yes, yes,” said Tony absentmindedly. Danny took a seat across from his friend and laughed. “You’re thinking about the build.”

  “Yep.”

  “Little too lat
e for that. It’s ready to go tomorrow.”

  “Oh, I know,” said Tony. “It’s just a lot.”

  “In a good way.”

  Tony nodded. It was a lot—in a good way. The application he'd spent much of his senior year working on had catapulted to the top of every app ranking system in the country—and, as of tomorrow, they’d be expanding worldwide. Countless dating couples had name-dropped his application, citing its funny use of emoticons and non-pushy push notifications as how they'd met. He'd gone from being a relative nobody to a hotshot billionaire almost overnight. People had been begging him for the privilege of funding his startup. Technically, Tony wouldn’t have had to do much more to be set up with success for life.

  But that wasn’t how Tony worked. He couldn’t not think about ways to improve.

  “There is one thing we’re missing,” said Tony.

  “What?” Danny fished around in the limo’s ice bucket for a cold beer. He threw one to his friend. Tony caught and opened it.

  “We don’t have a success story.”

  “Tony.” Danny laughed, and then took a long swig of beer. “All we have are success stories. Literally. Have you gone to our website recently? Like, the front end, not the version with programming jargon you’re always hunched over?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Tony diffidently. He waved a hand at Danny. “I know we have those. It’s just—we’re launching 2.0 tomorrow and we don’t have any success stories specific to it. And, as you know, it’s kind of a risky concept. It’d be really great if we had just one success story, you know?”

  “Well, you wanted it to be a surprise so you didn’t take anyone who didn’t work for the company into confidence—so that would have been a little hard to arrange,” Danny said, patiently. “And everyone who works for the company is already married.”

  “Right, I know,” said Tony absent-mindedly.

  Danny was staring at him. He took another drink, and then looked away.

  Tony noticed. “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No, that was a weird look. What are you thinking?”

  Danny bit his lip and glanced at Tony’s bottle. “Finish that beer and I’ll tell you.”

  For a few minutes of charged silence Danny waited as Tony finished his drink.

  “There,” said Tony, very impatiently, throwing his bottle into the recycling. “There, I’ve done it. Finished. I’m feeling a buzz. What did you want to run past me?”

  Danny took another sip of beer.

  “Well, first off, what I said just now wasn’t true, and you know it,” he said, patiently. “Not everyone at LoveMatches is married.”

  Tony ran through the mental roster of his employees. He frowned and shook his head at Danny. But before Danny replied, he looked at Tony very meaningfully.

  It dawned upon Tony. “Ah,” he said. “You mean me.”

  “Of course I mean you. What if you were to put your name in?”

  “Make myself a guinea pig?”

  “Yeah, but we wouldn’t frame it like that. We’d talk about how you had such confidence in the algorithm you composed that you had no fear of putting your love life in LoveMatches’ hands.”

  “But—“

  “But, nothing,” said Danny. “You’re a logical guy, a reasonable guy. You just cited a problem, and I gave you a really good answer. Take it or leave it.”

  Tony looked uncomfortable.

  Danny looked pleased.

  *****

  Elsewhere in Manhattan, Diana Rohr was raising a toast in a crowded bar with four other friends, all of whom were wearing matching glittery sashes. The woman immediately to Diana’s left was wearing a small crown.

  “To Joy,” one of them said.

  “To Joy,” said the rest. Diana gulped down her shot and then patted the woman next to her—one Joy Mendelssohn—on the back.

  “So happy for you, Joy,” she said. “Andrew’s the best guy. And you’re going to have the best wedding.”

  “Well, duh,” said one of the women, across the table from Joy and Diana. “She’s got the best bridal party ever.”

  “To the bridal party,” said Diana, smiling.

  Joy hugged her friend, and they all grinned and threw back another shot. The five ladies drank and toasted for hours, reminiscing about Joy, hearing again the story of how Joy met Andrew, and how Andrew had proposed.

  It was all very exciting, Diana mused, as she stepped out of her cab and unlocked the door of her third-floor walk-up. She’d known Joy for almost a decade. Joy had thought that there was no chance that she would ever get married; that she was one of those destined to grow old with cats and wine.

  But then Joy had met Andrew, and everything changed. Diana had tried to be so happy for Joy, but part of her got a little more dejected every time Joy talked about her wedding. They were going to be spinsters together—best friends til the end—and now Joy was going to be all happy with a huge family, and Diana was just going to be that really sad, random aunt who barged in on the holidays.

  Diana shook her head. She didn’t want to think about that now.

  She was tipsy and she was sad. She bundled herself up in blankets and tossed herself onto her bed, pulled out her phone, and started going through all of the usual dating apps. It was always a depressing activity of futility. There always seemed to be very attractive people just to her right and left who were happily matching up and going about their business together, riding off into the sunset—but it was never her.

  Diana got up and poured herself a glass of champagne—leftover from the engagement announcement party she'd hosted for Joy last week—and slumped on her couch to stare at her phone.

  After she'd gone through the usual dating apps—to no avail—she clicked onto Facebook and scrolled through her newsfeed. After a moment, she sat up. There was an ad for a new dating app—LoveMatches—that she'd never seen before. She was about to scroll past, but something about this ad stopped her. Instead of the usual giggling couple riding about on their bikes, this ad featured a series of equations. “Our algorithm will pair you with your perfect mate,” it said. “Love’s as easy as one, two, three!”

  Diana was at best highly skeptical of this claim. Wasn’t that what all dating apps professed to do, to some degree?

  She took a sip of champagne and found herself clicking through to the App Store and downloading the application. She filled out the brief questionnaire, linked it to her Facebook account, and was ultimately surprised at how quickly the entire thing went. “It’s just a one minute setup!” turned out to be fairly accurate. After she completed the profile setup, Diana waited to see the customary carousel of middlingly attractive gentlemen the typical application offered her. She was curious to see if she would recognize any of the accounts.

  Instead, the app took her to a screen. “Congratulations,” it said. “You’ve been selected to be among the first users to enjoy the beta features of LoveMatches 2.0.”

  Diana read this and dismissed it. This meant nothing to her.

  “Thank you for downloading LoveMatches,” said the resulting screen. “We will be in touch with your result within twenty-four hours.”

  This left Diana nonplussed. That’s it? Was there nothing else for her to do?

  She put her phone down and picked up her remote. She flicked through various movies for an hour until she went to bed.

  *****

  The next morning, Tony drove to the launch party for LoveMatches 2.0 feeling considerably more nervous than he did on a typical Saturday morning. He felt as if he was standing on the edge of a precipice or a cliff. He wondered if he was about to fall to his death or—somehow—learn how to fly.

  He pulled into the parking spot with his name painted on it and grabbed his backpack before heading into the small office space which he'd rented for his startup. Even though he was flowing with money, he hadn’t upgraded his office space yet—a surprise to most people who worked with h
im. He supposed that this was some leftover sense of economy from his school days, days when often he only had a dollar a day with which to eat. Now things were very different, of course—he’d thrown the party last night, after all, and had personally invited the 200 glitterati and provided the caviar and champagne with which all had toasted his success.

  Perhaps if LoveMatches 2.0 is a success, he thought grimly. Perhaps then he’d rent a skyscraper, or something. In the meantime, this 3rd floor loft was more than enough.

  He took the stairs up to the small dingy conference room. Danny was already there, smiling encouragingly. Tony had texted him his plans before he'd left this morning. Danny was a huge fan. Of course, it had been Danny’s idea—but, to his credit, he wasn’t lording it over Tony. At least, not right now. Tony was sure that it would come up some night, at some party, when Danny was trying to show off. But for now…

  Tony laid his briefcase on the table and smiled at the members of his assembled board.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he murmured briefly.

  “Tony,” said several voices back to him.

  Technically all he had to do at this meeting was simply pull up the interface for LoveMatches 2.0 and officially launch it to the public. The board was merely assembled for ceremonial purposes—and legal reasons, of course. However, no one was expecting anything above and beyond the normal. Tony was pretty sure that Danny had champagne chilling just outside the room.

  “I’d like to propose something to you guys,” said Tony. “We’re launching today—obviously. But I think we can do more. Danny and I were talking last night.” He nodded to his friend, and the rest of the room groaned.

  “No, no, it’s something good—I think,” said Tony. “We were talking about how this second tier of LoveMatches represents a rather risky venture. It may be hard to get people to sign up for it, given how much of a commitment we’re aiming for.”

  “Getting people to marry each other based off an app? I’d say,” said one of the women in the room.

  “He’s got the algorithm, the success is going to be there,” argued Danny. “Go on, Tony.”