I made a face at him and tightened my grip on my folder. “I would never. This thing is my life. I never let it out of my sight.”
Dex scrunched up his nose. “You don’t back anything up on an external hard drive? Or the cloud? Seriously, what if you actually did lose that thing?”
“Shh, don’t even speak that into the universe. I like writing things down with a pen. And clearly, I can’t trust computers. Look what’s happening with your dates. Paper doesn’t glitch.”
“I don’t know what kind of network you’re running, but I’m sure I could get to the bottom of it if you wanna let me under the hood.”
We made eye contact then, and the look of horror in his eyes as his cheeks flushed pink was not my imagination. He looked away, and I decided not to laugh out loud at the way his simple statement had sounded like an innuendo. Well, an innuendo for a computer guy. Maybe nobody else would have taken it that way, but either way, I was a professional. Snort-laughing at my client wasn’t appropriate, even if I did find him adorable.
“We have an IT department,” I said seriously, covering my lips with my hand to disguise my smile. “But thank you.”
He cleared his throat. “Any time. Uh, corn dog or turkey leg for lunch?”
“Fried pickles.”
“Ew.” He wrinkled his nose. “Really?”
“Don’t knock ’em till you’ve tried ’em.”
He rolled his eyes. “Amy, I’m thirty-five years old. I’ve tried fried pickles.”
“Well, then, don’t knock ’em ’cause I like ’em.”
“Fair,” he said, holding his hand out toward the line at the food truck. “After you.”
We stepped into the line, and I found myself looking over my shoulder several times to make sure no one I knew was there. My next clients weren’t supposed to arrive this early, so as long as one of them didn’t pull a Dex, I should be safe to be here with him. At least for a little while.
A thought occurred to me then, so I looked up at him and shaded my eyes from the sun. “Why do you want to be called Dex instead of Dexter?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
I shrugged. “Not to me. Dexter isn’t a bad name.”
“It’s kind of a dorky name.”
“Dex, there’s nothing about you that’s dorky from where I’m standing.” The words slipped easily from my lips, and I quickly told myself that I’d say them to any client. Part of my job was an honest assessment of their appearance, and then helping them improve on it if needed. This was especially true for the VIPs, in my experience. But Dex didn’t need any help in the looks department.
He tilted his head at me like he wanted to say something, and a hint of a smile played on his lips. Then he shrugged and looked away. “Don’t forget, I didn’t always look like this. I went by Dexter in high school because I didn’t really have a choice. People don’t tend to call you by the name you want. They call you whatever fits. I didn’t even have a bad nickname to go with it. The very fact that my name was Dexter was a good enough dig at the pizza-faced mathlete.”
I swallowed. “Well, I’m sure you could get away with being called whatever you want at this point. But I see why it would bug you.”
“I’m just not that guy anymore. People change.” He bumped me with his shoulder. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“What kind of high school experience did you have?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know.” I narrowed my eyes at him, and then my stomach clenched painfully when he did it right back to me.
“I bet you were a cheerleader.”
He was right. “Why?”
“Isn’t that kind of what you do now? Standing on the sidelines of these dates and cheering people on?”
“Yeah, okay. You got me there. I was a cheerleader. And a Girl Scout.”
“Ah,” he said as we stepped forward in the line, “a rule follower. I can see that, too.”
“Not unlike yourself.”
“Right, except I wouldn’t have been caught dead in Boy Scouts.”
“No?”
He shuddered. “Too outdoorsy.”
“You’re a Marine,” I cried, swatting him on the arm.
“Yeah, but, I’m Gunnery Sergeant Computer Crimes Guy, remember? I’m not a foxhole-dwelling grunt. The only wilderness I want to hang out in is The Witcher. I’m the Lord of the Wood.”
“You know, you lose me as soon as you pull out the video game talk. It’s like another language.”
“Someday I’ll have to teach it to you.”
Did he really mean for that to sound so inviting? I mean, honestly, when have I ever wanted a man to talk Xbox-y to me?
He placed his hand on the small of my back to guide me forward in the line, then dropped it quickly as he felt me stiffen. I hadn’t meant to react so strongly to his touch, but it surprised me how much I’d liked it, even as brief as the contact was. Between that and his offer to show me the virtual playground where he liked to spend his time, I felt myself losing grip on what I was supposed to be doing and slipping deeper into this crush on him.
We got our food from the truck—each paying for our own, of course—then chose a picnic table in the shade to eat. It seemed like in the ten minutes since I’d agreed to share a meal with Dex while I waited for my next clients to show up, I’d regretted it no less than ten times. In my seven years as a matchmaker for First Comes Love, I’d never spent time with a client outside of an official meeting. Why I was doing it now was completely beyond me.
“So,” Dex said, putting down the twenty-pound turkey leg and wiping his hands on his napkin, “tell me about the woman I almost went on a date with today. You know, the one you actually thought would be a good match for me.”
I finished the bite of pickle I’d just taken and wiped my lips with my napkin. “Well, her name is Erin. I’ll definitely save her for your next date. I think you’ll really click well with her. She works remotely in software development, so she’s able to work from anywhere she has an internet connection. Or, I guess, anywhere she has a phone signal, since she could always use her hotspot.”
Dex shrugged. “Depends on how sensitive the data is she’s working on. She might need something more secure. Most encryption tactics don’t work with hotspots.”
“Right.” I pursed my lips to keep from chuckling. “Also, she loves to give back and volunteer her time for various local organizations. And she wants children, which I imagine was the thing that ended your date with Jordan.”
“Yep.” He sank his teeth into the turkey leg. The roasted gam was so enormous, it blocked the entire bottom half of his face from view. As his eyes met mine, they were crinkled in the corners, like he was smiling behind the messy mouthful he’d just taken. “How did you know?”
“I knew it would be a deal breaker if it came up.” I took a sip from my water bottle, careful not to let the condensation drip down the front of my dress. “Jordan is vehemently against having kids. One mention of settling down from you probably sent her running. Am I right?”
“You are.”
“She’ll find her match eventually. Plenty of guys out there who don’t want kids.”
He wiped his hands on his napkin. “I guess I didn’t realize how important it was to me to have a family until I noticed how opposed to it she was. I kind of thought my mom was the driving force behind that one. But I don’t know, I said something about giving my old Game Boy to my kid and it kind of hit me in the feels. You know?”
“Did you and Harumi plan to have kids?” I asked. His eyes flashed up to mine and I could see the hurt in them. It was old, sure. But it was there.
In my profession, these were important questions. Knowing a client’s dating history wasn’t a matter of being nosy. Past relationship baggage was the foundation that every new relationship sat on. It was sometimes hard for them to tell me about—I wasn’t their therapist, after all—but it was a necessary evil when someone else was trying to find their happil
y ever after.
When he still hadn’t answered me after a moment, I tilted my head and smiled slightly. It might be necessary, but I still felt for him if it was rough to spill. “Sorry if that struck a nerve.”
He took his time chewing his food, then wiped his hands before drinking from his water bottle. Finally, he cleared his throat. “Well, like we said, this is a business meeting. And we’ve already talked about her once, so it’s fine.”
“Good,” I said, something wistful swirling within me as I watched him.
I’d literally witnessed him process and compartmentalize his emotions and then make a conscious decision to get back to business. It was fascinating. He’d had deep lines between his brows, and his Adam’s apple bobbed as he worked through his past hurt, then his eyes changed with determination, and he’d put the emotions away again. Was his ability to do that a product of years in the military or his analytical mind? Both, most likely. It struck me that I didn’t need to go that far down the rabbit hole in order to find a match for Dex. So why was I so curious? Why did I want to fall down the proverbial rabbit hole and get lost discovering everything there was to know about this man when I usually thrived on efficiency and succinctness with my clients?
“And yes,” he continued, “we planned to have a family. She was very traditional. She wanted to stay home and raise the kids while I worked. And she was homeschooled by her mom, so she wanted to homeschool her kids, too.”
“How did you feel about that?”
He shrugged. “I felt great about it. Because she did. If she wanted the opposite—that is, if she wanted to work full-time and put the kids in public school—I would have been great with that, too. I was just happy to be with her. Besides, she was my first … well, everything. So, I would have been happy if she told me she wanted to move the kids to Mars.”
My heart ached for him. He was so genuine and honest. He didn’t hold anything back for appearance’s sake—didn’t care about coming off cool or hard. He was exactly who he was, and he wasn’t afraid to be himself. I admired that. Being a matchmaker meant having a front-row seat to the way people acted while looking for a partner. There were singles who were so desperate for love that they were willing to change everything about themselves. A lesser man would have leaned into Ania’s questions about his money just to have a shot with her. He could have lied to Jordan about whether or not he wanted kids just to see if they could make it work.
The importance of giving Dex better matches for his future dates had never been more imperative. He deserved it. Plus of course, I had two wasted dates on my record as far as the competition went. This whole situation was not ideal.
“Dex, you have to level with me.”
“About what?”
“Why are you really single?”
He snickered. “I already answered this one.”
“I just don’t get it. Walk me through it. You didn’t date in high school because you had the whole nerdy thing going. Zelda and all that.”
“Uh-huh,” he confirmed, chewing another bite of food.
“And then there was Harumi, your first and only love with a three-dimensional woman.”
He smirked and nodded.
“And then you didn’t even try to find love for like a decade?”
“It didn’t work out last time,” he said, simply. “Why bother?”
I rolled my eyes. “Really?”
“What?”
“It didn’t work out so you just give up? You don’t strike me as the type to give up.”
He snorted. “By my calculations, the effort wasn’t worth the reward. I like my life as it is. Didn’t want to rock the boat.”
I couldn’t help but get lost in his gaze for a moment, then shook my head. “Not every relationship ends poorly.”
“Have you ever had one that didn’t?”
My brow furrowed. “Dexter Harrington. What’s the first rule of Amy Club?”
“We don’t talk about Amy.”
“Right.”
The curiosity was plain on his face, like I was a puzzle he wanted to solve. I noticed this intensity in his gaze more and more often, and it did the most remarkable things to my insides. What woman wouldn’t get a little hot and bothered when a man looked at her like this? Like she was the most interesting thing he’d ever seen, and he wanted nothing more than to lap up the air of mystery we all wished we adequately exuded. If this were any other circumstance, if I weren’t his matchmaker and he weren’t my client, I figured I could spend the rest of my life just sitting there with my chin in my hand, basking in the glow of his curiosity.
But then his eyes softened like he wouldn’t push the subject since I didn’t want to talk about it, and it was like letting the air out of the swoony balloon we’d been floating on. He tossed his napkin on his plate and pushed it to the side, finished with his meal. “Well, now you know why I didn’t try again.”
“Until now.”
“Until now,” he confirmed.
I leaned forward on the picnic table. “I know you’re only here because your mother bought the VIP package with First Comes Love. But let me ask you this: do you really believe you’ll find love?”
He paused, considering me—and my question—before he answered. Uncomfortable under his steady gaze after the thoughts I’d been having, I was in desperate need of wetting my whistle, so I reached for my water bottle. I’d been unable to drag my eyes away from his and had been reaching blindly, so it took me by surprise when I knocked it over. The lid was on, thank goodness, but we both reflexively grabbed for the bottle before it rolled off the table.
My hand clasped it first, and then his covered mine, holding it there. A shock ran through me when his skin connected with mine. His large hand wasn’t warm or cold, it wasn’t that I registered its temperature or even its texture. It was like it was made of electrical currents and I was being jolted alive. Goose bumps ran up my arm, and the air between us all but crackled and burned.
He looked down at his hand still holding mine and that perfect mouth sort of quirked up, like he was surprised about something. And then he let go. “Uh, yeah, I think I might.”
13
Dex
I sat in the wicker chair at my mother’s country club, fidgeting with the white cloth napkin on my lap, my thoughts on Amy. Our lips had been so close that night at the steakhouse when I’d leaned in to tell her about the napkin thing. What would she have done if I’d had enough game to kiss her? And was that even a thing? Were there really guys outside of action movies who would just grab a girl by the face and plant one on her when she least expected it?
I could be wrong, but I felt like acting like that in real life was a good way to get slapped. Or, maybe, guys with game were really good at figuring out which girls would slap them and which girls actually liked them enough to kiss them back. Which one was Amy? I’d probably never know. I just wasn’t that guy.
“Are you listening to me, dear?” my mom asked.
I looked up from my napkin and shifted in my seat. “Nope, sorry.”
She chuckled. “You’re just like your father. Always so deep in thought. What were you thinking about?”
“My matchmaker,” I said without thinking.
“Ah, I’ve been biting my tongue to keep from asking you for an update on how it’s going.”
I narrowed my eyes at her, holding back a laugh of my own. “Mother, I don’t think you know how to bite your tongue. You just talk about other stuff until you can swing the conversation around to where you want it.”
With a wink, she popped a bite of apple from her Waldorf salad into her mouth and chewed without speaking. That was the thing about my mother. She knew she was a woman who always got what she wanted. She always had been. All she had to do was strategically arrange the people around her so it looked like her whole life naturally worked out exactly how she wanted it to. But in reality, everything had been meticulously orchestrated.
She often used her powers for good, lik
e getting donors to give buckets of money to the charities she represented or convincing hotels to give her an incredible discount to hold her latest benefit in their ballrooms. She was a titan in the glamorous world of fundraising. I tried to steer clear of that world, but after my father died, I showed up for her more and more because I knew it made her happy.
My father, on the other hand, was just like me. In high school, his version of making me feel better about the bullying was to tell me that he’d been there. He’d been a mathlete. He’d been in the chess club. He’d been pushed into more lockers than he could count, and it actually surprised him to learn that swirlies could be passed down from generation to generation. I know my dad wanted to comfort me by telling me about his crappy high school experience, but instead, it made me feel stuck in a geek loop, hopeless that I’d ever be free of it.
In fact, my entire history with my mom meddling in my love life was also a long-standing tradition. My nerdy grandpa was roped into escorting a debutante he’d never met to some society event in 1950. They wound up married with three kids. My nerdy dad was paraded around in front of the single daughters of his mom’s friends, and one of them happened to be my mom, who thought his glasses were cute. They got married two years later and had me.
Long story short, I came from a long line of nerdy dudes and meddling women, and that’s how I wound up at First Comes Love.
“So, are you going to tell me how the dates are going, or do I need to keep chatting about Charlotte Williams and her terrible golf swing until your ears bleed?”
I laughed outright at this. Was that what she’d been prattling on about? Glad I missed it. “Okay. Fine. It’s not going too well.”
“Oh?”
“My first date was a total gold digger.”
She tilted her head from side to side. “Did she have any other admirable qualities? It’s not always a bad thing for a woman to want to marry up.”
“This wasn’t a simple case of marrying above her station,” I joked. “The woman had zero class. She point-blank asked how much my watch cost and for the exact dollar amount of my net worth.”
A Match for the Marine: A Sweet Romantic Comedy (First Comes Love Book 1) Page 8