by Anna Zaires
I’d sooner date a three-hundred-pound baldie who’s kind to animals and old ladies than a supermodel-perfect asshole with a giant cock.
It takes me close to an hour to get through most of the messages. It’s when I’m in the home stretch—and firmly convinced I will never, ever use a dating app again—that I see it.
A simple, attachment-free email from a cartoon avatar of a round-faced man with a shy smile.
Intrigued, I click on the message, sent only three days ago.
Hi, Emma, it reads. I’m sure you get this a lot, but I think you’re really cute, and I love the cats in your photo. I myself have two Persians. They’re fat and horribly spoiled, but I love them and I’m convinced that despite scratching up all my furniture, they love me back. Other than spending time with them, my hobbies include discovering quirky coffee shops in Brooklyn, reading (historical fiction, mostly), and rollerblading in the park. Oh, and I work in a bookstore while studying to be a veterinarian. Do you think you’d want to meet up for coffee or dinner one of these days? I know a nice little place in Park Slope. Please let me know if that’s something you’d be interested in.
Thank you,
Mark
My pulse racing in excitement, I read the letter again, then go to his profile. There are two actual pictures of Mark there, each showing a guy who appears to be exactly my type. Though the pictures are blurry, they resemble his cartoon avatar quite a bit. His rounded face looks kind, his crooked smile is both shy and self-deprecating, and in one picture, he’s wearing glasses that give him a pleasantly intellectual vibe. According to the profile, he’s twenty-seven, has brown hair and blue eyes, and lives in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.
He’s so perfect I could’ve ordered him off my secret wish list.
Grinning, I reply that I’d love to meet up with him, then jump off the bed and do a happy booty dance. My hair tumbles in frizzy red curls all over my face, and my cats look at me like I’m crazy, but I don’t care.
Kendall can shove her cat-lady labels up her skinny little ass.
I have an actual date.
2
Marcus
“Yes, that’s right,” I say impatiently. “I want her to be neat and well-groomed at all times. She has to have a sense of style; it’s very important. A brunette would be best, but a blonde would work too, as long as her hairstyle is conservative. She can’t look like she just stepped out of Playboy, understand?”
“Yes, of course, Mr. Carelli.” The stylish brunette in front of me crosses her long legs and gives me a polite smile. Victoria Longwood-Thierry, matchmaker for the Wall Street’s elite, is exactly what I have in mind for my future wife, except she’s in her fifties and married with three children. “What about hobbies and interests?” she asks in her carefully modulated voice. “What would you like her to be into?”
“Something intellectual,” I say. “I want to be able to talk to her outside the bedroom.”
“Of course.” Victoria makes a note on her notepad. “How about her profession?”
“That doesn’t really matter to me. She can be a lawyer or a doctor or spend all her time doing charity work for orphans in Haiti—it’s all the same as far as I’m concerned. Once we marry, she can either stay home with the kids or continue her career. I’m comfortable with either option.”
“That’s very enlightened of you.” Victoria’s expression is unchanged, but I get a feeling she’s secretly laughing at me. “How do you feel about pets? Do you prefer cats or dogs?”
“Neither. I don’t like having animals indoors.”
Victoria makes another note before asking, “What about her height? Do you have a preference?”
“Tall,” I say immediately. “Or at least above average.” I’m six-foot-three, and short women look like children to me.
“Okay, good.” Victoria jots it down. “How about body type? Athletic or slender, I would assume?”
I nod tersely. “Yes. I’m into fitness, and I want her to be in good shape so she can keep up with me.” Frowning, I glance at my Patek Philippe watch and see that I have only a half hour before the market opens. Turning my attention back to Victoria, I say, “Basically, I want a smart, elegant, stylish woman who takes care of herself.”
“Got it. You won’t be disappointed, I promise.”
I’m skeptical, but I keep a poker face as she gets up and politely ushers me out of her office. She promises to contact me within a couple of days, shakes my hand, and heads back in, leaving behind a cloud of expensive perfume. It’s not too strong—Victoria Longwood-Thierry would never be so tacky as to wear strong perfume—but I still sneeze as I head to the elevator.
I’ll have to add this to the list: the wife candidate can’t wear perfume, period.
By the time I get to my Park Avenue building from Victoria’s West Village office, my programmers and traders are glued to their screens. Only a few of them notice as I make my way to my corner office. I’d normally stop by their desks to ask them about their weekend and get an update on our positions, but the market is already open, and I can’t distract them.
With ninety-two billion of my investors’ money at stake, there is no room for error.
My office is huge and has a great view of the skyscrapers on Park Avenue, but I don’t stop to appreciate it. Once, this office felt like the pinnacle of achievement for a scrappy kid from Staten Island, but now I’m hungry for more. Success is my drug, and with each hit, I need a bigger dose to get the buzz. It’s not about the money anymore—in addition to my personal stake in the fund, I have a couple of billion stashed away in real estate and other passive investments—it’s about knowing that I can do it, that I can succeed where others have failed. The recent market volatility has resulted in record losses for hedge funds and mutual funds alike, but Carelli Capital Management is up in the high teens, outperforming the market by over forty percent. Foundations, pension funds, wealthy individuals—they’re all tripping over each other in a rush to invest with me, and I still want more.
I want it all, including a wife who’d fit the life I’ve worked so hard to build.
On the surface, it should be easy. At thirty-five, I have enough money to keep the female population of Manhattan in Louis Vuitton bags and Louboutin shoes for the rest of their lives, I’m not bad-looking, and I work out daily to stay in shape. The latter I do more for health than vanity, but women seem to appreciate the results. I can pick up any woman in a club in a matter of minutes, but none of them are what I want.
I want high class. I want elegance.
I want a woman who’s the complete opposite of the one who raised me—hence, Victoria Longwood-Thierry and her old-money connections.
It was my friend Ashton who pointed me in her direction. “You know the kind of woman you want isn’t going to be hanging out at a bar, right?” he said when, after a couple of beers, I mentioned my specifications for a wife. “You’re talking about American aristocracy here, Mayflower and all that shit. If you’re serious about tapping high-end pussy, you need to talk to my aunt’s friend. She’s a professional matchmaker working with politicians and rich Wall Street dudes like you. She’ll find you exactly what you need.”
I laughed and changed the conversation, but the germ of the idea had been planted, and the more I investigated Ashton’s aunt’s friend, the more intrigued I became. It turns out Victoria had matched at least two hedge fund managers I know—one with an Olympic gymnast, the other with a Princeton biologist who once moonlighted as a model. Upon further digging, I learned that both marriages are going strong so far, and that, more than anything, convinced me to give the matchmaker a shot.
I intend to be as successful in my personal life as I have been in business, and having the right kind of wife is a big part of that.
Sitting down at my gleaming ebony wood desk, I turn on my Bloomberg monitor and pick up a stack of research reports. I have Victoria on the case, so I put the wife hunt out of my mind and focus on what really matters: my work and
making my clients money.
It’s already eight p.m. when my phone buzzes with an incoming message. Rubbing my eyes, I look away from my computer screen and see that it’s a text from Victoria.
I have the perfect candidate for you, the text says. She can meet you at Sweet Rush Café in Park Slope tomorrow at 6 p.m. If that works for you, I will email you more details. Emmeline lives in Boston and is only in town for a couple of days.
I frown at my phone. Six o’clock? I almost never leave the office that early on a Tuesday. And Boston? How am I supposed to get to know this Emmeline if she doesn’t live in New York?
I start texting Victoria that I can’t make it, but stop at the last moment. This is what I wanted: for Victoria to introduce me to a woman I would never meet on my own. Given the matchmaker’s track record, I can spare one evening to see if there’s anything worth pursuing there.
Before I can change my mind, I fire off a quick text to Victoria agreeing to the date, and turn my attention back to my computer screen.
If I’m leaving the office early tomorrow, I have to work a few more hours tonight.
3
Emma
I’m all but bouncing with excitement as I approach Sweet Rush Café, where I’m supposed to meet Mark for dinner. This is the craziest thing I’ve done in a while. Between my evening shift at the bookstore and his class schedule, we haven’t had a chance to do more than exchange a few text messages, so all I have to go on are those couple of blurry pictures. Still, I have a good feeling about this.
I feel like Mark and I might really connect.
I’m a few minutes early, so I stop by the door and take a moment to brush cat hair off my woolen coat. The coat is beige, which is better than black, but white hair is visible on anything that’s not pure white. I figure Mark won’t mind too much—he knows how much Persians shed—but I still want to look presentable for our first date. It took me about an hour, but I got my curls to semi-behave, and I’m even wearing a little makeup—something that happens with the frequency of a tsunami in a lake.
Taking a deep breath, I enter the café and look around to see if Mark might already be there.
The place is small and cozy, with booth-style seats arranged in a semicircle around a coffee bar. The smell of roasted coffee beans and baked goods is mouthwatering, making my stomach rumble with hunger. I was planning to stick to coffee only, but I decide to get a croissant too; my budget should stretch to that.
Only a few of the booths are occupied, likely because it’s a Tuesday. I scan them, looking for anyone who could be Mark, and notice a man sitting by himself at the farthest table. He’s facing away from me, so all I can see is the back of his head, but his hair is short and dark brown.
It could be him.
Gathering my courage, I approach the booth. “Excuse me,” I say. “Are you Mark?”
The man turns to face me, and my pulse shoots into the stratosphere.
The person in front of me is nothing like the pictures on the app. His hair is brown, and his eyes are blue, but that’s the only similarity. There’s nothing rounded and shy about the man’s hard features. From the steely jaw to the hawk-like nose, his face is boldly masculine, stamped with a self-assurance that borders on arrogance. A hint of five o’clock shadow darkens his lean cheeks, making his high cheekbones stand out even more, and his eyebrows are thick dark slashes above his piercingly pale eyes. Even sitting behind the table, he looks tall and powerfully built. His shoulders are a mile wide in his sharply tailored suit, and his hands are twice the size of my own.
There’s no way this is Mark from the app, unless he’s put in some serious gym time since those pictures were taken. Is it possible? Could a person change so much? He didn’t indicate his height in the profile, but I’d assumed the omission meant he was vertically challenged, like me.
The man I’m looking at is not challenged in any way, and he’s certainly not wearing glasses.
“I’m… I’m Emma,” I stutter as the man continues staring at me, his face hard and inscrutable. I’m almost certain I have the wrong guy, but I still force myself to ask, “Are you Mark, by any chance?”
“I prefer to be called Marcus,” he shocks me by answering. His voice is a deep masculine rumble that tugs at something primitively female inside me. My heart beats even faster, and my palms begin to sweat as he rises to his feet and says bluntly, “You’re not what I expected.”
“Me?” What the hell? A surge of anger crowds out all other emotions as I gape at the rude giant in front of me. The asshole is so tall I have to crane my neck to look up at him. “What about you? You look nothing like your pictures!”
“I guess we’ve both been misled,” he says, his jaw tight. Before I can respond, he gestures toward the booth. “You might as well sit down and have a meal with me, Emmeline. I didn’t come all the way here for nothing.”
“It’s Emma,” I correct, fuming. “And no, thank you. I’ll just be on my way.”
His nostrils flare, and he steps to the right to block my path. “Sit down, Emma.” He makes my name sound like an insult. “I’ll have a talk with Victoria, but for now, I don’t see why we can’t share a meal like two civilized adults.”
The tips of my ears burn with fury, but I slide into the booth rather than make a scene. My grandmother instilled politeness in me from an early age, and even as an adult living on my own, I find it hard to go against her teachings.
She wouldn’t approve of me kneeing this jerk in the balls and telling him to fuck off.
“Thank you,” he says, sliding into the seat across from me. His eyes glint icy blue as he picks up the menu. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“I don’t know, Marcus,” I say, putting special emphasis on the formal name. “I’ve only been around you for two minutes, and I’m already feeling homicidal.” I deliver the insult with a ladylike, Grandma-approved smile, and dumping my purse in the corner of my booth seat, I pick up the menu without bothering to take off my coat.
The sooner we eat, the sooner I can get out of here.
A deep chuckle startles me into looking up. To my shock, the jerk is grinning, his teeth flashing white in his lightly bronzed face. No freckles for him, I note with jealousy; his skin is perfectly even-toned, without so much as an extra mole on his cheek. He’s not classically handsome—his features are too bold to be described that way—but he’s shockingly good-looking, in a potent, purely masculine way.
To my dismay, a curl of heat licks at my core, making my inner muscles clench.
No. No way. This asshole is not turning me on. I can barely stand to sit across the table from him.
Gritting my teeth, I look down at my menu, noting with relief that the prices in this place are actually reasonable. I always insist on paying for my own food on dates, and now that I’ve met Mark—excuse me, Marcus—I wouldn’t put it past him to drag me to some ritzy place where a glass of tap water costs more than a shot of Patrón. How could I have been so wrong about the guy? Clearly, he’d lied about working in a bookstore and being a student. To what end, I don’t know, but everything about the man in front of me screams wealth and power. His pinstriped suit hugs his broad-shouldered frame like it was tailor-made for him, his blue shirt is crisply starched, and I’m pretty sure his subtly checkered tie is some designer brand that makes Chanel seem like a Walmart label.
As all of these details register, a new suspicion occurs to me. Could someone be playing a joke on me? Kendall, perhaps? Or Janie? They both know my taste in guys. Maybe one of them decided to lure me on a date this way—though why they’d set me up with him, and he’d agree to it, is a huge mystery.
Frowning, I look up from the menu and study the man in front of me. He’s stopped grinning and is perusing the menu, his forehead creased in a frown that makes him look older than the twenty-seven years listed on his profile.
That part must’ve also been a lie.
My anger intensifies. “So, Marcus, why did you write to me?” Droppin
g the menu on the table, I glare at him. “Do you even own cats?”
He looks up, his frown deepening. “Cats? No, of course not.”
The derision in his tone makes me want to forget all about Grandma’s disapproval and slap him straight across his lean, hard face. “Is this some kind of a prank for you? Who put you up to this?”
“Excuse me?” His thick eyebrows rise in an arrogant arch.
“Oh, stop playing innocent. You lied in your message to me, and you have the gall to say I’m not what you expected?” I can practically feel the steam coming out of my ears. “You messaged me, and I was entirely truthful on my profile. How old are you? Thirty-two? Thirty-three?”
“I’m thirty-five,” he says slowly, his frown returning. “Emma, what are you talking—”
“That’s it.” Grabbing my purse by one strap, I slide out of the booth and jump to my feet. Grandma’s teachings or not, I’m not going to have a meal with a jerk who’s admitted to deceiving me. I have no idea what would make a guy like that want to toy with me, but I’m not going to be the butt of some joke.
“Enjoy your meal,” I snarl, spinning around, and stride to the exit before he can block my way again.
I’m in such a rush to leave I almost knock over a tall, slender brunette approaching the café and the short, pudgy guy following her.
4
Marcus
Gripping the edge of the table, I watch the little redhead fly out of the restaurant, her curvy ass swaying from side to side. Even in the shapeless woolen coat, her small, lush figure is unmistakably feminine… and bizarrely sexy. I’ve never particularly liked curvy women, but the moment Emma came up to me, my hormones shot into overdrive and my cock turned rock hard.