by Pippa Grant
These women lift each other up all on their own, and they help each other feel deserving all on their own too.
I know I could do the same for each of them, but this way, they get extra friends, and they don’t have to worry I’m only telling them what they want to hear because they’re paying me.
In theory.
I don’t actually see payment until I make a match.
Possibly I should rethink that, but it’s the fee structure that lets me sleep at night.
Phoebe’s phone alarm goes off shortly after two. “Gah. Bridesmaid dress fitting.”
Maren, Alina, and Eugenie groan.
“Prospects for a date?” Maren asks her.
They all look at me.
I smile brightly like I have as much confidence in me as they do. “Want me to find you a good-enough date?”
And that’s when it hits me.
I know what I need to do to survive going back to Richmond.
I need to take a super hot, athletic, rich date.
There’s not much time between our late lunch and my next appointment, but when the ladies leave, I hop in my car and point it toward a house that is not my own.
It’s a lovely Victorian in a private neighborhood with large mansions on huge lots, populated with smart, successful, occasionally famous residents who donate more money to charity every month than I usually see in a year.
In other words, it’s not a neighborhood where I fit in.
But it’s where Kami lives, and she’s my favorite cousin in the entire universe, and she’d still be my favorite cousin even if we weren’t related.
There are three things you need to know about Kami.
One, she’s this adorable, brown-haired, brown-eyed, kind, sweet, smart, petite-ish, big-hearted animal lover.
Two, she’s been in love with Nick Murphy, her best friend’s older brother, basically since high school, and she pulled a total baller move last year that had him crawling on his hands and knees begging her to love him for like a month, which is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.
And three, she has the cutest baby on the entire planet.
Naturally.
Despite Nick being the baby’s daddy.
I pull my car to a stop in front of the house that Nick bought her as his final please take me back gesture, which I can’t be mad at him for, since the house came with room for their pet cow-dog, and he got lucky in that Kami’s always wanted to live in a Victorian mansion and that was the kind of house for sale when he needed a few acres for farm animals too.
Long story.
There’s an Escalade parked in the driveway, which means Ares Berger is probably here as well, but it’s not a big deal. Ares doesn’t talk, so he won’t repeat anything he’s about to overhear.
And it’s time for me to spill my guts to Kami.
Some of them, anyway.
I bang on the front door, hear a subtle moooo in the backyard, and take that as the cow-dog giving me permission to go in.
And would you look at that?
The door’s unlocked.
“Kami?” I whisper-shriek, in case the baby’s sleeping.
“Muffy?” comes my cousin’s louder reply from the living room.
I bolt for the sound of her voice. “Kami! Kami, I need Nick.”
She’s still in her scrubs from work—she’s a vet, naturally—as she rises from the rocking chair, baby cradled in her arms, like she just finished feeding him. “You…need Nick?”
It’s a strange request. I get it. If I had a leaky toilet or I needed something off a high shelf, Nick wouldn’t be my first choice. Ever.
Not because he’s not tall or capable—he is—but I have a stepladder. Also, never trust Nick Murphy around a toilet. It’s a rule.
Which means I wouldn’t trust Nick for other home repairs either. Or most anything else.
Nick, the dark-haired, green-eyed, prank-pulling goaltender for the Thrusters, pokes his head in from the dining room. He’s eyeing me like I’m an alien being who shouldn’t be trusted around his wife and baby, which is probably fair. He nods, still wary. “Muffy.”
“I need a fake date to a thing on Monday morning. Can you glue on a super thick villain mustache, use a fake earring, wear color-changing contacts, and answer to Renaldo for a day?”
He blinks once at me, slides a look to Kami, and disappears again.
So I turn back to my cousin, who’s now eyeballing me like I have finally gone off the deep end.
For the record, I once set her up on a date with an octogenarian criminal—yes, yes, the same one my mother was having breakfast with this morning who Heimliched my boobs—so it does actually take a lot for her to think I’ve lost my marbles.
“Please?” I drop to my knees and clasp my hands. “Please talk him into being my fake date. I won’t kiss him, I won’t touch him except to possibly take his elbow since that’s something a date would do, and I won’t talk on the drive there or back since I know it would annoy him. I’ll even spring for his hotel room Sunday night since it…doesn’t make sense…to drive in Monday morning. I only need him to make me look good. Like I’m not a total disaster.”
“Muffy, you’re not—”
“I live with my mother, my matchmaking business is improving but it’s called Muff Matchers, and we all know there’s only so good it can get after that. I have student loans that the authorities will probably ask your kids to repay for me someday, and I also found a really weird mole behind my knee this morning that had me freaking out until I showered and it came off because it was a smudge of ketchup. Ask me the last time I had ketchup. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know when I had it or how it got under my pants. I am the very definition of a total disaster. And I cannot go to this fu—thing with these people who already saw me at my very worst without looking like a million bucks, and the only way to look like a million bucks is to stand in its shadow, so please. I need Nick. For one day.”
Kami bounces in place and pats the baby’s bottom while she frowns at me, the back of her head reflected in the mirror over the mantle, also bouncing, and I swear her ponytail is frowning at me too. “You’re going back to Blackwell.”
The name of my medical school makes me cringe, but I push on. “Veda asked me. She has this…ceremony thing…and she asked me to be there to support her. I owe her everything.” I know. I know. A funeral isn’t a ceremony thing, but if I tell Nick I need him to be my fake date to a funeral, he won’t go.
This is even worse than asking someone to be a fake date to a wedding.
At least at a wedding, you get cake and it’s okay to gossip about other people’s drama, which is why I’m willing to help clients find maybe not the perfect guy, but a good enough guy to take to one. At a funeral, it’s like all hushed whispers and you can only say nice things. It’s a rule.
Plus, at a funeral, there are so many more tears, and it takes a special kind of date to pull off being there just for a funeral.
Maybe that’s the next step for Muff Matchers.
Maybe I branch out into temporary dates for funerals.
And maybe I’m utterly insane.
Kami glances toward the dining room. I can’t see Nick, so I don’t think she can either, but I’d guess he’s listening in, and she probably thinks so too. “A ceremony for Veda?”
“She’s being…honored…for her work with… You know what? I got tied up working with a client who has this huge list of little awards she’s won over the years this afternoon and I’m having a total brain fart. But the point is, Veda’s the reason I started Muff Matchers. She’s the only friend I have other than your friends who tolerate me because you’re awesome and they’d do anything for you—Maren and Alina say hi, by the way—and so I’ll do anything for Veda, including going back to Richmond and Blackwell just because she asked me to. But I really don’t want to go alone, so can you please talk Nick into going? Or maybe Nick and Duncan? Showing up with two hot hockey-playing bodyguard dates
is way better than one.”
“Muffy. My friends do not tolerate you. They love you. You’re hilarious and fun and you tell it like you see it, except for right now, when I’m pretty sure you’re hiding something from me.”
The baby burps in agreement. Kami catches a bubble of spit-up before it lands on her clothes, which is a skill I don’t expect I’ll ever learn in my lifetime, even if I someday have a baby, which is also unlikely.
On the off-chance that I could find a guy I wanted to marry and have kids with, I’d still know where half that child’s DNA would come from, and cursing another human with my genes seems like a cruel and unusual thing to do to an innocent baby. “Can you please loan me your husband and a few of his friends for a day and a half for no reason other than that I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t desperate?”
“Are you sure Veda would be okay with you stealing her spotlight by bringing a harem of hot dudes as your dates?”
“That’s a really good point. I should ask her. And I get what you’re saying. I shouldn’t accidentally set myself up to be the center of attention. I’d rather get sucked into a wormhole so I never have to go there again, and if I could go in a magic suit that makes me invisible, I would, but also, I can’t be Veda’s support if I’m having my own personal crisis without a human brown bag.”
“Human brown bag?”
“Someone to hyperventilate on when it’s all over.”
I frown.
I probably shouldn’t have said that part out loud. Nick’s surprised me with how good he can be with diapers and puke, which Kami did a lot of when she was pregnant—the puking, I mean, not the wearing of diapers, though I’ve gotta tell you, I wouldn’t have judged that either considering the number of times she had to pee every hour those last three months.
But back to Nick.
Puke and diapers? Yes.
Hyperventilating Muffys?
Probably not.
“Or maybe he can suggest someone else on the team to go? What about Duncan all by himself? He’s got his life together and he’s adorable with those curls and those eyes, and he’s not quite as well-known around the world as Nick after all of those pranks and presents last year. Or Connor! I’d take Connor. There are like, zero pictures of him on the internet since no one ever cares about the backup goaltender. I’d take Ares, too, but it’s not like he can go in disguise, except maybe unless he disguised himself as Zeus, but if there’s a single person in the world who doesn’t know who the Berger twins are or who would still think either of them is single, I’d be shocked. Plus, again with the upstaging thing. There’s no way I could ask Ares.”
“You know the guys have practice on Monday morning, right? Sunday too. They still practice on their days off between games.”
“One guy can’t get a single day off to go support a friend in need? We can leave after practice on Sunday. They don’t practice all the way until night on a Sunday, do they?”
She winces. “Muffy, I—”
“I’ll do it.”
That voice.
I know who that voice belongs to, and it has my shoulders bunching up to my ears so high that if I were in a onesie like the baby, I’d have to pull my underwear out of my butt.
“What about Rooster?” I say to Kami like The Voice didn’t speak. “If I took Rooster, people wouldn’t be looking at me, and then I could be there for Veda?”
“I said I’ll do it,” Tyler Jaeger repeats.
If I don’t look at the wide arched doorway between the living room and the dining room, he doesn’t exist, and he’s not making the offer, so instead, I give Kami my best imploring please don’t make me answer him look.
She half-squints back at me with the universal looks of both what the hell is wrong with you? and also beggars can’t be choosers, Muffy. Maybe you should take your octogenarian criminal friend instead.
And then she stabs me in the back by turning to face Tyler straight on. “That’s so kind of you. Muffy accepts.”
6
Tyler
There’s nothing quite like a woman trying to look past you as if you’re not two hundred pounds of solid muscle standing right in front of her to make a guy realize there might be a reason for his complex.
His and his dick’s.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Kami, but I think you should see a doctor if you’re accepting dates for me with ghosts,” Muffy says as she scrambles off her knees, making the pink bag slung across her body shift, clanking the contents inside it.
What does she have in that thing, coffee mugs?
Knowing Muffy, it’s more likely cans of silly string and Magic 8-Balls.
She’s in jeans, a Muff Matchers hoodie, a light jacket, and a layer of something that smells like panic, and she’s clearly not interested. “I need a real man in corporeal form to do this, but if you can’t help me, I’ll go—hey!”
Yeah, it’s juvenile, but I’m now holding her scrunchie high above my head while her hair flops out of its ponytail and frizzes to her back, except for the smoother portion that was held against her scalp. I point at her. “You. Me. Outside. Or we’re talking about last night in front of Kami too.”
“There was no last night.”
“Whatever, fish lady.”
Kami makes a noise between a cough and a snort, and I wonder if she knows about Muffy working at Cod Pieces, or if she assumes I’m making a vulgar insinuation about Muffy’s muff.
Whatever.
It works.
Muffy lifts her head high, bumps into me as she stalks through the wide doorway to the dining room, then through to the kitchen, where Murphy, Berger, Lavoie, Klein, and Frey are debating god only knows what over a cheese platter—yes, a cheese platter—and past them all to the back door.
Their idea of an intervention was stuffing me full of dairy and suggesting women I should hook up with to work off my frustrations.
The fuckers know. They know I love cheese, and they know my dick doesn’t work. I don’t know how Berger knew, but then, Ares is Ares.
He just knows.
And when he decides other people need to know, then other people know.
“Don’t do anything out there that’ll scare my dogs,” Murphy says as I follow Muffy.
“Your dogs will get over it,” Lavoie retorts. “Fixing Jaeggy takes priority over a moment of trauma for pampered pups. Or cows.”
Frey, who’s a real-life prince of a small country north of Scotland in addition to being one of the best right wings the Thrusters have ever had, smirks like he always does. The cheerful asshole has one of those faces stuck in a permanent grin. “Especially if it makes him quit scowling like a sheep with an intestinal disorder all day. I miss his smile. Don’t you, Murphy?”
I leave them all with double-fisted, one-fingered salutes and step out into the chilly, overcast late afternoon.
Four chickens bawk at us from a pen near the back of the garage. Kami’s dogs ignore us as they chase each other through the yard. Muffy marches to the back fence where two cows, which Murphy calls his other dogs, raise soft eyes at her.
The first one moos, then the second one joins in.
If you’d told me two years ago that Nick Murphy would move out of his swanky downtown condo and into a house on the line between city and suburbs with a big enough yard to keep farm animals, for love, I would’ve asked how hard you hit your head.
It’d be like telling me that I’d one day want to get married and have kids.
You want a guy to stay single for life, give him four older sisters with no verbal boundaries.
Would I like a woman in my bed every night?
Yes.
At the cost of living with what my brothers-in-law live with?
Not a chance.
I love my sisters. They’re great. My nieces and nephews? Awesome too.
In small doses.
Being able to leave the house on my own when my sisters start talking about the trauma of childbirth has been the greatest g
ift of adulthood. I was a surprise several years after Mom and Dad thought they were done, so yeah, I’ve heard a lot when I couldn’t leave.
Second-best?
Until recently, it was being a hockey-playing sex god. And I’d like to get back to the having sex part of adulthood.
The last time my dick worked was when I hooked up with Muffy. So I’m retracing my steps, going back to whatever went wrong, and I’m fixing this.
I stop next to her at the fence, where Sugarbear, the all-brown cow, is rubbing her muzzle into Muffy’s hand. The other cow, a brown and white rescue named Tooter, snorts cow snot at me, turns around, and drops a load.
Muffy looks at me, then does that thing with her eyes where they go unfocused so you know she’s not actually looking at you, and then looks back to the cow. “Thank you for your kind offer, but I’ve decided I don’t need a date after all. You can get back to your Havarti party now if you’d like.”
One, the next time I have people over, I’m serving cheese and calling it a Havarti party.
Two, what the hell is her problem? “Did I do something to offend your majesty?”
“No. But I don’t date-date, so I figured ghosting you after that thing in the walk-in fridge at the secret club was the kindest gesture I could do for you. I mean, it’s not like you don’t have your pick of women.”
She’s lying. Not about me having my pick of women—that part’s true—but about the rest of it.
And the idea that she’s lying because I did something to ruin her trust makes something roil in my gut.
Not the marrying kind here, so it’s not like I’m heartbroken if she doesn’t want to see me anymore. But women don’t usually actively avoid me either, especially women who felt weirdly like my friend before we hooked up, even if I refuse to admit that we might’ve been friends, and a walk-in fridge isn’t the strangest place I’ve ever had sex, so that’s clearly not the problem. Also, as much as my sisters can irritate me, I’d defend the shit out of every last one of them and their best friends, even the annoying ones, if a guy ever so much as insulted a single one of their fingernails.