A Real Keeper: Arranged Marriage Romance

by Rocklyn Ryder

  A Real Keeper

  Arranged Marriage Romance

  Rocklyn Ryder

  Magpie Press

  Copyright © 2017 Rocklyn Ryder

  All rights reserved worldwide

  No part of this book may be reproduced, uploaded to the Internet, or copied without permission from the author. The author respectfully asks that you please support artistic expression and help promote anti-piracy efforts by purchasing a copy of this book at the authorized online outlets.

  This is a work of fiction intended for mature audiences only. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to events, locales, business establishments, or actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is purely coincidental.

  All sexual activities depicted occur between consenting characters 18 years or older who are not blood related.

  Sign up for Rocklyn's newsletter to keep track of everything she's got going on.

  ROCKLYN RYDER's NEWSLETTER

  A Real Keeper

  Arranged Marriage Romance

  by

  Rocklyn Ryder

  Prologue

  Raven Swann

  I look up from my sundae and study the girl across the booth from me. She's pretty enough, for her age. Kind of gangly and she could use a good tutorial on how to choose her make up palette, but overall I like her. I like her a lot.

  Which is the reason I agreed to meet with her.

  Mariah looks up at me from the combination of strawberry and vanilla ice cream that she chose for her own sundae and launches back into her serious voice.

  "The thing is," she tells me, "I'm going to be starting high school soon. I'll be going to dances and football games and I'm going to be spending more time with my friends and going out with boys."

  The 13 year old across the table rolls her eyes. I try not to let my amusement show, I'm not sure if her gesture is a an acknowledgment of an inevitability that she's not currently enthusiastic about, or if she's used to adults giving her grief on the subject.

  "Dad's going to have to get used to not having me around all the time," Mariah says in a pained voice that tells me she really has put a lot of thought into this, "it's time for him to get a life." She shovels a spoonful of ice cream into her mouth and winces with momentary brain freeze, "I can't have him all up in my business."

  She's thought this through. I already know she has, we've been texting for 2 months.

  "That's why I'm hiring you to find him a new wife," she tells me emphatically.

  I smile patiently at her and thoughtfully take another bite of my sundae. Internally I sigh. This is what I get for taking the pricing off my website.

  A lot of people see "marriage broker" and mistake me for just a high priced dating service. Some people have me pegged as an escort service, some have even expected me to be some sort of human trafficker where they can buy slaves for personal pleasure or abuse.

  Too many of the calls were coming from people who weren't in a serious market for what I offer-- happily ever after-- and because they could afford the prices listed, they thought they had the upper hand in negotiations and that the right price would convince me to find them what they're in the market for.

  I pulled all the pricing off the site a few months ago and now only discuss it via personal consultation. It lets me get a feel for the applicant and gives my intuition a better chance to factor into my decision.

  Unfortunately, it also means that 13 year olds with giant blue eyes and strawberry blonde hair don't know what they're getting into when they come across my site. And that gives them a chance to steal my heart with a single email.

  "Tell me about your dad," I pull out my pen and paper so I can take notes while Mariah begins rattling off a laundry list of traits about her father that are better suited to selling him on Craig's List than finding him a wife.

  "OK," I can't help but laugh as I interrupt her, "but I need to know who he is. So let's start with why you don't think he'll find a wife on his own?"

  Another eye roll. She's good at this teenage thing.

  "Dad got my mom pregnant when they were still in high school," Mariah tells me, "They stayed together till I was 3 and then Mom left him. She says he was too busy being an idiot to be a good man."

  I bite my tongue at Mariah's matter-of-fact tone.

  "You have a relationship with your mom?" I ask.

  "Yup, Mom's good. She got married a few years ago and they started having kids of their own. I have a little brother and in a few months I get a little sister."

  She pulls out her phone and slides through the gallery, showing me pictures of a happy family. Some with Mariah in them.

  I frown, "But your dad never remarried?" This could be a bad sign. If the man is still in love with his ex, there's not much I can do to solve that problem.

  Mariah's eyes float to the ceiling and she scrunches up the corner of her mouth in deep thought, "He used to go out on dates, I think, but mostly only when it was my mom's turn to have me so I didn't get to meet any of them. There was this one lady that hung around for a long time. Jenna or something, I remember she was really nice. I liked her a lot, but I'm not sure they were a real couple."

  Mariah renews her attempt at finishing her sundae, "She was cool. She used to take me shopping and we'd go get pedicures together and watch old movies together and stuff."

  "Did they fight?" I ask.

  "Nope."

  "Did your dad explain why she stopped coming over?"

  "Nope," Mariah shrugs her thin shoulders and keeps eating. She watches me make a note, "Is that important?" she asks.

  "Maybe," I tell her with a shrug of my own.

  "How come?" She watches me scribbling on the pad.

  "People break up for reasons, knowing what those reasons were helps me know which people would be good together and which ones would be bad together," I tell her.

  I watch Mariah eat her ice cream while she thinks over what I said.

  "So can you hook my dad up?" She scrapes the melted ice cream out of the bottom of the dish and slurps it down before looking up at me.

  "Well, I'll need to talk to him first," I'm looking down at the yellow legal pad, making notes and tapping the tip of the pen against the paper as I think through the clients in my files, "there are a lot of things I need to know that you can't answer."

  "Sex stuff."

  The tip of my pen freezes in mid-tap at Mariah's very astute, and equally nonchalant, statement. I rarely blush, but I feel my cheeks heat as I nod without looking up at her.

  "It's OK," she quips, "Dad's a grown up, he should be getting busy." She pulls soda into her mouth through her straw and adds, "I'm thirteen, it's not like I don't know grown ups have sex."

  There's that eyeroll again. She should consider going pro with that.

  "That's very mature," I tell her sincerely, "most people don't like to think of their parents having sex. No matter how old you are."

  A look of horror crosses her face, "Oh I don't want to think of that, ewww," her nose scrunches up in disgust, "I just know he should be doing it." She studies her empty ice cream dish thoughtfully for a minute, "And I don't think he is," she says finally.

  I shouldn't be having this conversation with Mariah for a number of reasons but I can't help but wonder why she doesn't think her father is sexually active currently.

  "Well, I can find out when I talk to him," I tell her.

  "OHMYGODNO!" Mariah clamps both hands tightly over her mouth and looks around the diner to see if anyone is staring at her after the outburst, "oh my gosh no!" she lowers her voice and emphasiz
es the gosh instead of god. "You can't tell Dad!" She leans forward and whispers conspiratorially, "He would kill me if he found out I hired you!"

  I'm too busy frowning-- a deep, worried, sort of furrow I can feel in my eyebrows-- to be amused at her teenage drama.

  "I have money," she reaches into the purse that I'm sure she's only recently started carrying with her where ever she goes and pulls out a prepaid Visa gift card and slides it across the table toward me, "My nana gave it to me for my birthday, I haven't used it for anything. I'll pay you, you just can't tell Dad I hired you."

  Ah shit. I look down at her fingers on the card. Her nails are a little on the long side and I think she's probably trying to let them grow, and they're painted blue, almost the same shade as her eyes.

  I can't take money from this girl. From the sound of it, there's not a chance in hell I'm going to get her father to hire me for real. I'm not going to get answers from this man to any of the questions on my application and that's going to make my streamlined process a lot harder.

  I have no way of explaining all this to Mariah, of course, so I just lay my hand over hers with a smile. "How about you hire me on contingency," I suggest with a soft pat on her hand before pushing it-- and her gift card-- back to her side of the table.

  "What's that mean?" Mariah asks me, her eyes narrowed in suspicion.

  "It means you don't owe me any money unless I find your dad a wife," I explain.

  "So what if he finds one on his own?"

  She catches on fast, I like that. "Then I didn't find him a wife, and you don't owe me anything. Deal?"

  Mariah studies me for a few seconds and her face breaks into an enthusiastic grin, "Deal!" she says and reaches across the table to shake my hand.

  A few minutes later, I stand on the sidewalk outside the diner, watching Mariah ride off on her bicycle after I swear an oath to keep the whole operation a secret. Then I hurry toward my rental car and head back to the hotel with my brain in overdrive.

  I've got a lot of work ahead of me. I have to call home and let Duncan know I'm going to be here for awhile then I have to call my assistant and have her look some things up for me. Then I have to get to work.

  It's been a long time since I did this the old-fashioned way.

  Kendra

  The last person I expected to hear from was Raven Swann.

  I'm not sure if I should be nervous, giddy, or just freaked out as I park my car in the empty field and head toward the carnival.

  The local K-8 school puts on a carnival near the end of the school year. It's put on by the graduating eighth grade class and the money raised helps funds their graduation dance.

  It seems like a strange place for a meeting with a professional match maker that flew all the way out from California to see me but if Raven wants to meet with me it can only mean good things so if she wants to walk around the practice baseball field eating snow cones and tossing pennies into saucers for goldfish-- I am not arguing!

  I found Raven's website 2 years ago, after calling off my engagement to Todd. We'd been together for 5 years, engaged for 3 and he refused to agree to a date for the wedding. When I finally hit the end of my rope and confronted him, he confessed that he didn't really want to get married. I felt like I wasted the best years of my life on him.

  At 27, I was convinced my clock was ticking, I needed to move on from Todd and find a husband fast.

  That's how I ended up on Raven's website at 2 in the morning after half a bottle of wine, filling out her entire pre-application and hitting submit before noticing the pricing.

  I was still just a resident back then. Even now, with my DVM, I make a good living, but not Raven Swann good. Not with my student loans still hanging over my head and by the time those are paid off, my uterus will be a shriveled shell.

  When her assistant called to follow up on my application I had to politely decline, even though it most likely meant dying a childless spinster.

  Oh well. Actually, I could always do in vitro at a sperm bank-- it'd actually be cheaper than having Raven find me my perfect husband.

  Then, last week, out of the blue, Raven called to ask if I was still interested in a match. She insisted on meeting with me, here in my dinky little hometown, even though I told her flat out I couldn't afford her.

  So here I am. Looking for the pizza booth because that's where she said she'd meet me.

  Sure enough, after a look around, I see a place in the food court section where a man is busy shuffling personal sized pizzas in and out of a real wood fired pizza oven that's built onto a trailer with one of those giant spatulas with an extra long handle.

  The guy manning the oven is tall, with short dark hair and a full beard, and from the bulge of his biceps I'm guessing he works out-- a lot. Beyond that, it's hard to get an idea of what he looks like. He's sweating from working near the oven in the late May afternoon sun, sunglasses conceal his eyes, and he's wearing a thick apron that could conceivably hide a host of sins.

  Ass is nice though, I think as he bends to look inside the oven and then reaches into a pile and adds a few sticks of wood before putting 2 more pizzas in.

  The woman standing near the edge of the table with a plate in her hand is unmistakable. I walk up and introduce myself.

  "Oh," Raven says, like I startled her, "Kendra! Oh my gosh, you're so pretty in person!"

  She says, practically gushes over meeting me, saying my name loudly in a bright, clear voice that sounds like she's introducing me to someone even though no one's here but us.

  "Mmm, you have to grab one of these things," she insists, even as she wanders farther away from the pizza booth, "I'm going to grab some lemonade, you want one?" she calls back to me as she heads toward a booth that offers lemonade with a variety of flavors added in.

  "Oh, then I'll go with you," I take a step to follow after her but she waves me off insistently.

  "No, no, order your pizza, Kendra," something about the way she says it makes me think I ought to do what she says, "I'll be back with drinks."

  Not exactly what I was expecting from Raven Swann. I watch her walk across the food court to the lemonade booth, her hip-length perfectly straight red hair trailing behind her.

  I stand in front of the young girl who's taking the orders for the pizzas and look at the options, "Ooh!" I admit to being a little more excited at the "diablo" option than is strictly necessary, "Is the diablo really spicy?" I ask the girl.

  The bored girl looks up at me and shrugs, "I dunno," she tells me.

  "OK, well, what's on it?" I ask.

  "Uh, hey Mr. Marshall? What's on the diablo one?" she turns around and asks the guy doing all the baking.

  The guy at the oven looks at the girl and then up at me. He wipes sweat off his forehead with the back of his arm, raising his sunglasses so they sit high on his head as he squints at me before his eyes dart around quickly.

  "I'll take one," I say before he can tell me what's on the pizza. It's obviously spicy, or he wouldn't be scanning the crowd for the man I must be ordering for. I'm used to it. For some reason, no one believes a woman would actually want jalapenos on her food.

  The guy shrugs, "You want the ghost pepper sauce too?" The corner of his lips turn up in a grin under the edge of his mustache.

  His voice sounds nonchalant but I recognize the challenge. "Yes please," I answer, as if it's my favorite thing in the world.

  Truth is, I don't really like ghost peppers. It's not the heat, it's the flavor. They always leave me with the unpleasant aftertaste of wet cardboard in my mouth but I'm not about to let this guy think it's because I can't handle the heat.

  I hand my money to the dark haired girl at the order table and step to the other end where a little sign says "pick up" and watch the kids in the back put my pizza together. Mr. Marshall's suggestion of extra peppers and his heavy handed application of a sauce that he squirts over the top of the pizza from a squeeze bottle from the far end of the table does not go unnoticed.

 
I almost laugh out loud.

  From the looks of him, I doubt this guy is a teacher but I haven't heard any of the kids at the booth call him "dad," so I'm guessing he's the guy who runs the mobile pizza business. I do like watching him work though. I know the pizzas aren't heavy, but the length of the handle on the peel means the muscles in his forearms flex when he reaches into the oven with the big spatula to shuffle pizzas around or to pull them out.

  I wonder what it is about a man's forearms that's so sexy.

  It only takes a few minutes for my pizza to bake and he pulls it out on the peel and slides it onto a plate. One of the kids runs a pizza cutter through it a couple of times and delivers it to me.

  Raven catches my eye from a table where she's managed to find a couple of empty seats and I wave back at her.

  I'm not oblivious to the watchful gaze of Mr. Marshall as he waits for me to bite into the pizza so I pick up one of the slices and take a big bite. Chewing thoroughly and swallowing at leisure before turning around to thank him personally, "Too bad this place doesn't serve beer," I wink at him before going to join Raven.

  Logan

  I'm more than happy to hand oven duties back over to Paul when he returns from his break. Working a wood fire pizza oven in late May isn't my first choice for how to spend a Saturday afternoon. We're already hitting 100 degree days this year I'm sweating like crazy in front of the oven.

  "Hey man, thanks," Paul tells me as he takes the peel from me and rotates the pies in the oven. I don't know how he manages to do this on a regular basis without dying from heat stroke.

  I shuck the thick apron that blocks some of the heat from the fire when you're standing in front of it and grab a bottle of cold water from the cooler while Paul hums to himself, looking cool as a cucumber while he bakes pizzas for Mari's carnival.