Matt (Red, Hot, & Blue)

by Cat Johnson

  Dedication

  For all the sexy computer geeks in the world and the women who love them.

  Chapter One

  Matt Coleman had the best state-of-the-art computer and the fastest Internet connection available to mankind. He should. Computers were his life—and that was the problem.

  None of that speed and technology made time pass any faster while he tapped his bare foot on the carpet in his living room. He waited for what felt like an eternity during the long seconds it took the browser to load the page.

  When his brand spanking new Matchmakers Unlimited profile loaded, he let out a long, slow whistle. Fifty-four views of his page and more than a dozen email responses and he’d only signed up for the account yesterday.

  That number had to prove single women were out there and they were interested in him. It was nice to have confirmation. The way his life had been going, he’d begun to wonder.

  Heart racing over the potential buffet of eligible females who wanted him, Matt opened the first email. He leaned closer to the screen just as his doorbell rang.

  Crap. What shitty timing. Matt considered pretending he wasn’t home, but his vehicle was in the driveway and his table lamp was on. Uninvited or not, whoever was here would know he was inside. With an annoyed huff, he took one last glance at the message he longed to read and headed for the door.

  Even if Matt hadn’t been a card-carrying member of Mensa, he could have guessed who stood on the other side of the door’s frosted glass window. He didn’t have to be a genius to know it was his teammate Bull Ford. The height and bulk of the darkened shadow was a dead giveaway.

  Matt swung open the door wide.

  “Bull. Hey. Come on in.” As he spoke, Matt turned and headed back to the computer and the lure of his inbox. He spent enough time with the guys on his team in life, death and other intimate situations that he didn’t need to stand on ceremony with any of them. Bull could show himself in.

  “Hey, what’s up?” Bull closed the door behind him and followed Matt into the living room.

  “Not much. What’s up with you?” Sparing Bull the briefest of glances, Matt sat in the rolling chair and wheeled closer to the computer on the table.

  “My girl is working tonight so I thought I’d stop by.” Bull eased his massive frame down onto the sofa.

  “At least you have a girl.” Matt let out a snort. “If you think you’re getting any sympathy from me that you’re alone for one night because Marly has to work, you’re nuts.”

  Matt was alone every damn night when the team wasn’t on a mission or he didn’t go hang out at the bar. Which is why he’d turned to his last resort—an online dating site. God help him, desperate times called for desperate measures.

  He’d signed up, but there was no way Matt could ever let the guys on the team know what he’d done. They’d tease him to no end. But if he didn’t want Bull to know what he’d done, Matt would have to wait to read the messages sitting in his inbox and taunting him like the aroma of a sizzling steak to a starving man.

  Resigned that he’d have to wait until later, he turned toward Bull. “So what are your plans for the night?”

  “Besides this? I got none.” The size of the sigh Bull let out was as big as Matt would expect from the hulking man, though Bull was generally a happy guy.

  “What’s wrong? You don’t seem your usual happy-go-lucky self.” Matt figured a man who got to have sex on a regular basis, the way he was sure Bull had with Marly, had nothing to be depressed about.

  “This light duty is killing me.”

  Ah, and there it was. They all went through it—withdrawal. It happened to the best of the men on the team when, for one reason or another, doctors or the command kept them from what they loved best—the mission.

  “Did they say when you’ll be allowed back?”

  “They said soon.” An unhappy scowl settled on Bull’s face.

  A man like Bull would need a definite, precise date to keep his sanity. Waiting was so much easier when there was an end goal to work toward. When it came to providing dates, the last thing the military was was definite or precise.

  Maybe it was Bull’s hangdog expression, or some sort of temporary insanity on Matt’s part, but he decided a distraction might cheer up his friend. “If you swear not to tell a soul, I’ll let you in on a little secret project I’ve got going.”

  “A mission?” Bull’s spirits lifted before Matt’s eyes.

  “No, it’s personal. Online. I was just about to get into it when you knocked.” Matt hooked a thumb at the screen, wondering what the hell had gotten into him that he was willing to risk all sorts of teasing just to cheer up Bull.

  “Good enough. I’ll take anything.” Bull planted a hand on the sofa’s arm and hoisted himself up with a grunt.

  It hadn’t been that long since Matt had visited Bull in the hospital after one of their missions had blown up—literally. Matt would make a bet Bull’s broken ribs were still sore as shit. It was good the command had kept him on light duty, whether Bull wanted to believe that or not.

  “What is this?” Bull looked over Matt’s shoulder at the screen.

  “Swear you won’t tell the team?” A little late to be asking but…

  Bull rolled his yes. “Yes, I swear. Jeez, as if you don’t have all sorts of secrets on me.”

  Since that was very true, Matt nodded and clicked open the first message. “I opened a profile on a dating site to meet women.”

  “Really.” Bull’s brows rose. “And? Anyone good?”

  “I don’t know yet. This is my first batch of responses.”

  “Well, jeez. What the hell are you waiting for? Open them up. Read ’em to me. Are there pictures?”

  Bull really was desperate for some action if Matt’s dating profile got him so excited, but at least he wasn’t giving him any shit about it. Since Matt was dying to read the messages himself, he didn’t comment on Bull’s interest.

  “The profiles have pictures. We can go there after I read the message.”

  Heart fluttering, Matt cleared his throat and dove into the first message.

  “‘Hey there, sweetie. Your cute’—you’re is spelled incorrectly, FYI.” Matt pointed that out, even though Bull was standing right behind him, reading over his shoulder. “—‘I’d love to connect with you. Hottie57’.”

  “Wow. She sounds hot.” Bull seemed impressed, in spite of Hottie57’s blatant abuse of the written word.

  “Yeah, I guess.” Could Matt date a woman who misused your for you’re? Maybe it was just a typo. A slip because she was so eager to get her message sent to him.

  Hottie57 sounded nice enough. Sweet. Friendly. Complimentary. If she was a hottie, Matt could overlook the typo. And this was the first message he’d read. Wouldn’t it be amazing if Matt found the love of his life in the first response to his online profile? Sure, it seemed the odds would be against that, but still, stranger things had happened. In his line of work, Matt had witnessed that too many times.

  “Look up her picture.” Bull nudged Matt’s shoulder with his elbow.

  “All right.” Armed with the belief that miracles did happen and that Hottie57 could be the future Mrs. Coleman, Matt set fingers to keys and searched for her profile on the website.

  He found her page fast enough…and his high hopes came to a screeching halt. “Nope. No good. Listen to this.”

  As Matt outlined the details for Bull, he wished he hadn’t, because the information he uncovered was not good. Hottie57 was, coincidentally, fifty-seven years old. With a sigh, Matt deleted the message from Hottie57.

  “So what?” Bull shrugged. “A little older isn’t so bad. Some mature women are sexy as hell.”

  “Yeah, a little older
, little being the operative word. Bull, I’m thirty. That’s a twenty-seven year age difference.” That seemed pretty huge to Matt. It wasn’t like he was an ageist, not at all, but he at least wanted a woman from the same generation he was in.

  “Hey, cougars are the hottest thing going in Hollywood. All you see is older women with younger men. Hell, even BB’s new wife is an older woman. BB seems plenty happy.”

  “Bull, BB’s wife is twelve years older than him.” But, yes, BB had never been happier. Based on that, Matt decided he’d place the limit at a twelve-year age difference in either direction for any woman he dated. That seemed fair. “Anyway, there’s like a dozen messages here. I’m moving to the next one.”

  “All right. Fine.” Bull agreed, not that it mattered, so Matt moved to the next message.

  It didn’t look any better. “Uh, oh.”

  “What?” Bull leaned lower.

  Matt glanced at his friend. “This one’s from somebody with the screen name Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.”

  “Hmm.” A deep frown furrowed Bull’s brow.

  Matt had spent a decade in the military. First in the Army, and now in the SpecOps with Task Force Zeta. He was well aware of the phrase and its reference to the military’s former stance on gays in service. Live and let live was Matt’s personal motto, but as far as his own love life, his taste ran strictly to females.

  “It could be a girl who’s new to this country or just didn’t know what that means. Won’t hurt to take a look at the profile. Right?” Bull shrugged.

  Sure, it wouldn’t hurt Bull. Matt, on the other hand, was another story.

  Matt noticed how willing his teammate was to send him out on questionable dates, while Bull himself had a nice girl of his own to go home to.

  Maybe it was just an accidental reference. Who knew? Giving her the benefit of the doubt, Matt clicked over to the profile and stared at the picture. He enlarged it, blowing it up to maximum size, and stared some more.

  “Nope. It’s a guy.” It didn’t matter how long or close he looked, there was a definite Adam’s apple in the photo.

  “No way. You think so?” Bull was too damn tall to see the picture well enough.

  “Yeah.” Scowling, Matt slid his chair over so Bull could get a better view.

  Bull read aloud, “‘Six-foot tall, athletically built. Looking forward to great changes in life soon’. Okay, you’re right. Next.”

  “Thank you.” Matt sighed and deleted that message too.

  Under Bull’s close supervision, Matt worked his way through all of the emails. He came up with two viable candidates. The team wasn’t expecting any assignments for the next few days, so Matt responded to both, asking one if she wanted to meet for drinks on Friday night, and asking the other for Saturday. He figured that would double his odds of meeting the girl for him.

  When the last email was sent, Matt leaned back in his chair. “That’s it then. We’ll see if I get responses back from the two I asked out.”

  “How many were there to start with?” Bull asked.

  “Thirteen.”

  Two seemingly normal, single women out of the whole bunch. Matt did the calculation in his head. That represented approximately fifteen percent of today’s responses. Matt didn’t know what the site’s average was for successful match-ups, but at least one of those two dates would have to be with a nice girl he would want to see again. Right? Besides, two dates in one weekend was two more than Matt had been on in months.

  “Two out of thirteen.” Bull whistled, long and low. “I’m glad I met Marly the old-fashioned way.”

  Matt let out a snort. “If you really believe getting blown up during a hostage situation is the old-fashioned way to meet a girl, you better go back to medical and get your head rechecked.”

  “You know what I mean. We met live and in person. Not through this online crap.”

  Online crap. Matt cocked one brow. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t be like that. I’m saying this way is fine for you, Matt. You’re a computer guy. I’m more hands-on.”

  “Yeah, I know. Believe me, Bull. I know.” Matt had been witness to far too much of his teammates’ hands-on activities.

  Bull shook his head. “You ever going to stop throwing that in my face?”

  “What? That while I was coordinating the team going in to save your sorry ass, as well as a roomful of hostages, I had to listen to you having sex? Um, no. Probably not.”

  Bull’s lips twisted. “I was pretty sure I was going to die that night, so get over it. You would have done the same damn thing if the situations had been reversed.”

  That was the problem. The situations were never reversed, because on most ops, Matt’s job was to stay in the van running the equipment. Yeah, his job and his skills were as valuable to the team as any of the others, but sometimes it was frustrating as hell.

  “I’m gonna go.” Bull turned for the door.

  The sudden decision had Matt frowning. “Don’t be pissed. I’m sorry. I won’t bring it up again.”

  Halfway to the front door, Bull stopped mid-step and turned back. “It’s not that. What the fuck, Matt. I’m a big boy. You know I can handle a little teasing. It’s just that Marly is working at another public event tonight. I figure I can pop in and make sure everything is okay.”

  Understanding dawned. Talking about the mission had gotten Bull antsy. Bull’s broken ribs would mend, his hard head should heal, but Matt had a feeling Bull would never completely get over that he’d failed to prevent the explosion. Even though none of the civilians had been seriously injured, failure was a hard pill to swallow for Bull.

  “All right, brother. Say hello to Marly for me.”

  “Will do.” Hand on the doorknob, Bull grinned. “You have fun with your project.”

  “Yeah, thanks.” As the door closed behind his friend, Matt envied him.

  Sighing, Matt logged out of his Matchmakers account. He was just deciding what need to fulfill first, dinner or a shower, when an instant message window popped on his screen.

  Sam_I_am: Hey, big guy!

  Matt couldn’t help but smile. Sam Foster, computer and communications guru, always had that effect on him. Matt typed in a response.

  Computer_God: Dude! What up? You need my computer expertise to bail you out of a jam again?

  For the past six months, Sam had held the same position on Omega team that Matt did on Zeta. They’d never worked together in person, but he and Sam shared information online all the time. Omega team was based out of Virginia, while Zeta was in North Carolina, so the teams didn’t cross paths too often.

  Matt loved the world of cyberspace. No matter how great the distance, he could still instant message or email when he wanted to bust Sam’s chops.

  Sam_I_am: Ha ha! And no, smart ass. I’m pulling an all-nighter. Surveillance. Bored as hell so I figured I’d bother you. What are you doing?

  Computer_God: Bored at home. No action here. But got me two dates this weekend.

  Sam_I_am: Been a long time. Hope you haven’t forgotten how.

  Computer_God: Ha ha! Very funny. Thanks for the confidence.

  Sam_I_am: Shit. Action. Gotta go. Later.

  Matt typed in Later and sighed. At least Sam was getting some action. Wallowing in his sorrow looked like it would be the only thing on Matt’s agenda for the evening.

  He pushed his chair back from the computer just as an email popped up. It was a response from one of his two dates, WickedWoman.

  That was more like it. Action of the romantic variety would definitely take his mind off the lack of action with the team. Matt clicked to open the email and leaned toward the computer, rubbing his hands together in anticipation.

  WickedWoman had written she was up for the date and excited to meet him.

  Oh, yeah. So was he.

  Hopefully by this time tomorrow night, he’d be getting cozy with WickedWoman. Even her user name had potential, and her picture—phew. Matt had never seen a woman built like that who w
asn’t wearing a G-string stuffed with dollar bills and dancing with a pole between her legs.

  Of course, he’d give BabyGirl her fair chance too. Who knew? BabyGirl might give WickedWoman a run for her money. Sometimes the ones who seemed the most sweet and innocent turned out pretty wild.

  Matt looked forward to finding out.

  WickedWoman, or Wanda as Matt would come to know after meeting her at the bar inside his favorite restaurant Friday night, sipped at her drink. She’d ordered a cosmopolitan, which was basically a glassful of booze with a touch of cranberry to tinge it pink.

  “So, Matt, what do you do?”

  Matt swallowed a mouthful of his own beer. He yanked his gaze up from where it kept slipping—to her massive boobs. He contemplated his answer to her question.

  Had Wanda looked like her profile picture, he might have considered dancing along the edge of the rules and hinted at his SpecOp status. However, Wanda’s online photo had been taken at least ten years and fifty pounds ago. Oh, the stripper-worthy boobs were still present and even larger than pictured, but the age she’d written on her profile? Nuh, uh.

  Matt didn’t mind a curvy girl one bit. Nor did he mind an older woman. But in this lighting, sitting as closely to Wanda as he was, he could see the crow’s feet under the caked-on makeup, proving she’d not only uploaded an old photo, she’d also lied about her age.

  Her lack of honesty bothered him. How could a guy trust a woman who lied from the moment he met her? Any hopes Matt might have had for a relationship with Wanda had been squashed the moment he realized he’d been duped, and that decided his answer to her question.

  “I’m in the Army.”

  “Oh.” Her smile faded. A frown knit her brow beneath the makeup. “That doesn’t pay very well, does it?”

  “Nope.” That wasn’t a lie. Army pay for the starting rank of private was crap. He just didn’t elaborate he was nowhere near that pay grade.

  He could see her hopes falling. If she was looking for a sugar daddy, it wasn’t going to be him.

  “So what do you do in the military?”

  “I’m in technology.” There, that was the truth. Matt felt a little better not having to lie to that question.