by Lauren Wood
“Oh no,” I murmured, reading through the gossip columns’ latest accusations.
While older Meadows siblings Lucas and Camille seem to have found their own matches, restoring our hope in their ability to find the rest of us love, too, their youngest brother Joshua reminds us why many women are skeptical about men in the first place. The one and only crown prince of playboys strikes again—is this the kind of guy we can expect to find on a website promising true love?
“Better him than us, I guess.” I handed her phone back and could see from her grim expression that she didn’t exactly share my sentiments. “If anyone can get him in line, I know it’s you.”
She smirked. “I wish I shared your confidence.”
After lunch, we took a walk through the park. It was a beautiful day, and the pathways were filled with skaters, bikers, runners, and other couples like us, strolling along and chatting while they enjoyed the warm weather. We held hands as we approached the gazebo in the center of the park, surrounded by fresh spring blossoms and fragrant plants.
“It’s beautiful out here today,” she said, taking in a deep breath of the spring air.
“You’re beautiful today. And every day,” I shot back, squeezing her hand.
She followed me onto the gazebo’s platform and walked over to the edge to look out across the field where people were exercising and playing with their dogs. But I hung back a few steps, then cleared my throat to get her attention.
She spun around, wide-eyed when she saw me kneeling there in front of her, offering up the black velvet box I had acquired weeks ago...just waiting for the perfect moment to surprise her.
“What are you doing?” she gasped in shock.
“I’m giving those gossip columnists something better to talk about,” I quipped. “Camille Meadows...when I first started terrorizing the Heartstring app, I never expected it to bring me true love. But then you showed up on my doorstep and nothing has been the same since. I had given up, and then you brought me back to life. And now that I have this big hopeful life full of love stretching out in front of me, I know more than ever that I need you by my side for the rest of it. So...what do you say? Will you marry me?”
Her hands flew up to her face as her eyes teared up with happiness. “Yes!” she shrieked. “Of course I will! I thought you’d never ask!”
“It’s barely been a year since we met,” I scoffed, and then chuckled as she threw her arms around me.
“And that was long enough,” she cooed, brushing her lips against mine.
I dipped her back into a deeper kiss, ignoring the people passing by who had stopped to stare at my proposal, some of them even taking videos with their phones. That should take the heat off of Joshua for a moment at least.
But neither of us cared about any of that anymore, not as long as we had each other. When the company’s PR consultant Victoria got her hands on us in the coming weeks, she gave our story a promotional tagline: They may not have expected Heartstring to find them true love, but that’s exactly what they got.
It couldn’t have been more true. We were two cynics turned romantics, but only for each other. No one else could have ever persuaded me to think twice about my opinions on love, but she had shown me how wrong I was. She was exactly the right woman for me.
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His Perfect Woman Sneak Peak
Heartstring Dating Agency Series
1
Lucas
I leaned back in my office chair with a smug, contented smile, lacing my fingers together behind my head. My old buddy, investor, and advisor—Jack Landson—was due in my office any minute, and I was expecting it to be a celebratory meeting. I had a very expensive, top shelf bottle of imported bourbon just waiting to be uncorked for the occasion.
Staring across the framed mementos and photographs on the wall across from my desk, I felt proud for bringing my family this far. The past five years hadn’t been easy by any means, but it all had led to this moment when I could finally breathe a sigh of relief.
Checking my watch and noting that Jack was late—which was unusual for him—I stood and walked over to admire the photograph of my siblings and me at the ribbon cutting for our new headquarters. The very building I stood in right then, still standing and thriving.
There were four of us—each born just a couple of years apart—which would have seemed like a lot had we not grown up in a sprawling mansion. Our father dabbled in a little bit of everything—investment banking, stocks, real estate, business, law...you name it. Any profession that carried a potentially large pay-out, he had a hand in it. I used to think he was a genius.
That was until he passed away from a heart attack and we quickly learned that his many endeavors were little more than a mad scramble to keep his head above water with all of his debts. He’d spend, then borrow money and try to make a quick million to pay it off, but would spend that, too, then borrow more to pay the original debt, which would land him right back where he started from. It was like a game of musical chairs with our financial security on the line. No wonder he had a heart attack so suddenly.
You can imagine our surprise when we sat down to hear the terms of our trust funds and inheritances only to find that his many lenders were seizing everything, practically leaving us penniless. Us. The Meadows family. Completely broke. We thought our mother would have a heart attack, too, right there in front of the family lawyer.
We had a lavish lifestyle and none of us knew a damn thing about working in any area outside of our father’s many realms of expertise. Unfortunately, once word got out about his poorly managed funds, no one wanted to work with us. We were blacklisted and shunned by everyone we knew.
I, along with my brother Joshua and our two sisters, Camille and Jada, buckled down and made a plan. We couldn’t accept defeat, and we couldn’t bear to flip burgers or bag groceries, just barely scraping by. No, we were accustomed to a certain lifestyle, and we decided we would do everything it took to work our way back up to it.
After many brainstorming sessions, I decided the fate of our family. There was one thing in this world that there was an endless market for: love. Every single person wants it, most would do anything to obtain it, and yet, for just as many, it felt like an impossible thing to get their hands on. I developed a formula that would fix that: a matchmaking app with a unique algorithm to bring people together who had the greatest potential of staying together. That’s how Heartstring was born.
Jack Landson had used his funds and expertise to help with the start-up, and now here we were...three years after the launch date and business was booming. Heartstring was considered to be one of the top ten dating sites and matchmaking services in the country.
We weren’t quite billionaires again...not yet. But we were well on our way, and with our big three-year anniversary coming up, I knew Jack had scheduled this meeting so we could pat ourselves on the back and plan how to market the celebration of our ongoing success.
Finally, my secretary chimed in over the intercom to say she was sending Jack in. I was surprised when I turned and saw the look on his face. He greeted me with pursed lips and a stiff nod. Not exactly the big, cocky smile I was expecting under the circumstances.
“Hey. Please, come in. Have a seat.” I returned to the chair behind my desk to face him. “Rough morning?”
“You could say that.” He cleared his throat and unbuttoned his suit jacket, adjusting his tie.
I wrinkled my brows, but let his brooding disposition roll right off my back. I had been waiting for this far too long to let his personal moodiness drag me down.
“Well, the three-year anniversary is coming up,” I began, hoping to shift his mood back to what it should have been. “We’ll need to start discussing the big party and our plan to make our customers in the digital realm fe
el included. But first...you know what I want to hear. What are the numbers looking like?”
“You know the numbers are good,” he answered tightly. “Profits are still rising. We’ve nearly paid off all the start-up funds. The company just keeps going up, up, and up.”
I nodded, smiling, but he seemed unmoved. Unimpressed. “Something wrong?” I finally ventured to ask.
“Yeah,” he shot back incredulously, pulling out his phone.
“What could be wrong with everything you just said?”
“Because none of that matters if something happens to bring the whole operation down.” He pressed a button on his phone, prompting a ding on my computer screen. A link he had sent. “Don’t you follow your own press?”
“I pay people to do that for me, but I skipped my morning briefing to make space for this meeting,” I explained as I scrolled through the article before me.
Bachelor playboy Lucas Meadows of the Heartstring dating app touts guaranteed formula for love, yet can’t find it for himself. Is he selling false hope to millions of customers?
“What the fuck,” I muttered under my breath as I continued reading.
“There are at least fifty more just like that one plastered all over the internet,” he huffed in frustration. “Not to mention all the social media posts from past, current, and possibly future customers. Or at least they would have been future customers if not for this. It was a bad morning to skip that briefing.”
“Surely there are other CEOs with similar businesses who aren’t married off,” I scoffed, exiting the browser window. I couldn’t stand to read anymore.
“Don’t act like you don’t know how things work, Lucas. Your father and his world should have taught you the basics, this included. People don’t like a CEO of anything who isn’t a happily married man. If you can’t keep up with a relationship or a family, even if only for appearances, then how the hell can you manage a multi-million-dollar corporation?”
I raked my hands down my face. It was something Dad had lectured me about a time or two, but I’d assumed it was an outdated standard that would be long gone by the time it could matter to me.
“What brought all of this on, anyway?” I groaned. “Why now?”
“I guess a number of your pissed off flings and ex-girlfriends all got together and started blabbing to the media.” He shook his head. “You know better. You should have been spending that time and energy securing a future wife, not getting laid. You don’t have to want it, you just need to appease the public...and potential clients and partners...and your mother. Well, really—everyone.”
I stood and paced in front of the large view of the city that spread out behind my desk. What I should have done didn’t make much of a difference now. The press was having a field day with this, and short of a mail-order bride, I didn’t know where to even begin with the damage control to fix it all.
But what Jack didn’t know was that I had a very big reason for not nailing down the picture-perfect marriage. I think part of me always wanted to remain available...just in case she ever wanted to be more than friends.
The one that got away. The only woman I had ever thought of as anything more than a fling or a one-night stand. My high school crush. My “perfect woman.”
It wasn’t just Jack who was clueless about how I’d felt about her back then. How I still felt about her, even though I had been keeping my distance ever since we launched Heartstring. My siblings didn’t know either. More importantly, she had no idea how I felt. I was too embarrassed to admit that I didn’t have the balls to tell her how I felt, back then or now.
“I’ll fix this,” I decided out loud, knowing that dwelling on that old, hopeless scenario wasn’t going to help me now.
I hadn’t talked to her in months and I hadn’t seen her in two years...maybe longer. Even if we still talked every day, I was no more willing to confess my feelings for her now than I was back in high school or college.
“How?” He gaped, joining me on his feet. He marched over to the bar cart and helped himself to the bourbon I had set out, although the tone and mood for uncorking it was now, suddenly, nothing like what I had anticipated.
“In today’s market, this is the kind of thing that brings a company down,” he fretted, pouring two glasses. “Everything can be great on paper, but one viral social media scandal and it’s all over. And this one is especially ripe for disaster. People are already looking for any excuse to be skeptical about love and relationships, anything to talk them out of spending the extra money on our service. This is the only push they need to help them make up their minds, and not in our favor.”
“I get it. I said I’ll fix it. I don’t know how yet, but I will. We’ve come too far to let this drag us under.”
He didn’t seem convinced. We sat and sipped our drinks in silence while I tried to wrap my head around the fact that I had run out of time. I couldn’t keep waiting around for her anymore. I had to find a woman to marry to save my business or let my family down—just like my dad had. And for what? So I could pine over some woman it was never going to happen with?
I had humiliated myself enough by falling for someone who didn’t feel the same, and even if she did...I was too much of a coward to find out. I wasn’t going to make things worse by clinging to it, disappointing everyone around me and letting our company go up in flames in sacrifice.
It was time for me to find a wife, and it wasn’t going to be her. The end. My new mantra—to be repeated however many times it took to get it through my thick skull.
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Also by Lauren Wood
If you enjoyed Certified Heartthrob then you are in for a treat! See below for a list of boxsets that contain most of my books. All FREE on Kindle Unlimited!:)
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Second Chance Delight: A Contemporary Romance Series Boxset(Book 1 - 4)
The Hot Bad Boys: A Bad Boy Romance
The Complete Collection(Book 1 - 4)
Accidentally Met Him: An Accidental Marriage Romance Series Boxset(Book 1 - 4)
Mountain Man’s Fever: A Mountain Man Romance Series Boxset(Book 1 - 4)
First Love: My Best Friend’s Little Sister Romance Series Boxset(Book 1-4)
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Be My Forever: A Billionaire and Virgin Romance Series Boxset(Book 1-4)
One Last Chance: A Second Chance Romance Series Boxset(Book 1-4)
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