by Elle James
Then again, she wasn’t the kind of woman he normally went out with. His usual woman was all the highs: high class, high heels and high maintenance, wearing designer clothes that could fit in a board room as easily as a country club with the wealthiest clients. Yeah, maybe he should wait until BODS found his perfect match. He was curious now to see how his “perfect match” would compare with the redhead.
As he drove out of the garage, rain poured down on his truck, making it difficult to follow the redhead. Not that he would. He had a date with a beer and his brothers at the Firehouse Lounge.
He parked his truck in the parking lot near the bar, dragged in a breath and braced himself for his brothers’ ribbing. His only consolation was that they would go through this whole matchmaking scheme soon enough, and he’d get to poke fun at them and make them just as uncomfortable as they would make him this evening.
He was soaked in the downpour by the time he entered the bar. Ace spotted him from a table in the corner and waved a hand.
As he approached his brothers, all had wide grins splitting their faces.
Ace pushed a mug of beer into his hands. “Drink.”
He accepted the offering and tipped it back, drinking half the mug before setting it on the table. “Hit me with your best shots.”
“How was it?” Colton asked.
“Not bad. I finished the questionnaire in less than forty-five minutes,” Dillon said.
“Then what took you so long to get here?” Brand demanded.
“Electricity went off. I had to make my way down twenty-flights of stairs,” he said. No way was he going to tell his brothers that he’d had company all the way down.
“The leading edge of the storm was pretty wicked,” Ace said. “We made it here right before it hit.”
“Did Leslie say how long it would take to find you a match?” Colton asked.
“No. But she helped me download the phone application.” He patted the pocket containing his cellphone. “When it finds a match, it’ll notify me with a text. Then I can go online to see who she is.”
“Seriously?” Colton leaned toward him. “Show me the app.”
Dillon pulled his cellphone from his pocket and tapped the screen. He pointed at the icon for the BODS system. “If you were that interested, you should have stuck around and filled out your own profile and questionnaire at the same time as I did,” he said, though he was glad Colton hadn’t. He’d had the redhead to himself all the way down the stairwell.
“What did you put as preferences?” Colton asked. “Your usual brunette ice woman who could have a roomful of corporate executives on their knees begging for their jobs with one killer look?”
Dillon frowned. “I didn’t give a hair or eye color preference.” He had stated a preference for a tall woman. Now that he had a chance to think about it, he hadn’t minded bending down to give his mystery woman a kiss, even though he’d had to bend way down to kiss the redhead. She’d been a good head shorter than him. But he’d liked how petite and feisty, she was.
“A computer shouldn’t take long to put two profiles together,” Ace said. “I’m surprised you didn’t get a match before you left the office.”
Except the electricity was off. “The system might have gone down with the power outage.”
“Most corporations have their computers on battery backup for just such occasions,” Brand pointed out.
“True. So, why haven’t you gotten your text with your perfect match?” Colton asked, one eyebrow cocked.
“Maybe the server is down.” Dillon lifted his beer and drank.
“Maybe the outage fried your profile, and you need to start all over,” Brand suggested.
Dillon didn’t want to think about that. Once was enough. If he had to go back, he would just tell Emma and Leslie to forget it.
His cellphone chirped and vibrated, letting him know that he’d received a text message.
His pulse quickened. For a brief moment, he thought it might be his pretty stairwell companion, until he remembered they hadn’t exchanged phone numbers.
“Check it out.” Colton snatched away his cellphone and brought up his text messages.
“Give me that,” Dillon demanded, reaching for his cellphone.
Colton pulled it out of his reach. “It’s from BODS,” he said with a grin, and then read aloud. “Congratulations, we’ve found your prefect match. Click on the link to take you to her profile.” Colton whooped. “Dillon’s got a match.”
When Colton tried to duck away from Dillon’s reaching hand, Dillon punched him in the arm. “Give it. Unless you want to go out with her.”
Colton’s brow twisted. “No way. BODS matched you with her. You’ll have to bite that bullet and go out with her.”
“Then give me the damned phone so I can check her out to see if she’s anyone I’d be interested in.”
Colton tossed the cellphone to Brand.
Dillon glared at Colton and held his hand out to Brand.
Brand gave it to him. “Let’s see what you got.”
“Not what…” Ace corrected. “Who.”
Dillon clicked on the link and a profile came up with a name: Ariana Davis. He frowned. No picture.
“Is she a dog?” Brand asked.
“Show us,” Colton urged.
Ace leaned forward. “Yeah, man. Show us.”
“Something must be glitchy with the system.” Dillon frowned. “It didn’t come up with a photo. But I did get a little of her background.”
“So, what does she do for a living?” Ace asked.
“It says she’s a business owner,” Dillon read aloud.
“What else?” Colton asked.
“She not a vegetarian.”
“That’s good, considering we raise cattle on the ranch,” Ace said.
“Can she ride a horse?” Brand asked.
Dillon scrolled through. “She doesn’t say.”
“Like dogs?” Ace asked.
Dillon shrugged. “She likes animals.”
“That could be anything,” Brand said. “Monkeys, gerbils, hamsters.”
“Cats,” Colton added.
“If she likes animals, she’ll like dogs and horses. If she doesn’t ride, she can learn,” Ace said.
“Does she like country music?” Brand wanted to know.
Dillon looked. “Soft rock and big bands from the 40’s.”
Colton frowned. “How old is she?”
Brand snorted. “Sounds like Grandma.”
“Says she’s twenty-nine,” Dillon said.
“Like I said,” Brand gave a knowing nod, “an older woman.”
Ace shook his head. “Only a year older than Dillon. Not an issue.”
“Are you going to ask her out?” Colton asked.
Dillon thought of the redhead in the stairwell. Before he could ask her out, he had to give BODS a chance. The sooner, the better. “Yes. Might as well get this over with.”
“That’s the right attitude,” Ace said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “Like marching toward a guillotine.”
“You know what I mean,” Dillon said. “Do you really think a computer can match two people?”
Ace lifted an eyebrow. “It worked for Emma and Coop. We all know how much they love each other.”
“Look, I agreed to do this for Emma. And I will,” His eyes narrowed into slits. “But if it doesn’t work out, I don’t want any crap from the rest of you. Remember, you’re all up next.”
Colton raised his hands. “I’m not giving you any crap. I know my time’s coming, and I’m not anymore pleased about it than you are.”
“Why are you all so negative about this dating system?” Ace asked. “You don’t have to marry the first person BODS comes up with. Just go on a date. Show Emma you’re trying. She’ll get over it when it doesn’t work out.”
“Now, who’s the negative one?” Colton crossed his arms over his chest. “You’re assuming it won’t work out.”
“When it doesn’t wor
k out…if it doesn’t work out…semantics.” Ace sighed. “Just do it to make Emma happy. We gave her enough grief about getting back into the dating scene. She deserves the benefit of the doubt on this BODS thing.”
“I’m texting Ariana now,” Dillon said. “I’ll go out once, but that’s all I’m promising.”
Colton turned to Brand. “Wanna bet on how this turns out?” He slapped a twenty dollar bill on the table. “Twenty dollars says Dillon marries his match.”
Brand’s eyes widened. “You’re all positive.” He reached into his wallet and pulled out two fifties. “I meet your bet and up the ante to one hundred dollars. I’m betting he’ll ditch her.”
Ace slapped two one hundred dollar bills on the table between them. “Make it two hundred, and I’m betting she’ll ditch him.”
Dill stared at the money on the table. “You guys suck.”
As Ariana left the garage and headed home to her house in the suburbs of west Austin, she tried to get the handsome stranger out of her mind. No amount of Zen-anything would shake his image loose.
By the time she got home, she was on the verge of calling Leslie and asking for the man’s number.
Instead, she entered her house, lit twenty candles, ran a hot bath with essential oils and sank into water up to her neck. She closed her eyes and pictured a beautiful field of ripened wheat waving in the breeze.
A handsome face and broad shoulders rose up out of the wheat and walked toward her, a sexy grin spreading across his face.
Ariana’s eyes popped open, and she sat up straight, splashing water over the edge of the tub. “No, he’s not the one. BODS is working on my match.” She had to be patient and wait for Leslie’s program to sift through the data and connect her to someone truly perfect for her.
A little voice whispered in her ear, Who could be more perfect than the stairwell stranger?
Ariana dipped a washcloth in the water, wrung it out and placed it over her eyes. She sank back down in the water and focused on serenity. She was almost there when her cellphone pinged with an incoming text.
She ignored it. The text could wait until she cleansed the tension from her system.
But what if it’s BODS sending you the data on your match?
Sitting up again, water sloshed over the edge of the bathtub, as she reached for her cellphone on the bench beside her. She fumbled with the device, her hand wet and slippery with essential oils. When she had the phone steady in her hands, she swiped the screen and read the text.
Congratulations! BODS found your match!
Click here to view your match’s profile.
Her heart beat so fast, Ariana felt like it might just leap out of her chest. She clicked the button and waited while the application pulled up the man’s profile.
No picture?
Where the picture should have been was a silhouette of a face and a note: Photo unavailable at this time.
“Damn.” She sighed and scrolled through the personal data. At least she had a name. Dillon Jacobs.
She frowned. Her friend Emma’s last name was Jacobs. Could it be one of her four brothers? Jacobs was a pretty common name. Maybe not.
She read more about the man.
He was in construction. That was good. Warmth spread throughout her body and down low in her belly. A man who worked with his hands would know what a woman wanted and know how to get her there.
So far, he intrigued her.
He liked dogs and horses. Another attribute in his favor. Ariana couldn’t be with a man who didn’t like animals.
He enjoyed fishing, hunting, sports and the outdoors. Ariana shrugged. She had never been fishing, but she was willing to give it a try. Her father had been an accountant, a little nerdy and never into sports or interested in the outdoors, beyond his neatly trimmed yard.
Ariana loved getting outside and going for long walks. It could work.
She drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. She could go out with Dillon Jacobs. One date wouldn’t be too much trouble. Hopefully, he would let her pick the location for the first date. That way she would know what to expect.
So, how did she go about letting him know she was interested? She scrolled down and found a button to push if she wanted to know more.
As she pressed her finger to the screen, another text came through, flashing across her phone.
Ariana, this is Dillon Jacobs. BODS matched us. Want to go out tomorrow?
Her heartbeat fluttered, and then pounded so hard she could barely breathe. As she positioned her hands to respond, the phone slipped and fell into the tub.
“Shit!” she cried, pushed to her feet and fished for her phone. Once she could get her fingers around it, she stepped out of the tub and wrapped the device in a towel.
Please, please, please, still work, she prayed as she dried the phone and looked down at the screen.
Nooooo! Ariana sank to the bathmat on the floor and shook the phone, hoping the water it had ingested would fly free and the phone would miraculously recover.
She tried rebooting it. Nothing.
Rice? Oven? Anything?
She ran naked through her house, dripping on the wood flooring. When she rounded the corner of the hallway and moved into the living room, she slipped and nearly crashed to the floor. A quick hand out to the side caught the wall, and she slowed her pace a little as she hurried to the kitchen.
She pulled out a glass casserole dish, poured uncooked rice into it, laid the phone in the rice and placed it in the oven. The she turned the oven on low and murmured a prayer. A friend had used this technique when she’d dropped her phone in the toilet. Surely bath water with essential oils wouldn’t be worse than toilet water.
With her phone in the oven, Ariana raced back to the bathroom, wrapped herself in her bathrobe and wiped up the trail of water from the bathroom to the kitchen before she fell and hurt herself.
When she got back to the kitchen, she pulled the phone out of the oven and tried it again. The damned thing wouldn’t even boot.
Ariana stared at the clock on the microwave. It was ten-thirty at night. Would Leslie still be awake? If she was, what could she do? Ariana needed a new phone and soon. Her match would be expecting her to answer his text, in the morning at the latest.
Now, she was beginning to rethink her decision to disconnect her land line. With no phone to make any calls, she couldn’t call Leslie, even if she wanted. Nor could she call Emma to ask if one of her brothers was named Dillon.
What about her computer? She could get on social media and look for Dillon Jacobs.
She hurried to her laptop and flipped it open. The battery was dead. Ariana ran with it to her office and plugged it into the charger.
Minutes later, she brought up the logon screen, keyed in her password and googled Dillon Jacobs.
As the screen was coming up, her laptop blinked out, the screen going completely blank.
Ariana squealed. “What the ever-lovin’ fuck!” Everything she touched seemed to be blitzing out on her. She didn’t have a desktop, having gotten rid of it in her effort to be more minimalistic. With no computer and no phone, she was out of luck. She couldn’t even consider calling Leslie for the phone number of the man who’d walked her out of the BODS offices.
Trudging back to her bedroom, Ariana dressed in her night clothes and lay in her bed, staring at the ceiling. Hell, she was afraid to touch the remote for the television. It might break as well.
For a long time, she stared at the texture on the walls, imagining stairwell guy with a quirky smile on his face, laughing at her stress-reducing techniques. Where were they now? They sure as hell hadn’t worked when everything had blown way out of her control.
Ariana reminded herself that some things were worth worrying about. Others…well…it just wasn’t that important. In the scheme of things, not being able to respond to a text for one night wasn’t that big a deal. It wasn’t cancer. She’d live through the disappointment and frustration.
After a wh
ile, her eyelids drifted closed. Her last thought was not of the text she needed to reply to, but of the big guy she’d met at BODS. What was he doing at the moment? Was he thinking about her at all?
Chapter 4
Dillon laid awake half the night with his cellphone beside him on the pillow, waiting for a response from his BODS match.
By morning, he still hadn’t slept worth a damn, so he rose before his alarm, dressed in shorts and running shoes and went for a run. When he got back, he still hadn’t received a return text in response to asking Ariana out.
He opened the app and checked her profile. Still no photograph of the woman he hoped to meet that day. He thought about the redhead. Hell, he’d thought more about her than this Ariana woman. He wished he could get on with the BODS date so he could prove they weren’t going to fall for each other. Then he would ask the redhead out.
With a construction site to run in downtown Austin, he didn’t have time to watch his cellphone for a text. He showered quickly, dressed in jeans and boots and grabbed his hard hat before leaving his downtown condo for the job site.
Though it was Saturday, he expected to see a busy crew working by the time he arrived at eight o’clock in the morning. He’d been paying overtime for the men to show up to work on weekends for over a month now. It was biting into his profits, but he refused to miss the deadline. His reputation as a contractor had been built on his ability to get jobs done on time and within budget. He had contingency funds built in to pay the overtime, so he wasn’t too worried about funds, but the timeline was tight, and he wasn’t sure how he’d bring it in on the due date.
As he pulled up to the site, he swore beneath his breath.
His crew was sitting around, doing nothing. Only half the people he’d expected had shown up.
He met the foreman, Patrick Sutton, in the portable trailer.
Pat stood with a phone to his ear when Dillon entered. He raised a finger to tell him he’d be a minute. “Okay. But be here as soon as you can make it. We have guys waiting on your work.” He ended the call and gave Dillon a tight-lipped look. “Joe Felton didn’t show up this morning.”