Scoring a Soulmate, a Mr. Match Novella Read online

  Also by Delancey Stewart

  Mr. Match

  Scoring a Soulmate, a Mr. Match Novella

  Singletree

  Happily Ever His

  Happily Ever Hers

  Shaking the Sleigh

  Second Chance Spring

  Falling Into Forever

  Watch for more at Delancey Stewart’s site.

  Scoring a Soulmate

  A Mr. Match Novella

  Delancey Stewart

  Contents

  1. Love = Math

  2. Maverick, Elvis, and Polar Bears — Oh My!

  3. Paging Dr. Buttchin

  4. Here’s Your Tooth Back

  5. Math and Love Don’t Mix

  6. Selling It

  7. Scoring in Santa Monica

  8. Secrets and Soccer

  Sneak Peek of Book 1

  Chapter 1

  Love = Math

  MAX

  I was twenty-four when I discovered the equation for love.

  Maybe that sounds nuts, but the reality is that I'm a fucking mathematical prodigy. It's not a claim, or an arrogant assertion of hubris. If I was going to make an arrogant statement, I'd tell you how I was recruited to play pro soccer for the South Bay Sharks after my sophomore year at college. I'd tell you about my ridiculous mansion, my three cars, or about the fact that I've already saved enough at the age of twenty-six that no one in my family will ever have to work again.

  But I'm not actually an arrogant prick. Just a genius.

  And like I said, I discovered the equation for love at twenty-four.

  But let me back up a bit.

  When I was a kid I watched my mom's heartbreak when we lost my dad. Maybe I didn't get all the nuances of their love, of what exactly she was grieving when he was gone. I knew what I missed. I missed piggyback rides and wrestling, kicking the ball around the yard and the patient way my dad would explain the rules of soccer to me as we watched World Cup games. I missed the way he'd get me up out of bed in the middle of the night so we could sit side by side on the couch and cheer for Manchester United—something my mom really never understood.

  And I sort of got what my older sister Cat missed—a man to model how women should be treated, a set of big arms to comfort her when high school girls proved just as diabolical as the movies reputed them to be, and someone to steer her when she brought home guys with more piercings and hair product than her. I was too young to do any of that.

  But the hardest part about losing dad was what it did to Mom. And as I grew, I saw that while it was tough losing your best buddy and your dad, it was maybe harder losing your soulmate.

  I became fascinated with the way two people might fit together, and Mom suggested that we all started out just slightly incomplete to begin with. Not so much that we couldn't live on our own, but just lacking enough that when we found that thing we'd been missing, life turned into a whole other kind of adventure.

  "It's chemistry and luck," Mom said once as we sat at our favorite diner with milkshakes. "But it's not rocket science. Parts of you just fit with parts of the person you love. And if it's right, things just snap into place. It's not perfect, but it's close enough. The hardest part is finding that person who fits. And there's not just one fit, I don't think," she would say. "There are probably a few different people who might be right for each of us. Maybe more. But it's the right combination of elements—”

  "Like an equation," I'd suggested. "Where both sides need to be balanced."

  "Just like that, Max."

  "Oh my God, can we have one family outing that doesn't turn into a math lecture?" Cat, my older sister, wasn't as fond of math as I was. “Love isn’t a math problem,” she went on, drawing a series of hearts on the napkin in front of her as she spoke and then shading them to look three-dimensional. “Love is something magical, something you can’t define. Something you just know when you feel.” She looked up from the drawing, and added, “it’s the way I feel about Zac Efron. That’s love.”

  “It’s like that too, Cat,” Mom told her as I rolled my eyes.

  “It makes more sense if I think of it like an equation.” My sister might not enjoy it, but math was a comfort to me—it made sense. And the more I talked to Mom about love—something everyone seemed to regard as mystical and fated, the more I became convinced that it was just another equation, one I could solve.

  And as an adult, I started really working on it, testing different theories and algorithms, looking for the one that worked. When I was twenty-four and my sister was at the end of another dramatic relationship with a guy who was so wrong for her he might as well have been wearing a sign that said “NOT FOR CAT,” I found the one I was pretty sure would work. But it needed refining. And I needed to help my sister find someone who would appreciate all the great things about her, and love her despite her complete incompetence at math.

  I’ll be honest—part of my motivation was that if Cat was settled and happy, I’d feel better. She took Dad’s death hard, and I was too young to step up. She and Mom have always taken care of me, and now that I’m in a position to take care of them—financially if necessary, and mathematically, if they’ll let me—I plan to do it.

  With some convincing (mostly me assuring her there’d be no math involved on her part), my sister Cat was a willing participant in the tests, and this is her story. And mine.

  This is the story of how I became Mr. Match.

  Chapter 2

  Maverick, Elvis, and Polar Bears — Oh My!

  Cat

  "Oh my God, are you even listening to me?" I lifted myself up to peer over the arm of the couch in my brother’s living room to where Max sat at the dining room table, alternately pounding away at a keyboard and scribbling with a pencil on the notebook at his side.

  "Yes. There was the whining about the Swedish exchange student in art school, Johann, and how he took you out that one time, tried to get in your pants, and then told you it had been just a fling before he went back to the frozen tundra to wrestle polar bears or whatever."

  "Right. Except the polar bear part," I said, sitting up.

  "And then you were complaining about Andrew and how he compared you constantly to his ex, who apparently had the intellect of a mildly gifted snail but was blessed with a huge set of knockers. And then you told me about Rob and Richard and that guy, Maverick—the name alone should have warned you off, by the way—and finally, Elvis."

  "And?" I was looking for sympathy. Another relationship had gone up in smoke and I was clearly fated to be alone—at twenty-eight I’d expected to be married and pregnant by now. My parents must have named me Cat to save me time when spinsterhood knocked and I had to choose what kind of companionship to settle for as I headed into old age.

  "And what, Cat? You have terrible taste in men and a proclivity for picking dudes with ridiculous names." Max closed his computer and narrowed his eyes at me. He looked smug. My brother often looked smug. That’ll happen, I guess, when you’re blessed not just with mathematical genius (like no shit genius, seriously), and a career as a professional soccer player. The genes in our family were not fairly distributed. Though I am a delightful human being, it might be nice to be a genius.

  I lay down again. I was going to have one day of misery before I got back to work preparing for my art show.

  "Sis, I have a proposal for you."

  I rolled over, letting my arms hang over the armrest so I could get a better look at my little brother. I'd come over for dinner and to hang out, and for some brotherly advice. I did have a terrible track record with men, but being with Max usually made me feel a little bit better, if only because it helpe
d me feel just slightly less alone in the world.

  Max and I were nothing alike. He was all left brain and I was all right. He had an intuitive understanding of numbers and formulas, seeing patterns in things where other people only saw chaos, and I had a similar gift for art. It was the same thing really, I could find beauty and pattern in seemingly ordinary things, and find ways to represent them so others could appreciate them too. But getting Max’s analytical take on my life sometimes helped me put it in perspective. I tended to get a little dramatic. Just a tad. It was charming, I assure you.

  But where I saw beauty in everything, it seemed very few people saw it in me—or maybe they saw beauty, but they didn't see it as anything they wanted to hold on to for the long run. No one ever stuck around, and I was beginning to think I was destined to be alone.

  "There's someone for everyone," Max was saying. "It's a mathematical certainty. It's just a matter of testing the right attributes against a large enough sample size to find a viable match."

  "That's very romantic." I rolled my eyes. We’d been having this conversation for years. Max thought love was some kind of scientific problem to be solved. I thought it was something much more mystical than that—and for some people, I figured, lightning just didn’t strike. I’d tried so many dating apps I might as well have been standing on top of a mountain holding a metal stick, and the lightning would still choose some stupid tree nearby. Fucking trees. I heaved a dramatic sigh, which Max thought was aimed at him.

  "No, hear me out. I've been working on this a while." He stood and began to pace the room. Max was a good-looking guy—I mentioned he was a soccer star, right? He had the looks to go with it. The number of girls throwing themselves at Max was insane—but he had a habit of completely geeking out, and maybe that was the reason he was still alone in the love game.

  But maybe his magic math mind could help. I had nothing to lose.

  "I've been building a database and working on the right variables to test," he said. "If you'll be my first subject, I think I can use the algorithm I've created to find your perfect match."

  "You're going to use math to find my soulmate." I sat up and grinned at him. “Is this going to be like the time you made me buy exactly forty-three tickets for the raffle at school?”

  “You won five hundred dollars. That worked.” He raised an eyebrow.

  I lifted a shoulder. He had a point, though he’d made me give him half, and minus the forty-three bucks I’d had to spend to win, he’d come out ahead in that one.

  “What’s in it for you?” I asked him, suspicious now.

  “I want to prove the theory.”

  “That’s all.”

  “It could also be really lucrative,” he admitted, crossing his arms. His dark eyes twinkled and I could almost hear the gears ticking in his brain.

  I stood and waved my arms around his living room, furnished in a spare modern style, but absolutely opulent. “You don’t need more money, Max.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  "I’ve tried every dating site there is," I pointed out.

  "This will work better."

  I pulled my long blond hair up into a bun on top of my head, thinking about it. My brother was smart, that was for sure. If he thought he had a line on solving life's greatest mystery and wanted to help me, I might as well let him. I wasn’t getting any younger. "Okay," I said.

  "Okay?"

  "What have I got to lose?" I shrugged and stood up. "What do I have to do?"

  "I'm going to give you a questionnaire," he said. "It might seem like some of the questions are arbitrary or pointless, but just answer it as completely as you can, okay?"

  I nodded. "So you'll take my answers and match them up with...who?"

  "Men in San Diego. I've restricted my focus to the local area—San Diego and a fifty-mile radius. I've been collecting data for the last year or so to build the database while I perfected the algorithm. It's almost there. Ready to test."

  "Hold on. You’ve been gathering data on dudes in San Diego in your spare time?”

  “It sounds creepy when you put it like that.”

  “It is creepy.”

  “Just set up a skeleton site, ran a few ads. Nothing creepy—just gathering a pool to pull from.” He brushed an invisible speck off his chest as he explained this.

  “Huh. And these guys think what? What’d you tell them?” I was leaning over his computer now, trying to see if I could get a gander at this large pool of men. Maybe I could just sort through it myself, pick my own ‘match.’

  “I was truthful. They’re getting free memberships into what will become the most sought-after matchmaking service in Southern California. No guarantees, no time limits set. When I find a match, I contact them.” He closed the computer and recrossed his arms. “What do you say?”

  “Hang on, so what did these guys think when you told them who you are?” Obviously it was bizarre to have a pro soccer star everyone had heard of recruiting dudes for a dating app.

  “That part’s gonna have to be a secret. You have to agree to that.” His dark eyes were serious now, and he dropped his big hands onto my shoulders. “Swear, Sis.”

  “Okay, okay,” I agreed.

  His hands relaxed on my shoulders and he gave them a quick squeeze before letting me go. “What do you say then?”

  “I'll be your guinea pig," I agreed. "Let's get it going."

  * * *

  Two days later I was working in my studio, letting my mind run back over the insane questionnaire Max had made me fill out. It wasn’t just thorough. It was crazy. Max had taken a picture of me and then asked questions about everything from my blood type to my preferred pillow firmness. But I doubted there was any real possibility that a detailed questionnaire could accomplish what I hadn’t in twenty-eight years, no matter how encouraging my mother continued to be.

  “There’s someone for everyone,” she always told me.

  But maybe not for me.

  Besides, I had finally scored a solo show at a gallery in Santa Monica that I’d been hoping to land for years, and I had a lot to think about besides love, or my total lack of it.

  Honestly, I would have settled for a guy willing to stick around for more than two dates. I didn't need a soulmate, just someone who didn't seem hellbent on getting away from me as fast as they could after a few dates. I'd begun to get a complex. I was twenty-eight. I wanted kids. Lots of them. Time was a-ticking.

  Max called while I was in the zone—Ed Sheeran was singing, I was swaying as I put paint on the canvas, and my vision was erupting before me in a vibrant explosion of color. I let the call go to voicemail, and a few hours later when I was taking a break, I picked up the message.

  "Sis. Call me. I ran the numbers and I've got your guy. Pretty sure he's a perfect fit."

  I called Max back from the front patio of my little cottage. I rented a tiny place in Ocean Beach. It was nothing like Max's glamorous multi-million dollar high-rise on Mission Bay, but it was perfect for me. The ocean rolled beyond the sloping sand as the phone rang in my ear.

  "Hey," he said. "Ready to meet your match?"

  "Match? Is this the terminology we're going with?" A little blossom of hope popped out of the dark soil in my gut. I tried to ignore it.

  "Yeah. I'm Mr. Match. Like it?"

  "What about something more mysterious like Señor Suave, or Monsieur Romance?"

  "Because I'm not selling a body spray for hormonally challenged teens."

  "Fine."

  "I think it's catchy," he said.

  Made no difference to me. "Sure. I guess that works. All right, Mr. Match, tell me about my match."

  "Cool. Okay, so he's a doctor. He's twenty-eight, and he also plays the piano and volunteers at animal shelters."

  "Okay," I said. "Sounds good on paper. I don’t suppose he’s a closet poet or anything, too? I’m an artist, Max." Was it too much to expect that my perfect match would be artistic too?

  "It doesn’t work that way
. Look at the success rate you’ve had picking men based on your criteria. Trust the math. I'm emailing you his photo. If you say go, I'll email him with yours and set up the first date."

  "Okay, hang on." I pulled the phone from my ear and pulled up my email, waiting impatiently for Max's email to come through. When it did, I clicked the photo immediately and was not disappointed. Dark wavy hair hung boyishly around a clean-shaven handsome face with full lips and bright blue eyes. A cleft in the center of his chin reminded me a little of Gaston from Beauty and the Beast. "Wow," I said.

  "Good wow or bad wow?"

  "Good," I said, my voice holding more awe than I'd intended to convey. I'd never dated anyone so good looking. My insecurity spiked—what would he think of me?

  "So the butt-chin isn't a deal breaker?"

  "Butt chin? The cleft?" I let my eyes drag away from his gorgeous eyes to re-examine the cleft in his chin.

  "Yeah."

  I laughed. "No, it's cool. As long as he doesn't, like, get food stuck in there or anything."

  "I didn't have a question about regular hygiene of dimples, but maybe I can add that." Max’s sarcasm made his voice flat.

  "I'm sure it's fine."

  "So you'll go out with him?" He sounded weirdly excited.

  "Yeah, if he's willing to go out with me." This was the part where things fell apart. I knew I was a catch—but I felt like I needed time with someone for them to understand how. I wasn’t rich like Max, I wasn’t a famous athlete. I was a semi-successful artist who just wanted someone to love, to have a family with and to grow old alongside. I swallowed hard.

  "Cat, you're his perfect match. He'll be willing. Stand by."

  I could hear Max's fingers flying over the keyboard, and after a minute he said, "There we go. Done. Mr. Match—who, remember, is not me—has reached out with the match."