Scoring a Holiday Match (Mr. Match) Page 5

  “No,” I said, though it sounded good. “I need you to explain it to me. Why go risk your life over and over again when you don’t have to?”

  “Why do surfers surf?” he returned. “Why do pilots fly? Why do climbers scale El Cap without a rope?”

  “Because they have a death wish,” I said under my breath. This topic was one we’d avoided, kept tucked in the corners of our time together. But it was always there.

  He sighed and rolled me in his arms so he could look down at me, and his face was a mix of resignation and pain. “I go away so I can’t disappoint my mother here.”

  I almost laughed. Here was the biggest, strongest man I’d ever met, telling me he was worried about disappointing his mother. “Your mother isn’t disappointed,” I said. “She’s terrified you’re not going to come home.”

  He gave me a sad smile. “I know she thinks that. It’s easier not to admit to herself that I’ll never be the guy she wants me to be.”

  “And who do you think that is?” I asked.

  “My father.” The word dropped between us, dark and full of venom. Ash didn’t talk about his father much, but he had told me that his mother had never been happy with the man, and that Ash had been terrified of him.

  “Why would she want you to be like a man she didn’t like? And why would you want to be like him at all?” I pushed myself to sitting, genuinely confused. I didn’t have much family here, and I’d worked so much as an adult, the relationships I’d once had were distant now. I didn’t understand.

  “I don’t want to be him. That’s why I left,” he said, rolling onto his back and dropping his big hands over his eyes. “And Mom hated him, but he was her version of what a man should be like. She might say she doesn’t want me to be like him, but then she spends all her time forcing me into suits and dragging me to the country club.”

  “Maybe because that’s all she knows,” I suggested. “Your mother is a tentative woman. I don’t really see her changing her life drastically just because your dad is gone. She’s just following familiar patterns, clinging to what she knows.”

  “Maybe I should take my mom fishing,” Ash joked.

  “Maybe not in Alaska, but . . . Yeah.”

  He dropped his hands to stare at me. “You want to see Caroline Bailey with bait in her hands on a boat?”

  “You’re taking me too?”

  “We are not going fishing.”

  I reached for my phone and found a charter fishing service. “Let’s go fishing, Ash. Today.” I couldn’t have told you why this idea stuck in my mind the way it did, or why it felt like the right thing, but when the three of us were on a fishing boat, leaving San Diego Harbor later that morning, I knew it was perfect.

  Caroline sat at one side of the boat, her huge sunglasses covering her face and a huge hat on her head. But the thing that convinced me this was right was the way she was looking at her son, an enormous smile on her face.

  “Ash has never taken me fishing,” she told me as I sat beside her.

  Ash was busy chatting up the captain, so it wasn’t until later that he noticed how different his mother was out here on the boat. Gone was the uncertain, tentative woman who floated from room to room in the mansion her husband had left her in. The woman on the boat was laughing heartily, drinking a can of beer as the captain told her a story about a group of golfers who had decided fishing was their real calling.

  “She’s so different out here,” he said, coming to sit beside me. “I would never have expected it.”

  I nodded at him, joy spreading through me at his nearness, his happiness. “I think at some point we trade places a little bit,” I said. “The adults raise us as kids, and we live in their worlds. But when we’re grown, if we want to keep them close, it’s our turn to show them our worlds, the ones we were able to make because of their guidance, their care.”

  He leaned close to me and wrapped an arm around my waist. “You are the wisest woman I’ve ever met, Rose Gonzalez.” And after planting a kiss on my cheek, he took both my hands in his and slid off the bench, dropping to a knee in front of me.

  Caroline turned just in time to see this happen, and a hand flew to her mouth. She tapped the captain to turn and see too.

  “I never thought I’d find someone I really wanted to be with,” Ash said as everything inside me shook. “I never thought I’d find a woman who understood me, who challenged me, who encouraged me and with whom I would want to forge new adventures every day.

  “But you, Rose . . .” he paused, and I could see him struggling with emotion as he said the next words. “I love you. I know it’s all too fast, and it’s crazy. But I also know it’s right. Rose, will you marry me?”

  He was right. It was too fast. And it was crazy. And it was right. “Yes,” I said.

  Caroline shrieked and came across the deck to embrace us both when we’d finished kissing. She and I were both crying, and the captain was busy digging in one of the cupboards up front for something.

  “What are you doing?” Caroline asked him.

  He pulled out a notebook, the pages flapping in the breeze. They were covered with marks, like he was keeping score. He flipped to a half-filled page and made another mark. “That’s three hundred and six,” he announced.

  “Three hundred and six what?” Ash asked, his arms tight around me.

  “Proposals on this boat. It’s why I renamed her the Deal Sealer.”

  As we motored back into the harbor that evening, Ash’s arm around me and the warmth of his body pressed to my side, I dared to ask the question that had been on my mind all day, and for the weeks that had passed. “Are you still leaving in two days?”

  He looked down at me fondly, and then leaned in, kissing the top of my head. “I’ve asked my substitute to stay on for the season,” he said. “And I’ve listed the boat for sale.”

  I pulled away so I could see his face. If he looked upset, or sounded sad, there was no way I could let him do it. But he looked serene and peaceful as he gazed down at me. “You’re staying?”

  “I’m staying.”

  And as we drew up into the slip, surrounded by the merry bobbing of masts and lights all around us, I kissed my fiancé and squeezed his mother’s hand. “I didn’t know fishing could be so life changing.”

  “Someday I’ll take you to Alaska,” Ash said. “That’s real fishing.”

  “Ash,” I told him, “I’ll go anywhere with you.”

  Scoring with the Surfer

  A Mr. Match Story

  Chapter 10

  Margaritas and Racoons

  Tallulah

  Look, it’s not that I’m dead set on breaking the rules. It’s just that half the rules in my world were created by moronic people who weren’t affected by them.

  The league? Rules originally created by commissioners (men, by the way) who were looking to make a buck. Thankfully, that’s changed and women’s soccer is on the upswing, though we’re still not making what the men make. (The men didn’t win the world cup this year either, so stay tuned…)

  My own life? I was raised by a single dad, so his rules tended to be a little over the top. (No dating until you’re forty, no makeup until high school, and no hair or beauty implements that look like ancient torture devices. This last one was remedied by an extensive educational program for Dad on the various techniques women use to do things like curl their eyelashes and hair. After all, as a single dude, he liked the results, he just didn’t have any idea how they were created. Raising me made him a more cosmopolitan dude.)

  And Mr. Match.

  That’s a whole other can of worms.

  Nothing against Max Winchell. He’s the genius who created the site in the first place, and I’m not arguing that it worked for him.

  But he put me in charge, and that means it’s time to put the fire back in matching. (See what I did there?)

  Yeah, Max’s version was pretty by the book. People fill out the intake forms, the system parses them and does all that mathem
atical shit Max was always going on about, and then it spits out matches based on statistical likelihood of agreement on various things. But there’s no wiggle room there. And I could be wrong, but I think making a love match is still something of an art. Maybe it’s just the woman’s perspective I’m bringing to it. Either way, I’m testing a new system. One with a little more human judgment applied.

  It’s Tallulah Time. Welcome to Ms. Match. (Okay, I signed a legal document saying I wouldn’t change the name officially. But between you and me. Wink wink, nudge nudge.)

  And what better way to test the new system than by making some matches for the most willing participant I’ve been able to find?

  Me.

  In my mind, there are three absolutely critical characteristics required for a guy to get my attention.

  1) He’s gotta be athletic. I’m a pro soccer player. He’s gotta keep up.

  2) He’s got to be hot. Not necessarily in a perfect kind of way, but there has to be at least one really mind-blowing physical attribute on any guy I choose. The Hemsworth factor. A girl needs something to focus on.

  3) He’s got to be smart. I dated a guy once who was geographically challenged, and it was a huge deal breaker. He suggested we could travel, take a vacation to South America. My mind lit up, thinking about Patagonia and Rio. Then he suggested we go to Louisiana. I bought him a world map and told him we were done.

  So as I sat down at the table in Old Town and ordered a big ass margarita, I had high hopes. I’d run my profile three separate times, given the output the Tallulah screening, and then set up a date with the best candidate.

  There were people everywhere—Old Town is a tourist trap, after all—but I spotted Noah as soon as he stepped out onto the patio under the twinkling lights strung between the old Eucalyptus trees.

  I stood and shot a hand up, and Noah’s eyes landed on me and widened before he headed my way with a smile.

  “Tallulah?” He asked, leaning over slightly as he reached the table.

  “Noah,” I said, reaching out a hand for him to shake. “Happy to meet you.”

  He shook my hand firmly and gave me a grin—a little lopsided if you want the truth, but that’s what made it charming—and he sat. I liked that he didn’t take the chair across the table, opting instead for the one right at my side. Noah was tall. Like six-four. Which, considering I’m only five four myself, made him stand out immediately. But he also had a smile that could melt any woman’s heart (and her nether regions), with gleaming white teeth and a broad mouth with full lips. And his dark eyes danced when he smiled. When I’d seen his photo, something inside me had flipped over like a tiny love dolphin. Noah had the Hemsworth factor. Hot. In a non-traditional kind of way.

  “So, Old Town, huh?” He leaned his elbows on the table and leaned in a bit, looking around and then sending me that grin again.

  I smiled back at him, and then looked around us at the mess of tourists with margaritas as big as dinner plates and over-cheesy Mexican food served on platters that would feed entire families south of the border. “I love it here,” I admitted. “I know most San Diegans wouldn’t set foot here unless they had visitors in town, but …” I sighed, leaning back in my chair. “I love it.”

  He cocked his head to one side, the dark hair falling over his brow. “What do you love about it?”

  The waitress hurried by and Noah pointed at my drink and ordered one for himself.

  “Let’s see,” I said, meeting his interested eyes as I thought about it. “It’s always moving, always light and happy. People come here and things are just a little brighter, a little bigger than in the real world. The lights, the huge drinks, the mariachi music. It’s like real life, only it’s like the theme park version.”

  He pressed his lips together and looked around, nodding as his giant margarita appeared. He took a sip and then smiled at me again. “I like it too,” he said, and for some reason my heart actually lifted a tiny bit inside me. “My brothers give me shit about it, but I love any place that can turn a regular day into something special or different.”

  “That. Exactly.” I might have been nodding a little too furiously, and maybe I shouldn’t have pointed my finger at him so enthusiastically or jabbed it into his very firm shoulder. But I had a bad habit of over-expressing.

  Noah just laughed, though, as I pulled my hand back and sipped my drink.

  “So,” he said, narrowing his eyes at me. The way he drew out the word brought my focus back to his face from where it had been lingering on his very tight and bulging biceps, visible just below the sleeve of the white shirt he wore. “You play soccer.”

  I nodded.

  “Professionally.”

  “I do,” I confirmed, punctuating this with more enthusiastic nodding. “For the Oceanside Stars.”

  “You any good?”

  My spine stiffened. “Um. Yeah, I am.” You didn’t play professionally if you weren’t any good. I was about to deduct points for stupid questions, when I noticed that the smile was back, pulling up one side of his face more than the other, creating a dimple there. I resisted the urge to run my finger over it. We’d just met. And the guy had just questioned my soccer skill.

  He chuckled and then leaned in. “I watched the Stars’ last season on in the internet last night. I know you’re good.” His voice was low, his tone intimate, like he was sharing a secret with me. But what got me was the eyes. Something in those dark chocolate eyes was glowing with appreciation and respect, and when I saw it there, I realized I might be in actual trouble. “You’re not good, actually,” he continued in that tone that was making my fingers and toes tingle with what felt like anticipation. “You’re phenomenal.”

  Pride filled me and added to the warmth caused by his nearness, the margarita, and the fact that I was in my happy place here in Old Town. “Thanks,” I said. “And what about you? You have a surfing school, huh? So you must be a shitty surfer.”

  “I’m the worst,” he laughed. “You know what they say. Those who can’t do, teach.”

  My Dad had taught me to play soccer. And he was pretty good, so I wasn’t sure about this saying, but I had heard it before. “And you teach kids, right?”

  “And soccer stars, if they want to learn.” He leaned into my shoulder, bumping it with his own.

  Shit. We’d escalated to second-level flirting, and now he was asking me on another date. I hadn’t planned for that. I’d thought tonight would be about just checking him out, deciding if my added screening process for Mr. Match was a good idea or not. We were in uncharted territory.

  “What makes you think I can’t surf already? I grew up in San Diego, after all.”

  He looked down quickly, as if realizing he’d made an error. “Sorry,” he said, catching my eyes again, the dimple appearing. “I guess I was hoping maybe you didn’t surf already. I’d love to be the one to teach you.” His voice was low and rumbly, and the honesty just about sent me to the floor.

  “Yeah,” I said, my mouth taking over for my mind, which was still trying to figure out how I’d lost control of the plan here. “I’d like that,” I said. And then I leaned toward him, and Noah met me halfway, brushing his lips lightly across mine and sending sparks exploding overhead.

  One of the sparks actually landed on Noah’s hand and he leapt to his feet, cursing.

  People around us were shrieking and jumping up from tables, and the place was generally erupting in chaos as the strand of twinkle lights above us sparked and then ignited into a line of flames.

  My mind spun as Noah yanked me away from the overhead blaze, and we watched as the waiters brought out wet dishtowels and threw them over the top of the strand while another one shimmied up the nearby tree and detached the end from the trunk, letting it fall across the patio in a blackened strand. As we watched the employees dispatch the faulty lights, I realized Noah had his arm protectively around my shoulders and I was pressed firmly into his broad firm side. It was warm and felt safe. I liked it. A lot.

/>   “Apologies, senors and senoras,” said a little man who came out in a huge fancy sombrero. “We have this problem now and then, you see. It is only Hector. He plays tricks on us.”

  Noah and I were not the only people looking at each other with confused expressions.

  “He will eat anything,” the man explained, his hands spread wide and his tone apologetic. “Rubber gloves, wallets… he chews the lights in the trees.”

  “Sounds like Hector has more issues than a newsstand,” Noah said under his breath. I burst out laughing.

  “And now, Hector, he brings his son,” the man went on, getting comfortable now with this divulgence of Hector and his family’s odd proclivities for eating inedible objects. “And I worry that soon we will be serving fried raccoon.” The man looked sad, and Noah and I exchanged a glance full of equal parts amusement and confusion. Raccoon?

  The man shrugged and looked around. “One drink on the house for everyone! On Hector!” He called out, and Noah and I returned to our table, figuring that if Hector was buying us a drink, we’d better accept it.

  “So,” I said slowly, looking up into the trees arching over us in the warm breeze. “Hector is a raccoon, right?”

  “That’s what I’m thinking.”

  I leaned back in my chair, chuckling. “I thought the sparks we’re just from the kiss.”

  Noah shot me that heartbreaking lopsided grin again. “Let’s go with that. Way hotter than raccoons living on the edge.”

  Laughing, I took another sip of margarita, feeling the cold liquid running down inside my throat as every other part of my body warmed with Noah’s smile. I was happy. This date was working out, and I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t congratulating myself for knowing as well as or better than Mr. Match himself. Max never should have doubted me…math isn’t everything.

  “So can I take you surfing tomorrow?” Noah asked me, taking my fingers in his own on the table top and fixing me in that doubt-dissolving chocolate gaze.