Mister Match (The Match Series Book 1) (24 page)

Chapter
28

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“W
ow,” Jacob was saying, “you’re even hotter than I expected.”

Lisa hid her scowl in a swig of her Negra Modelo.

She sat with Willow just one table away from where Clare was seated with Jacob, in a dark corner of the Sidecar. Lisa’s back was to them, in hopes that Jacob wouldn’t see or recognize her. But she’d stolen a few surreptitious glances over her shoulder, and had seen Clare leaning seductively toward him, crossing her arms under her breasts to showcase her cleavage.

“Well, you’re exactly as hot as I expected,” she heard Clare drawl.

Willow giggled and then clapped a hand to her mouth, like a schoolgirl trying not to laugh aloud during a test.

“So should we get out of here?” Jacob was saying. “My place is really close. We could head over there and...get to know each other a little better.”

His greasy voice was making Lisa’s skin crawl. “What are we supposed to do?” she whispered to Willow.

“Just wait,” Willow murmured serenely, under her breath, and took a sip from her drink.

“I don’t know,” Clare was saying, coyly. “I don’t normally go home with felons.”

Lisa’s heart froze for one long beat.
Here we go,
she thought.

Jacob seemed to pause for a half-beat. “With what?”

The poor guy. Lisa couldn’t help but feel just a little bit sorry for him. Clare was playing with him like a cat batting at a mouse. He didn’t even seem to realize he was staring into the jaws of his own demise.

“With felons,” Clare repeated, sweetly. “I did a little research while I was waiting for you to show up this evening. Did you know that blackmail is a felony in the state of Texas?”

Covertly, Lisa shifted in her seat just enough to see Jacob in profile, right at the moment that his smile gave way to confusion.

“So what?” he asked.

“So,” Clare said, with a shrug of her pretty shoulders. “I thought that was interesting. If you try to blackmail someone for over twenty thousand dollars, it’s a second-degree felony, and you can get at least five years in prison. Or even up to life, if you already have a record, or if the judge gets a bad impression of you.”

“What’s that got to do with me?” Jacob said, hotly, as if a petty show of bravado could conceal the fact that his face had turned a guilty shade of gray.

Clare nodded at Willow, who smiled at Lisa.

“Let’s join our friends, shall we?” Willow said, not bothering to lower her voice now. She stood and moved her chair to sit at Clare and Jacob’s table.

Ignoring the quaking in her stomach, Lisa followed her lead.

“What the hell—” Jacob started, but then stopped abruptly when he saw Lisa. “You,” he hissed. “What the hell is this?”

“Aw, poor sweetie,” Clare said. She reached out and patted his hand. “It’s okay, take a minute. I know it must be a shock, to come face-to-face with the woman you tried to use in your ridiculous plot to blackmail Mister Match.”

“I didn’t blackmail anybody,” Jacob hissed, and shoved his chair back as if to leave, but Clare pinned him with a deadly stare.

“Sit down,” she commanded.

To Lisa’s great surprise, Jacob sat, like a naughty little boy being chastened.

“We all know exactly what you did,” Clare went on. “And for future reference, if you’re dumb enough to try a ridiculous stunt like this ever again—not that you should, because as I said, blackmail is a felony offense. But since you very well might be just that dumb—can I suggest that you create a dummy Gmail account first, so it’s harder to trace your email back to you?”

Jacob winced.

“You know what else I discovered,” Clare went on blithely, “when I was Googling ‘blackmail’? I found out that in the state of Texas, when you try to blackmail someone via email, it bumps your crime up to a federal offense.”

“A fed—a federal offense?” he stuttered.

Lisa was finding it harder and harder not to feel sorry for the poor idiot, and harder and harder not to laugh.

“That’s right,” Clare said. “See, the Feds are the ones who own the Internet, and you just used their property to commit a felony. That’s a huge, huge no-no, Jacob.”

“Huge,” Willow agreed.

“It’s called Internet fraud,” Clare added. “It can tack five to ten years onto your sentence.”

Lisa stifled a snort. She was fairly certain “the Feds” didn’t “own” the Internet, which called the rest of what her was saying into question. But Jacob didn’t seem to notice the potential factual flaw. On the contrary, he seemed to be falling for every word.

For a moment, no one spoke. Then Jacob’s face fell. “I was just trying to get a little money,” he said, his whining tone as pathetic as his demeanor. “I ran up my credit cards, like, way too much, and then I saw a thing on E! News the other night about that dating site guy and his fiancée who’s been cheating on him. And it was
you
.” He scowled at Lisa. “And you’d just gone out with me, so I knew you were a cheater. I can’t stand women who cheat.”

Outrage burst hotly in Lisa’s chest. “Well, I can’t stand men who lie through their big, white teeth,” she hissed at him. “You said you had nudie pictures of me.”

Jacob’s face fell again. “I had an old girlfriend once who looked a lot like you. That’s why I was so excited to meet you, when we started talking on Mister-Match. I always thought she was really pretty. And then when I found out you were just like her, a dirty cheater—”

“Excuse me,” Lisa interrupted, outraged all over again, but Clare placed a quelling hand on her arm.

“Let the poor man speak,” she said, giving Lisa’s wrist a purposeful little squeeze.

“I just figured I could use the pictures I had of me and Angela,” Jacob went on miserably, “and get a little money out of the deal, either from Mister Match or from whatever celebrity website wanted to buy the pictures from me.”

He pronounced it “pitchers,” which, for some reason, made Lisa’s anger toward him dissipate a bit. He was like a little boy—albeit a very ignorant, dangerously misguided one.

“Aw.” Clare tilted her head. “Such a bummer that your idiotic little plot didn’t work.” She placed her cell phone on the table and tapped its screen with scarlet fingernails. The look she gave Jacob appeared genuinely sympathetic. “And now you’ve gone and dug yourself an even deeper hole. See, I just recorded everything you said and texted the audio file to Willow, here, and to Lisa, and also to Adam Match. In case you don’t quite understand what that means, it means we have your confession on tape.”

Lisa felt oddly breathless. When Clare had said fixing her mess would be easy-peasy, Lisa hadn’t actually believed her. But now, less than an hour later, her brilliant friend had gotten the poor fool to admit everything, and had recorded the entire thing.

Jacob was blinking hard, clearly trying to wrap his brain around this turn of events.

“There’s a police station two blocks away,” Clare went on, calmly. “You can come with us, right now. We’ll head over there together and tell them the whole story. I can have Adam meet us, so he can show your email to the cops, and we can get everything all straightened out. Who knows? If this is your first offense, maybe you’ll end up getting a light prison sentence, like five years instead of fifteen or twenty.”

Jacob was looking positively ill.

“Or,” Clare said, and smiled sweetly. “You can do us a teensy, weensy little favor, and I can make this whole mess go away. It’s your choice.”

“Favor?” Jacob repeated. His suspicious gaze slid to each of them in turn. “What favor?”

“All you have to do,” Clare said sweetly, “is sell a story to the press. Not your bogus story, of course. Our story.”

He was watching her with distrust, but Lisa could see defeat plain on his face.

“All right,” he said, finally. “What do I have to do?”

Clare smiled, Willow clapped her hands, and Lisa found herself actually starting to feel hopeful.

T
wo days later, she groaned as she stepped into the women’s locker room at the Town Lake YMCA and sank onto a bench. Why she’d agreed to meet Clare and Willow for a Pilates class after work, she had no idea. Maybe it had been some misguided attempt to follow through on the resolution she’d made days earlier, in the car with Adam, to say yes to life instead of living the cautious, lonely existence she’d gotten so used to leading.

If sore, aching muscles and thighs that felt like quivering jelly were the consequences of saying yes to life, maybe she should just go back to saying no again.

“Wasn’t that awesome?” Clare said, stripping off her sweat-soaked tank top before grabbing the remote control that was Velcro-ed to the wall and pointing it at the television mounted above it.

“That was almost better than yoga,” Willow enthused, stretching her willowy arms above her head.

“That was almost better than sex,” Clare said, punching buttons on the remote. “Wait, what am I saying? No, it wasn’t.”

“Ugh,” Lisa grunted. “I’m never doing that again.”

“What, sex or Pilates?” Clare asked. “Oh, look,” she went on, without waiting for a response. “Here we are, just in time. Let’s see how our boy did.”

She used the remote to turn up the volume on the television.

“Get the latest on Mister Match,” the announcer was saying, “from the man who tried to break up the dating site mogul’s engagement. Was it simple jealousy? A personal vendetta? Or something more? Find out, after the break.”

Lisa sat up straighter, wincing as her muscles protested the sudden movement. “Is this it?” she asked, tensely.

“Yep.” Clare’s eyes were glued to the screen, even though it had switched to a commercial about Ford trucks. “This channel does their celebrity news updates at seven, so I figured a six p.m. Pilates class would be a good way for us all to loosen up and get some good endorphins pumping through our systems. That way, we’re prepared to handle whatever might happen.”

She sounded almost grim, which wasn’t encouraging. Lisa’s stomach quaked. If Clare wasn’t entirely confident, then Lisa definitely wasn’t.

“I’m going to rinse off,” Clare said. “Don’t let anyone touch that remote.” She swished off toward the showers.

Two minutes later, she was back, dripping water onto the floor and the bench.

“Just in time,” Willow said, grabbing the remote to bump up the TV volume a few bars higher.

The same, skinny announcer reappeared on the screen. “A cheating scandal has taken Adam Match, founder of dating site Mister-Match.com, by storm,” she said.

Her co-host, a blandly handsome man in a suit, nodded. “That’s right, Chelsea.” A rectangular photograph appeared above their shoulders.

Lisa caught her breath. It was the picture of her with Reese, on their breakfast date, a few weeks earlier. Instantly, her stomach churned with shock, fear, anger—all the emotions she’d felt the first time she’d learned her photograph was all over the Internet.

“So Adam Match announces he’s engaged, just totally out of the blue,” the male announcer said, taking over the narrative. “Which came as a surprise to everybody, since the entire Internet has been trying to figure this guy out for, like,
ever
—I mean, is he gay? Is he straight? Is he single, is he taken? Please, God, tell me single and gay. The guy is
hot
.”

“How did you connect Jacob with this show, again?” Lisa asked distractedly.

“The guy co-host, Jeremy?” Clare nodded up at the television. “I drank him under the table, once upon a time. We’ve been friends on Instagram ever since.”

Lisa frowned. She had only the vaguest idea what Instagram was. “You drank him under the table?”

Clare waved a hand dismissively. “Strip club. Bachelorette party. Long story. Tell you later. Let’s listen.”

Chelsea, the female co-host, was laughing. “But all those questions were answered, just a few weeks ago, when Mister Match announced on a talk show that he was engaged to a woman named Lisa. But then it seemed like not even five minutes later—”

“This photo shows up,” her co-host cut in, “and starts circulating all over the Internet. This is his fiancée, and
this
is supposedly the guy she’s cheating on him with.” He shook his head. “I mean, I just don’t see it. Have you seen Adam Match? Come on, put up his picture. Show us Mister Match.”

On cue, the photo of Lisa and Reese was replaced with one of Adam. It looked like a promo picture from a press kit. He was wearing a slim, dark suit, his jacket slung over his shoulder, and he was grinning at the camera.

Lisa felt the punch of seeing him squarely in her chest. It had been days since she’d seen him last, and every second since had felt like simply breathing required energy and concentration. Not talking to him was an act of pure will. The only thing harder would have been to go ahead and dial his number, knowing how they’d left things—and more to the point, how things had ended between them, and how Adam seemed to feel about her now.