Page 9 of Failure to Match

“Aren’t you going to eat?” I asked Jackson. He’d done nothing but stare for the last five minutes. “The sooner we’re done with the meal, the sooner this night ends. I really don’t want to stick around for the full hour if we can help it.”

“Jamie. Tone it down.”

Jackson blinked slowly, his freakishly light eyes sliding over my features like he was having a hard time reading them. Odd, since I was doing absolutely nothing to mask the genuine contempt I felt toward him. It should have been written all over my face.

“You’d like to end the night early?” he asked carefully.

Man, his voice was so deliciously deep. And his subtle accent touched every word just enough to give them an attractive little curve.

How annoying.

“Yes,” I answered. “Very much so.”

We’d gotten all the info we needed. If Jackson was trying to throw these dates on purpose, there wasn’t anything we could do. He’d essentially wasted eight months of our lives and was about to cost us our jobs.

At this point, spending the next forty minutes with this man was about as appealing as having my eyelashes repeatedly waxed while listening to moist chewing ASMR.

It wouldn’t even matter if he confessed to throwing the dates on camera because we’d get fired for violating the client’s trust and tricking him anyway. There was no winning for us.

“Don’tyouwant it to end early?” I asked, crossing my arms.

He studied me for a long moment then held up a hand, presumably stopping the wait staff from delivering the next course.

“I mean, this is going rather terribly, wouldn’t you agree?” I insisted when he didn’t respond. “I know Charmed has the one-hour first date rule, but I won’t tell if you don’t.”

What was confusing to me was thathelooked confused. Did he think this was going well? Or was he just not expecting me to acknowledge it out loud?

Seriously, how the hell had not one person mentioned his appalling behavior in their post-meeting follow-up? And how had this man managed to make it through sixty-seven dinners without having at least one person walk out on him?

I was tempted.

So, so tempted.

My feet had already shifted, my fingers were already curling around the clutch on my lap, and with every silent second that ticked by, the urge became stronger. Until I couldn’t hold it in anymore.

“Ripper,” I said.

Jackson blinked. “What?”

“Fine,” Alice sighed in my ear. “Yeah, get out. We got our answer, I guess. We can just start applying for new jobs tomorrow.”

I’d shot to my feet before she was done talking, not taking into consideration how much alcohol I’d chugged in the span of fifteen minutes. The world spun out of balance for a moment, and I started to tilt on my heels.

Jackson bolted up and reached for my arm, which backfired in the most catastrophic way possible.

I wasn’t sure how it happened, exactly. One second, I was instinctively yanking back from his touch, and the next, my heelswere tangled in the drag of my dress, and the more I tried to correct my balance, the worse it seemed to get.

“Whoa, what the fuck is happ?—”

I didn’t hear the rest over the deafening sound of all the water rushing against my ears.

3

I was having a nightmare.A terrifyingly vivid nightmare but a nightmare, nonetheless. It made so much sense!

On the bright side, now that I’d realized I was dreaming, I was one step closer to waking up.

Probably right after I drowned.

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