Page 18 of Love in Fine Print

At the mention of a husband, Ben’s face popped into my mind. In fairness, his face had been popping into my mind every few minutes for the past forty-eight hours. Actually, it was more like migrating from the back to the front of my mind because since I’d seen him in the park, I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about him.

I went to sleep thinking about him and woke up thinking about him. I’d replayed every word he’d said to me. Every look we’d shared. And, most importantly, every time we’d touched.

The experience of him carrying me to the truck and into the clinic was better than at least fifty percent of the sex I’d had. Iloved the way it felt being in his arms. I’d never felt safer in my life. Yet, somehow, there was an air of danger around him.

I couldn’t explain it. But it was intoxicating, and I feared, addictive. I could easily lose myself in his eyes, his voice, his touch. I’d spent approximately two hours with the man and forty-eight hours later I was still obsessing about him and those fucking arms.

Trying to conceal my mental swoon, I snapped back, “Do you know how ridiculous that sounds?”

Trevor leaned his head back as he patted his mouth, miming a yawn to demonstrate how much this conversation was boring him.

“I’m serious.” My left brow twitched the way it did when my anxiety reached its limit.

I didn’t have very many tells. All my life people had told me I could easily be a card shark because I was smart and had a killer poker face. But my left brow twitch was something I could not control. It started when my mom would come home and tell me that she had a surprise, which always turned out to be a new man in her life or a trip she was taking or some renovation she was doing on the penthouse that would cost my dad money he didn’t have.

To this day, I hated surprises.

Trevor leveled me with his stare as he matter-of-factly stated, “We’ve been over this.”

I stared back at him as my mind tried and failed to come up with an argument that would win me this case. Was what he was saying ridiculous? Abso-fucking-lutely. Was he right? Sadly, yes. No unmarried man had ever made partner. And no woman had ever made partner, with or without a ring on her left finger.

Being a single woman was basically having two hurdles to overcome. If I removed one of them, maybe, just maybe, I’d be able to leap over the other and cross the finish line.

My internal conclusion must have shown on my face because Trevor’s lips curled up in a cat-who-ate-the-canary grin. “See, you know that I’m right.”

“I hate that you know me as well as you do.” I preferred people to be at arm's length. To be scared of me. Trevor was neither of those things. He never was.

“I know you do.” His self-satisfied grin spread even wider.

Trevor didn’t care that I was his boss. From the first day that he started at the firm as a paralegal, it was as if he’d seen through my icy façade. He broke down my walls like the Kool-Aid man, never placated me, and always told me when I was wrong. Or at least, when hethoughtI was wrong.

“So.” He clapped his hands together. “Are you ready to stop whining and be the badass bitch I know you can be?”

“What would that entail, exactly?” I never agreed to anything before knowing the scope of the commitment.

He sat back in his chair and opened his arms as if he was revealing the Holy Grail. “You need aprofessional.”

“You think you’re a professional?”

“I could be,” he retorted confidently. “But, for once, I wasn’t talking about me. I’m talking about a matchmaker.”

“A matchmaker?”

“Yes, and I know the perfect one. It’s been family-owned for over seventy years. It has the highest success rate of any matchmaking service, including all of the apps with their fancy, schmancy algorithms.”

“Fancy schmancy,” I repeated.

Trevor didn’t seem at all bothered by my parroting of the phrase. “It is the real deal, Holyfield.”

“Fine.” With a resigned sigh, I turned toward my computer and began to type in the company name so I could sign up. “What is it called?”

“I’m not telling you.”

I lifted my shoulder in a shrug and began typing. “You said it’s been family-owned for seventy years, right?”

“No!” Trevor leapt across the table and covered the keyboard with his hands. “No! You will not google the matchmaking service and you will not be setting up your profile or selecting any matches.”

I stared at him thinking he must be joking, or crazy, or maybe both. “If I can’t set up a profile, how in the hell am I supposed to go on a date and find a man to marry so I can lock down my partnership?”

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