"We were talking about your fee," she said hesitantly. "It's a little...high. I mean, compared to Internet dating..."

He nodded thoughtfully. "Think of it this way, Alison. Internet dating is like a tendollar buffet. You pick out several things that look good, put them on your plate, and hope you can stomach at least a few of them. Matchmaking is like eating at the chef's table at a gourmet restaurant. You put yourself in his hands and trust that you're in for a five-star experience."

She had to admit that analogy really hit home. After all, hadn't Randy very nearly made her barf?

"Still, it's a lot of money," Alison said. "I'm going to have to think about it."

"I understand completely. But I'm also sure you understand that matchmaking is a very personalized service, which means I can take only so many clients at a time. My schedule is booking up fast."

"How fast?"

"I have room for only two more clients this month."

"But it's only the fifth."

"Exactly." He rose from his chair, came around his desk, and held out his hand. "It was nice to meet you, Alison. If you decide you'd like my help, give me a call. We'll talk more about what you're looking for in a man. If not this month, then maybe we'll see each other next month, okay?"

She rose and shook his hand. "Uh...yeah. Thank you for seeing me."

"Of course. You have my number. Just let me know when you'd like me to introduce you to your future husband."

With that, he sat back down, pulled out a file, and laid it open on his desk, moving ahead with business as usual. Alison walked to the door, each step a little slower than the last. Future husband. She loved the sound of that.

It wasn't as if she didn't have the money. But was it a smart use of her money?

She admitted to being a little impulsive, but it was usually limited to things like ordering octopus at a sushi bar, or dyeing her hair red. The fact that she'd even considered using a matchmaker was crazy enough. Could she actually spend fifteen hundred dollars to let a man find her a man? This could turn into a bigger disaster than her Florida trip, where she'd ended up as mosquito bait.

Or she could find the man of her dreams.

No. That was crazy. This was crazy.

She started to open the door, only to stop short, her hand on the doorknob. But if not this, then what? Was she just going to wait around, doing nothing, hoping for a man to stop her on the street and tell her he was the one?

Just take some time to think about it. A day, or an hour, or at least a few minutes...

Then she had a terrible thought. What if she waited until next month, and Brandon gave away her perfect match to another woman who hadn't hesitated to seize the opportunity?

Feeling a surge of conviction, she spun back around. "Brandon?"

He looked up. "Yes?"

"If I write you a check today, when can we get started?"

He pulled out his phone and hit a few buttons, then looked back up at her with those dark, sexy eyes, a smile of satisfaction playing over his lips.

"How does Thursday look for you?"

Chapter 3.

The moment Alison left the house, Brandon slipped the check she'd written him into his shirt pocket. He slapped shut the file on his desk, stuffed it randomly into a file drawer, and trotted up the stairs to the second floor. He stepped into the first room on the right, where Tom was leaning across the pool table, his cue in place, taking aim.

"That was fast," Tom said. "I'm guessing she told you to forget it. But hey. Nothing ventured, nothing gained." A flick of his cue sent the four ball into a side pocket.

Brandon pulled Alison's check from his shirt pocket. "Think again."

Tom's eyes grew wide. He dropped his cue, came around the table, and jerked the check out of Brandon's hand. He looked at it with disbelief. "No. No way. You did not just convince that woman to give you fifteen hundred dollars to find her a husband."

"Did you think I couldn't do it?"

"Hell, yes, I thought you couldn't do it!"

Brandon plucked the check out of Tom's hand and stuck it back into his pocket. "I thought you had faith in me all these years."

"Of course I have faith in you, as long as it involves a real business. But conning a woman into believing you're a matchmaker? Who the hell would have ever thought you'd ever be able to do that?"

"Con?" Brandon said. "There's no con involved here. I fully intend to deliver the services I promised."

"Right. You don't know crap about matchmaking."

"What's to know? I'll look through my grandmother's files. Find a guy who looks decent. Set her up with him. What's so hard about that? I have five shots at it, for God's sake. The odds are with me."

"Okay," Tom said, racking up the balls. "So you managed to get fifteen hundred bucks out of one client. That's a far cry from the thirty thousand you need. Where's the next client coming from?"

"I placed an ad on the Dallas After Dark website. When it comes out next week, I'll have more business than I know what to do with."

Tom lifted the rack, and Brandon grabbed a cue to break.

"Our option to buy the warehouse is good for only six months," Tom said as Brandon's break drove the six ball into a corner pocket. "If you don't get the money by then, I'll have to bring in another partner. But you're the guy I want. Are you sure you can pull off this gig?"

Yes. He was sure. Because there wasn't anything he wouldn't do to make it happen.

For years, Brandon had crisscrossed the country, making real estate deals and making money. He stayed in no-tell motels, played a little pool in the evenings, had a few drinks, and then got up the next day to guide a crew in renovating his latest project. It had been an incredible high-finding distressed properties in cities across the country, then racing the clock to turn hovels into showplaces and get them sold before his construction loans came due. Once in Vegas he had four projects going at once, and the money piled up until his bank account was so stuffed he couldn't imagine ever being broke again.

Then the bottom had fallen out of the real estate market.

He still remembered that horrible feeling when he had loan payments due and not a dime left to pay them. The projects had gone into foreclosure, leaving him with big losses, bad credit, and nowhere to turn.

Brandon and Tom had partnered on several projects in the past, so when Tom contacted him about the Houston deal, he sat up and paid attention. The owner was so motivated to sell that he'd have taken just about any offer, but it took a guy with vision to be able to see the possibilities for the old warehouse.

Brandon was that guy.

Turning that dilapidated warehouse into loft apartments was going to take some work, but even in a depressed market that area was so hot it practically sizzled. They couldn't miss. And if the company that owned the adjoining property succeeded in getting the zoning changed from residential to mixed use and put in the urban living center they wanted to, Brandon and Tom's investment would go through the roof. That part was a long shot, but even without it, they could easily walk away with a substantial profit, and Brandon would be off to the races again.

The seller had agreed to finance the deal as long as they came up with the down payment cash he was desperate for, so their creditworthiness had never been called into question. The only thing that stood between Brandon and that project was a lousy thirty thousand dollars, his half of the down payment. Three years ago, he'd have never been concerned about a pitiful amount of money like that, but he sure was now.

Then he'd found out his grandmother had died and he was her sole heir.

"I'll have the money," Brandon said as he dropped the three ball. "Don't worry about that."

"Didn't she leave any cash at all?"

"About eight thousand. So all I really need is twenty-two."

"Are you sure there's not some loophole in the will that will let you sell this house? Getting the money that way would be a whole lot easier than by playing matchmaker."

"Nope. I can live here as long as I want to. But if I move out, the house goes to my grandmother's church."

"I can't believe she willed her house to a church. That's so weird."

"Not for my grandmother. She practically had a pew with her name on it at the First Baptist Church for the past thirty years." Brandon aimed carefully, taking out the one and the five in a single shot.

Tom nodded down at the pool table. "You might want to consider selling this monstrosity. It's bound to be worth something."

"Not without restoration, and that costs a bundle. But I wouldn't sell it, anyway. This is a nineteenth-century Brunswick Monarch. I'm putting it in storage when I go."

"It's ugly as hell."

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And if I ever see you set a beer on it, I'm chopping off your arm at the elbow."

"What's the problem? It'd just blend in with the other rings."

"You heard me."

Tom was right. This pool table had seen better days, though it must have been amazing when it was new. Built of burled elm, it was inlaid with a mosaic of walnut, rosewood, and ebony in diamond patterns. The legs were four cast-iron lions stretching from beneath the table out to the corners, each one finished in fourteen-carat gold. Built at the end of the nineteenth century, it was still in the house when Brandon's grandmother and grandfather bought it in the 1950s. By then its condition was already compromised. The felt was scuffed and faded, the wood scratched and stained.

He remembered the long hours he'd spent playing on this table when he was a teenager. When he'd been forced to live with a grandmother he barely knew, it had been something to escape to when the awkwardness got to be too much. After everything that had happened, he spent the first few months gritting his teeth and smacking balls so hard they sometimes ended up on the floor. But gradually his finesse returned, the soft clack of the balls calming his angry, bitter thoughts and letting him breathe a little.

Looking back, he realized now that his grandmother had known what was going on in his head. She'd known just how much he had to work out, and not once had she ever interrupted him when he was in this room. She'd been the only stable influence he'd ever known, the one person who'd given him half a chance to be a normal kid.

"I'm keeping the table," he said, hitting the two ball into a side pocket. "But for the rest of the stuff, I called out a company that specializes in estate sales. They told me I could get only a few thousand for the furniture because of its condition, but that won't get me where I need to go."

"Did you check under the mattresses?"

"Give it up, Tom."

"But did you check?"

"No, and I also didn't rip up the floorboards or look for hidden closets. Trust me. There's nothing here."

"So you're going to be a matchmaker." Tom shook his head slowly. "Words I thought I'd never say."

Brandon couldn't have imagined it, either. But he'd also never been one to ignore opportunity when it was staring him right in the face. Once he dug through his grandmother's records and saw the high price she charged her clients, he realized all he had to do was play matchmaker himself, increase the number of clients, and in six months he'd have all the money he needed. And because he had this house to stay in, he'd have no living expenses to speak of. He knew people would question a man as a matchmaker, but he'd hustled enough real estate deals to know how to shoot from the hip and pour on the charm. He had no doubt he could convince just about anyone-man or woman-that he could introduce them to their perfect match.

And where his grandmother was concerned, he couldn't imagine that she'd intended him to become a professional matchmaker when she willed him her business. She merely expected him to liquidate it, pocket the money, and move on. So if he could make a little bit more from the business before he left town, was there anything wrong with that?

"When you close up shop in six months," Tom said, "what do you intend to do with the clients you have on the hook?"

"Give them prorated refunds. If I haven't given them five introductions yet, I'll refund for those they haven't received. It's all figured into the operational budget."

"Looks like you have this all worked out," Tom said.

"I never step foot into any situation without a plan."

"What about the clients your grandmother was already working with?"

"Two asked for refunds. I think the others figured they might as well stay on and see how I did."

"So how'd you convince this woman?" Tom asked. "Reading those women's magazines must have helped."

"Oh, yeah. You want to get inside the head of a woman, read a couple of those. That'll do it."

Especially the article on women who were obsessed with men, most of whom were also obsessed with getting married. It had given him some pretty good talking points about that particular state of mind. The Modern Bride thing had been an educated guess, but judging from the look on Alison's face when he mentioned it, he'd hit pay dirt.

"I also took a call from another client I'd successfully matched up. That helped convince her."

"But you haven't worked with any other clients yet."

"She doesn't know that."

Tom blinked. "You faked a phone call?"

"Just because it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it's not going to. Think of it as a dramatization of a future conversation I'm sure to have."

Tom looked at him dumbly. "You make my eyes cross sometimes, you know that?"

"Yeah. I know. That's why you've never been able to beat me at pool."

"Hey, don't get cocky. I've beaten you a time or two."

"Once in Miami when I'd had eight beers and no sleep, and once in Phoenix when that bartender's breasts fell out of her tube top."

"See, you get distracted, too."

"That woman must have been a thirty-eight F. A man would have to be dead and buried not to get distracted."

"So what's the woman like who just hired you?" Tom asked. "Maybe you should put her aside for yourself." He raised an eyebrow. "Or maybe for a trusted friend such as myself?"

"Conflict of interest," Brandon said.

"Oh. Pardon me. I didn't know there were matchmaker ethics."