The Matchmaker Meets Her Match Read Online Free

and it wasn’t just getting laid. He wouldn’t have shown up at her door if that was what he wanted. But if he couldn’t even admit to himself that he wanted a life partner, how was he ever going to meet one? And what Rilka had to believe was that beneath the flippant remarks there existed a man worth knowing. She hoped so, anyway. If only she could find the woman who didn’t mind wading through the thorns.
    There’s someone for everyone
, she reminded herself. Her grandmother had really believed that, but Rilka no longer did. She herself was an excellent example. She was thirty-seven and working on her sixth year of celibacy. She’d never found “the one.” Gran used to say love didn’t blossom only between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine, and that you never knew …
    To Gran, that was the beauty, the promise, the hope, of her work. To Rilka it was a depressing commentary on it. You didn’t know there was someone for everyone. You just had to believe it. Or not.
    Rilka glanced at the brass mantel clock and saw she’d have time for a quick sandwich before Duncan’s early afternoon appointment. Good. She was going to need sustenance to deal with him.

Chapter 2
    Jeremy rolled down the sidewalk to where his truck was parked at the curb. When he got back to work, his brother was going to ask him how it went, and Jeremy was going to say, “It went weird.”
    Not what he’d expected when Nate had handed him a card with an address, a name, and a time, and said, “I made the appointment for you. Be there.”
    A flare of anger had burned low in his stomach and Nate, correctly anticipating that, had said, “Look, I met Sandra on an online dating site. How pathetic is that?”
    “Pretty pathetic,” Jeremy had agreed.
    He hadn’t tried the online route because he knew if he disclosed his … situation, he’d get the two kinds of women he’d already had enough of, but if he didn’t disclose his situation, he’d have to go through the shocked surprise with every woman he met. Rilka had managed her reaction pretty well, but most people didn’t. What he couldn’t stand was when someone seemed disappointed to meet him. He had a fairly sturdy ego, but he got tired of that.
Really
tired of that. Bad enough at the shop when customers weren’t sure he could do the work. It was plain depressing in his personal life when women wrote him off before he opened his mouth because he wasn’t what they pictured when they pictured what true love would look like.
    Rilka had been expecting a regular Joe but she hadn’t been
disappointed
in him. Of course, she hadn’t been looking at him as a potential mate.
    “You need someone to weed out the jerks,” Nate had said.
    So Jeremy had sucked it up and he’d gone, exposing himself and his insecurities and his vulnerabilities to the matchmaker, whom he’d assumed would be something along the lines of an elderly Jewish grandmother. His heart had thudded way too happily when he’d seen the dark-haired woman about his age open the door. Like everyone else, she’d looked first where he would be if he could stand, then dropped her eyes to where he sat.
    Which meant Nate hadn’t mentioned about the wheelchair, or the missing legs, both above the knee. But he understood it was kind of hard to work into ordinary conversation.
    Jeremy had bantered with her about getting laid, his stomach twisting into a knot because he kept thinking,
It’s not just sex I want.
But he didn’t know how to say that. Especially not to Rilka, who seemed to hate men, women, and love. Sort of not the mindset he’d expected from a matchmaker.
    Yeah,
it went weird
pretty much summed it up.
    • • •
    Every time Rilka opened the door to Duncan O’Hayre, he took her breath away. He was gorgeous, in a knee-weakening, resolve-undermining way, all dark hair and sleepy eyes and sex. He dressed like a man on the cover of GQ, even when he was just strolling to the corner grocery for a quart of milk. He had