The Matchmaker Meets Her Match Read Online Free Page A

charming manners, a body like a Greek god, and he smelled good enough to make her want to strip and roll in him. His voice, deep and husky, sent a shiver down her spine. The icing on the very yummy cake was that he was straight, so when you had a fantasy about him, you thought,
Hey, it could happen.
    Unfortunately, he was — well, there was no politically correct, perfectly sensitive way to put it. He was dumber than a box of rocks. He could get dates, he just couldn’t get girlfriends, and he had come to Rilka to change that.
I want someone to grow old with
, he had said soulfully and at the time she hadn’t understood how that could be hard. So far Rilka hadn’t been able to get him past a third date and most of the time not past a first.
    He had a successful modeling career only because his manager ran herd on him, assigning him an assistant to make sure he got to his shoots on time and followed directions appropriately. He was such a sweetie. He tried so hard. And yet. His current assistant was sitting behind the wheel of the town car parked at the curb. Rilka waved at the girl and shut the door.
    “How’s it going?” she asked Duncan as she headed down the hall.
    “Fine,” Duncan said vaguely, following her into the kitchen. He took the chair she offered and smiled pleasantly at her. It really took someone special to be too dumb to model without help.
    You look and you look
, Rilka thought,
but there’s no one home
. She sighed. From long experience, she did not offer him refreshment. He would not be able to decide between tea or juice without debating the pros and cons of each beverage at interminable length.
    “How did your date with Cynthia go?” she asked cautiously, sitting across from him at the table. Cynthia had already reported in.
    A frown marred his perfect forehead. Then, as if he had become aware of it, he immediately smoothed the expression away.
    “Cynthia,” he said with a bone-melting smile. “Cynthia, Cynthia.”
    Rilka helped him out. “Tuesday. The Grill Room. Tall redhead.”
    “Oh, yes.” His lips twisted in a grimace. “Oh, my. Oh, my.”
    “So you didn’t really hit it off.”
    “Oh, my. No. We did
not
hit it off.”
    Cynthia had already said that she’d ditched him by going to the bathroom and not coming back, a dating infraction that usually earned a long lecture from Rilka and the threat of being dropped as a client.
We must be polite to one another
, Rilka always said.
Be direct but polite
. Ditching dates was neither polite nor direct. But Rilka could hardly blame Cynthia. Rilka sometimes wished
she
could escape Duncan by going to the bathroom and not coming out.
    What am I going to do with you?
She leaned forward and patted Duncan’s hand. “Have you thought any more about taking those night classes to obtain your GED?” Maybe it would improve his powers of concentration. You never knew.
    He focused briefly on her. “I went one night, you know. But I’m not really an intellectual person,” he explained.
    Well, that was true.
    “Okay,” she said. Time to regroup. What now? She had to think of something. Unfortunately, the number of women lining up for men who were dumb as boxes of rocks was strictly limited. If Duncan were a woman, he’d have been taken off the market months ago. Men had absolutely no problem with women who were beautiful and dumb. In fact, that very much appeared to be their preferred combination of traits. But women couldn’t stand it. Rilka supposed this was social conditioning, but what did she know.
    “How long have I been coming here?” Duncan asked suddenly.
    “I’d have to look it up,” Rilka said, wondering what brought that on. She remembered when she’d first met Duncan and thought he might be the man of her dreams. “About a year.” It felt like a decade. Week after week of trying to figure out what to do with Duncan. Surely Gran would have hit upon the solution by now.
    Duncan nodded. “Jenny — out in the car — or,