Excerpt 3

Brilliant, esoteric and sprightly, Elle DuBois seems to bring luck to all her friends, though she can’t seem to strike a spark of romance in her personal life.  When she connects with the charming Wally O at a speed dating event, she’s sure her romantic karma has changed....

As soon as Elle returned to the office, she set up her laptop and looked up Wally O’s profile on PerfectPair.com. Lindsay’s party wasn’t until next week, but she just wanted to fill out some of the other details of this amazing man. Besides, she’d been assigned the odious task of removing old files from the cranky dinosaur of a computer in bossman Judd Siegel’s basement office, and she needed something to distract her from the smell of must and boredom.

Odd, but she didn’t see him listed. She tried to check a few different ways, then called the number on the card. A recording told her the number was no longer in service.

“What do you think?” she asked Lindsay. “Is he a party crasher!”

“A Perfect Pair crasher!” Lindsay said with a giggle.

“Hey, it’s not funny. He was the only guy there who was worth talking to.”

“Probably because he totally fabricated his life. I mean, the whole Kennedy inference. Oh, Elle, I never did think that speed dating was a good idea. Just something about it, something I read...”

“I can’t believe it, and I don’t want to believe it.” He’d been so real. He’d looked her in the eye and asked her to call him. “You know what? I’m going call Perfect Pair and ask them to help me find him. After all, what am I paying them for?”

Just then Judd came down the stairs and Elle bristled inside. Her hotshot boss would not be sympathetic to the woes of fabricated dating. “How’s it going?” he asked, ignoring that she was on the phone.

She lifted her chin from the phone. “Slow but steady. There’s a bunch of floppies with downloaded stuff on the table upstairs.” Hopefully, that would get rid of him so that she could focus on more urgent matters, like finding Wally O.

“And you know what else?” she told Lindsay. “How the hell did he get past Killer Kyra?”

“I don’t know, but how could a member of the dating website disappear like that?”

“Well, I am going to make him reappear. I’ve tracked down some rare, difficult items in my production career. A clapping walrus. A model T Ford. I can find him. And then I’ll invite him to your Labor Day party. How’s that?”

Judd coughed from the other end of the room. Oh, just go play with your old computer files, she thought, willing him away.

“Elle, you’ve got to see this,” Lindsay’s voice sounded reticent. “I just found something online about speed dating event crashers. Serial speed daters...It says:  ‘men who appear at open dating events and portray themselves as the perfect match. One local impersonator has hit ten cafes in the past three months, usually claiming to be the descendant of British royalty or a Kennedy.’  Hold on, I’m forwarding this article to you.”

“Oh, no! What kind of loser goes around copping a ten-minute date?” Elle sank back in disappointment and embarrassment.

“A ten-minute man?” Lindsay joked.

“Oh, no...”

“Sorry, I don’t mean to make fun of your predicament. Listen, I’ve got to run. Copy deadline beckons, but don’t feel bad. I’m not going to have a date for the Hamptons party, either.”

It was the law of converse good wishes that whenever someone told Elle not to feel bad, she felt worse. She flipped her phone closed and pulled her knees to her chest, and huddled on the crappy old desk chair, feeling crushed.

There was no Wally O Kennedy.

She didn’t have a date for the party.

She would be there with her game smile on, that toothy grin of a desperate single woman. And after the party she would adopt a dozen cats and let the gray streak in her hair grow out – Spinster Elle.

“Is there a problem?” Judd’s voice interrupted her pity party.

She felt tears welling in her eyes, so she didn’t turn to face him. “No.”

“It’s about this website thing, isn’t it? The love match online?”

She shot a glance and noticed that he was standing by the PerfectPair.com screen on her laptop, which she’d left on. Dumb, Elle. Stupid, stupid. All these years she’d managed to stay under his radar, the perfect employee because she never had issues, never needed attention. And now she’d blown it all in one afternoon.

“Look,” he said, “so the synthetic dating didn’t work out for you.”

“It’s more than that,” she said. “It’s about my failure as a person to find a single person on this planet with whom I am compatible.” Maybe her parents were right to send her thousands of miles away from them. She was hopeless.

“Whoa.” She heard him edging closer behind her. “Aren’t you being a little hard on yourself? I mean, you may have failed, but no one ever said that all that romance crap is a requirement for peaceful fulfillment on the planet.”

“I’m not talking about romance, but you wouldn’t understand. It’s a girl thing.” She couldn’t believe they were talking about this. Judd was not an employer to notice that the office was on fire, let alone that an employee was having a personal problem.

“I heard you talking about the party. I can’t help you out with the whole planetary compatibility thing, but I could be your date.”

“What?” She rubbed the tears from her eyes and swung around to face him.

“I’ll be your date for the Hamptons party. Haven’t been out there in awhile, and I think we’re on hiatus that week.”

“No.” She knew he was joking, and it served her right for bringing her personal crises into the office. “Sorry. I’ll figure this out. You just...go do whatever you were doing.”

“Elle...” His baritone voice rocked her as he sat on the edge of the desk, nearly touching the huge, chunky old monitor. “I want to do this for you.”

She shook her head, feeling tears well again at his generosity and pity. “No, you don’t.”

“A night in the Hamptons? What’s not to like?”

She wiped her cheeks with her hands and stared up at him, awed by the sweet gesture and all the while wondering if they would be able to stop arguing long enough to look like a couple, just for a weekend.