Lila groaned. “Brandon, come on. I think this batch is really good! There’s some definite cuties in there.”
My nose wrinkled involuntarily. “I hate the way you just said that.”
“My matchmaker tried giving you both options this time around. Since she wasn’t really sure what yourpreferenceswere, and frankly neither did I, so she got you cute guys and super manly?—”
Oookay.
Time for this god forsaken conversation to end.
“Bye, Lila.”
“Hey, wait!”
Thankfully, the alarm at the front of my store chimed, signaling a new customer. “Gotta go!”
Setting the phone back down onto its cradle, I leaned forward to rest my head in my hands. As if my love life couldn’t get any sadder, my poor sister was taking it upon herself to try and set me up herself. She had no faith in me to find someone to bring to her wedding and had resorted topayingto find me a date.
Although, I couldn’t exactly blame her. We were both late bloomers when it came to our love lives—mine for completely different circumstances than her just being picky as hell. She’d eventually found a really nice guy that treated her well and wasn’t about shoving her into the housewife box the second he put a ring on her finger.
Lila was a career driven person through and through, much like I was. We both found solace in what we did for a living, and changing lives, even on a micro scale, was fulfilling. Though, now that we were both in our thirties, it was getting harder towatch everyone else around me move on with their lives while I was still stuck.
I loved my career, don’t get me wrong. But sharing my life with someone else was also a need that had gone unfulfilled for a long, long time.
That last person that I’d ever wanted—or rather,envisioned—a future with had left Ellington Heights and never looked back.
I’d love to say that my teenage heartbreak had been left in the dust but even now, a damn decade and a half later, it still ate me up sometimes when I was lying awake in bed staring at the water stain on my ceiling.
By now, the world had since moved on and it was my turn to do the same. Even if that meant complying with a damnmatchmaker.
Sighing, I lifted myself up from my chair and headed out to the front of the shop.
There was a man standing in the waiting area with his back turned toward the counter, his arms crossed over his chest while he stared out the dingy window that I’d yet to get a rag and a Windex to since spring hit.
He wore an expensive looking suit that hugged his body perfectly in that old money kind of way. His dark blond hair was just long enough to touch the top of his broad shoulders, thick and silky looking, even in the natural light spilling in from the window in front of him.
“Can I help you?” I asked, leaning against the counter.
He wasn’t the kind of guy who usually frequented my shop. Any of the city-slickers who blew through here were more prone to sticking to the chain shops a town over from this one, finding their ritzy reputation worth more of taking a risk than one like mine that barely had any kind of online presence outside of a Google overview.
When he turned away from the window to look over his shoulder at me, his eyes widened.
He was handsome—an angular jaw that was dusted with stubble, blue eyes that I could spot even from here, and full lips that curled back as his mouth opened.
“Brandon?”
My brow rose. “That would be me.” Usually people weren’t too inclined to use my first name, seeing as how it was my last that was stitched onto the patch on the front of my uniform. “Can I help you?”
He let out a soft laugh, shaking his head. “Wow. I wasn’t expecting to see you here.”
Weirdly enough, this man looked familiar. The problem was that I couldn’t quite place my finger as to why.
“Well, considering I own this shop, I would hope that people would be expecting to see me here.”
His mouth opened again and then closed, his eyes softening. “You did it.”
Did what?
“Shit,” he muttered, rubbing a hand over his face. “Sorry. I don’t know why—Avery.McAllister.”
