Still, he’d checked his phone eight hundred times in the past few days. At some point he’d have to accept Rhiannon wasn’t going to get in touch with him. He’d left the conference the day after the interview, but even if he had stayed, he wouldn’t have tried to find her. She’d made it clear she was furious with him. A next step, if there ever was one, would have to come from her. He wasn’t about to stalk the woman.
In the meantime... “No, I’ll vet my own dates.” He ought to do something to justify the salary Matchmaker was paying him.
Reluctantly, Samson perused the faces of all the women smiling back at him from Tina’s laptop. There were selfies and group shots and full-length photos. The group was diverse in body type and ethnicity. And not one of them looked like the woman who had occupied his mind for the last week.
He shifted, hating that he couldn’t stop thinking abouther. Hating that he had a job to do, and he couldn’t shelve her enough to do it. Hating that the job he was doing felt far too much like window-shopping for a woman. “This is a lot.”
He meant everything, in general, but Tina misunderstood him. “No, this is about right. You usually get about ten matches at a time,” Tina explained.
“Can I see their profiles?”
“Which ones?” Tina hovered the mouse over the first girl.
“Uh. All of them? Since I don’t know anything about them?”
Tina blinked at him. “You don’t want to knock any of them out on appearance alone?”
He looked at the women again and rubbed the back of his neck. He’d barely known what Rhiannon looked like before he’d met her on the basis of a sentence and a few messages, and they’d had an immediate connection. What if he got rid of someone based on her dimples or lack thereof and missed out on a good thing?
Uh, a good thing for the camera, that is. Not for him, personally. “They’re all pretty in their own ways. I’d rather see what they have to say.”
Tina beamed at him, though he wasn’t sure what he’d said or done to get that response. They started going through the matches. A kindergarten teacher, a lawyer, a doctor, a receptionist. All perfectly normal women who didn’t deserve to be used by him for a gimmicky photo op.
When Annabelle had come to him with this idea, he’dproposed doing the whole thing with hired actresses, but she’d nixed that. He’d still been deep in his grief over Uncle Joe and hadn’t protested too hard. He’d been happy to have some project forced upon him so the endless future hadn’t seemed so endless.
He should have protested harder. Meeting real women hadn’t felt so distasteful when it had been conceptual, but now that he was faced with a buffet of individuals, he couldn’t get the sour taste out of his mouth.
“Can you filter based on profession?” he asked abruptly, when they were about halfway through.
“Sure,” Tina said. “What are you looking for? Fellow athletes?”
“I haven’t been an athlete in a long time.” His main method of getting out of the house for the past five years in Cayucos had been twice daily runs on the beach, but that wasn’t anywhere near his fitness regimen when he’d been a professional football player. “Filter it down to entertainment. Actresses, models, singers.” This was L.A., and it wouldn’t be hard to find at least one woman who was in the business. Being an actress didn’t mean that his potential date’s heart wouldn’t be soft, but at the very least, she might get something out of a contrived hour that was more entertainment than a meeting of hearts. “Someone who will be good on camera and fine with this being a business thing.”
Tina’s gaze turned knowing. “Gotcha.” She typed something, and all but two of the matches vanished. She leanedforward. “We got an actress and a model. Let me contact them and see if either of them are interested in our project, vet them a little to see which of them would be the most natural on film.”
“Fantastic.” He was so glad he wasn’t actually emailing back and forth with them like he might if he really was looking for love on Matchmaker.
Tina gathered up the laptop and Samson shoved back his seat. “Have you heard from Annabelle?” His aunt had been pretty silent for the past week, though she’d sent him a quick text reply in response to his check-in.
“Yeah, a little, for some necessary business stuff. I keep her updated daily via email. She doesn’t always respond. That’s normal when she goes on the run like this. She gets overwhelmed, disappears for a while, but she always comes back.” Tina wrinkled her nose. “I should have gone with you two to the conference. I told her the crowds might overwhelm her, but she was so dead set on trying to be Jennifer, she didn’t listen.”
Samson grimaced. He hadn’t been very close to Jennifer, but the older sister had been protective of Annabelle and had kept her little sister out of the spotlight. “Yeah. Luckily, everything worked out for the best.”
“Good thing you were there. You handled that interview with Crush like a champ. I hear Helena might even have you on her talk show? Good deal.”
Oh, that was right. On her talk show with Rhiannon.
Hope at the thought of seeing Rhiannon again filled him. Pathetic.
The timer went off on the oven and he glanced at it. Tina waved him away. “You take care of that, I’ll see myself out.”
He was pulling mini pizzas out of the oven when he heard the door open and a deep male voice say, “Damn, I know we haven’t seen Samson in a long time, but when did he turn into a small blond woman?”
Tina’s reply was muffled, but the tartness of her response was clear from her tone. Samson grinned and dropped the pan on the counter and came out to the foyer.
Harris and Dean Miller both smiled when they saw Samson. For a second, none of them spoke, but then Dean erupted into a whoop and they closed in on him, engulfing him in a big hug.
His two closest friends were both settled in L.A. Getting together over the past few years had been a challenge, what with their lives taking them on different paths.
