I Pucking Love You (The Copper Valley Thrusters #5) - Pippa Grant Page 0,10
I’d never do, and two weeks later, Julie and Gustav started dating, and they’ve been together for two months now.
Sometimes matchmaking is about letting the universe do its work.
Sometimes it’s about seeing something in a client that no one—not even the client—has seen before.
And sometimes it’s about finding creative ways to identify the right guy for a client, because the end justifies the means.
Julie still comes to my client support group meetings, because she was short on girlfriends outside of work. I like having her since she’s a success story, and I don’t have many, so I need to use what I’ve got, though things are improving.
“How’s everyone doing today?” I ask after we’ve been served. I send motivational emails to my clients daily, so I know a lot of the answers already, since they tend to email me back.
Still, talking and emailing are different.
“Sick of men,” Maren mutters. She’s an environmental engineer that I’ve been trying to match off and on for a year. She’s also my biggest source of guilt in my business since she’s also one of my cousin Kami’s closest friends, as is Alina, the woman next to Maren, who’s a cellist. Alina isn’t a client like Maren is, but she comes to the support group meetings anyway.
I have hopes of bringing her over to the Muff Matchers side.
And, you know, of not letting her down when it happens.
“Oh, no,” Julie says. “What happened?”
“I was putting gas in my car this morning, and this guy at the next pump started telling me how I should do it.”
“No!”
“Yep.”
Eugenie, who’s a massage therapist at the spa four stores over in the strip mall, snorts over her Reuben sandwich. She’s also not a client, but she joined our lunch dates after overhearing us a few weeks ago. “Did he try to explain to you how a hybrid engine works too?”
“Yes.”
Maren punctuates the word with a snort, and all of us groan.
Phoebe, who’s a contracts manager for the city, lifts her glass of tea. “To clueless mansplainers. May we never date them, never raise them, and find creative ways to reject them.”
I flinch a little. I’ve set most of my clients up with mansplainers—and worse—before, including one who was so bad that he mansplained mansplaining before a server intentionally dropped a plate of mashed potatoes in his lap. But my screening methods are improving, so I toast with them.
“How’s your job going?” I ask Phoebe. “Any word on the promotion?”
“Not yet, but I should hear soon.”
“You’ve got this,” Julie tells her.
“They’d be stupid to pass you over,” Maren agrees.
We spend the next hour talking jobs and friends and family and dates, offering encouragement and support to each other, with me taking various notes in my master Muff Matchers notebook, and steering the conversation when necessary, but it’s not really necessary.
These women lift each other up all on their own, and they help each other feel deserving all on their own too.
I know I could do the same for each of them, but this way, they get extra friends, and they don’t have to worry I’m only telling them what they want to hear because they’re paying me.
In theory.
I don’t actually see payment until I make a match.
Possibly I should rethink that, but it’s the fee structure that lets me sleep at night.
Phoebe’s phone alarm goes off shortly after two. “Gah. Bridesmaid dress fitting.”
Maren, Alina, and Eugenie groan.
“Prospects for a date?” Maren asks her.
They all look at me.
I smile brightly like I have as much confidence in me as they do. “Want me to find you a good-enough date?”
And that’s when it hits me.
I know what I need to do to survive going back to Richmond.
I need to take a super hot, athletic, rich date.
There’s not much time between our late lunch and my next appointment, but when the ladies leave, I hop in my car and point it toward a house that is not my own.
It’s a lovely Victorian in a private neighborhood with large mansions on huge lots, populated with smart, successful, occasionally famous residents who donate more money to charity every month than I usually see in a year.
In other words, it’s not a neighborhood where I fit in.
But it’s where Kami lives, and she’s my favorite cousin in the entire universe, and she’d still be my favorite cousin even if we weren’t related.
There are three things you need to know about Kami.