Sandcastle Beach (Matchmaker Bay #3) - Jenny Holiday Page 0,124

yes. Elise appreciated the sentiment. So Elise Maxwell, interior designer, stood and shook the hand Jay “I Don’t Look Like My Picture” Smith extended.

Elise had not seen a picture of Jay’s hand, but she had not imagined it being…like this. Big and warm and somehow striking the perfect sweet spot between firm and gentle with its grasp.

Most of the time when guys did not look like their pictures, it went in the opposite direction. Like when a guy’s Tinder profile showed him shirtless holding up a fish and you thought, Well, maybe I can excuse the stupid fish because look at those arms! And when we get married, I’ll appreciate all those fishing trips, because don’t smother me, dude. But then you met him in person, and it turned out that those arms were from six years and two gym memberships ago.

This was…not that. The photo of Jay Smith, partner at Cohen & Smith, that accompanied his bio on the firm’s website showed an accountant. It sort of went with his name: nondescript. In the portrait he wore a suit and glasses, and his hair was slicked back. And the picture was in black and white.

Jay Smith in the flesh, however, was not black and white. His hair was a deep rich brown, and instead of being neatly pasted back, it looked like he’d been raking his fingers through it all morning. His eyes, which were not obscured by glasses at the moment, were turquoise. Like, seriously, colored-contact levels of saturation. Elise had done an accent wall the other day that was pretty much that exact color.

“Bahaman Sea Blue,” she said before she could stop herself.

He flashed a smile that was equal parts amusement and bewilderment. Lines appeared around his eyes as he did so. She wondered how old he was. Older than she was, but she couldn’t tell by how much.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just did a job that involved some paint the exact color of your eyes. Benjamin Moore Bahaman Sea Blue.”

Then, to try to save herself, to make it seem less weird that she’d just informed him of the color of his eyes in the Benjamin Moore palette, she pointed to the pale-pink button-down shirt he wore and said, “Millennial pink.”

He grinned, and those lines came back. What the hell was going on with those lines? She kind of wanted to…stroke them?

No stroking prospective clients, Elise.

But seriously, those eyes—the crazy color and the lines around them—made her realize how long it had been since she’d been on a date. Or…done other things. Between dealing with all the family drama, finding an apartment, and getting her business off the ground, she’d barely had time to sleep, much less engage in any extracurricular activities.

She hadn’t missed those activities—she’d thought. Or at least she hadn’t missed them until she was suddenly confronted with Jay Smith’s laugh lines.

“Millennial pink,” he repeated. “Is that a Benjamin Moore color, too?”

“No. Just a zeitgeisty thing. It’s a color millennials like.” Though he was rocking it super well, paired with a skinny black tie. “It’s very of the moment.”

“Well, I’m thirty-seven, so I guess I am a millennial.”

That confirmed her sense that he was older than she was. But only by seven years. Somehow he seemed older than he actually looked. He was commanding. In a good way.

Not that that mattered.

No stroking prospective clients, Elise.

He turned and gestured vaguely at the waiting area. “So this is the ‘before’ picture, I guess.”

Yes. The firm was hiring a designer to redo the lobby. It wouldn’t be the most exciting job, but having something like this on her résumé would be huge for her. Cohen & Smith wasn’t a major global player like Ernst & Young, but according to her research, the firm had a reasonably big reach in Toronto. If she did a good job, there might be referrals. And for someone with exactly $717 in the bank and a burning desire to not go crawling home to Daddy, referrals were precisely what was needed.

“What’s your diagnosis?” he asked, still looking around the space, which matched her impression of his corporate portrait: nondescript. Beige sofas, beige low-pile carpet, boring landscape paintings.

“Well, it could use a refresh.”

“I know it could use a refresh. That’s why I’m interviewing designers.”

Technically he was still smiling, but there was an edge to his tone that hadn’t been there before. In doing her research on the firm and its partners, she’d read a profile of Jay in Canadian Business. He reportedly had