A Sensible Arrangement: A Modern Match-Maker Romance Read online

  A Sensible Arrangement

  A Modern Match-Maker Romance

  Rocklyn Ryder

  Magpie Press

  Copyright © 2018 Rocklyn Ryder

  All rights reserved worldwide

  No part of this book may be reproduced, uploaded to the Internet, or copied without permission from the author. The author respectfully asks that you please support artistic expression and help promote anti-piracy efforts by purchasing a copy of this book at the authorized online outlets.

  This is a work of fiction intended for mature audiences only. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to events, locales, business establishments, or actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is purely coincidental.

  All sexual activities depicted occur between consenting characters 18 years or older who are not blood related.

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  A Sensible Arrangement

  A Modern Match-Maker Romance

  by

  Rocklyn Ryder

  Raven Swann

  This one must be special," Duncan looks over my shoulder at my laptop and brushes my cheek with a kiss that makes me smile.

  It also makes me feel guilty. I rarely bring work home with me and I never bring it into the bedroom.

  Nodding and still smiling I keep scrolling through the notes I've taken. Duncan moves closer till he practically has me in his lap.

  "Sorry," I mumble to my husband apologetically as his arm wraps around me and he sets his chin on my shoulder.

  I feel him shrug lightly and his breath tickles my collar bone with his short laugh.

  "Babe, you know I don't mind," he tells me, "I love watching you help people find what we have."

  Duncan's lips brush my shoulder before he rests his chin back where it was.

  The man really is a saint.

  "This Tiffany woman must really be special." He repeats his earlier remark with a nod in the direction of my laptop that jostles me sideways.

  "Hmm," I answer absently as I compare my notes from my last conversation with the woman in question against her answers to the questionnaire, "yeah, I guess so. There's just something about her. I can't get her out of my head."

  "Uh oh," Duncan teases, "Don't tell me she doesn't believe in true love?"

  He annunciates "true love" like a side character from the Princess Bride. It makes me laugh but I also shove him off of my shoulder with a hard push.

  He falls over on his side of the bed. Serves him right.

  "Tsk tsk," he shakes his head sadly as he burrows down under the covers and lays his head in my lap, forcing me to reposition the computer. "She obviously hired the wrong match-maker if she thinks she's going to find a simple marriage of convenience trope to her personal romance novel."

  I thump him on the forehead. Why can't he listen to me when I tell him to take the trash out?

  Then I smooth his hair back from his face and trace the line of his jaw. It's nice to know he's been paying attention to something all these years.

  "Let me up and I'll go work downstairs," I tell him, my fingers running along the stubble on his chin while I watch him smile with his eyes closed.

  "Mm, no," he tells me after a second of thought, "I like having you in my bed." His hand settles between my knees and rests there, "Stay and work in here, you know it doesn't bother me." He opens his eyes and lifts his head to look up at me, "You find Tiffany her happily ever after, Sweetie, you know you want to prove her wrong."

  Duncan relaxes his head on my thigh again and before I know it he's already drifted off.

  I keep reading through the notes from the personal interviews, comparing mine to my assistant's, and then comparing those to the questionnaire.

  No. Mrs. Tiffany Henries-Rowe does not believe in True Love but she's still willing to pay me handsomely to find her a husband.

  A new husband, technically.

  Looking through her application, I can see why love doesn't rank high on her agenda.

  I see a lot of heartbreak in my field as a professional marriage broker. People come to the decision to hire someone to arrange their mates for them for a lot of reasons and bad luck with love is certainly at the top of the list, but Tiffany has more reasons than most to give up on Cupid.

  Reaching for the legal tablet I've been using to jot down key points on, I set it on the bed next to me so I don't disturb Duncan and scribble a few more thoughts.

  Her late husband was found dead at his desk in his office just one week after their wedding from a congenital heart condition he never even knew about. They never even made it to their honeymoon-- it was scheduled for the following month.

  My husband is right though, this woman is looking for something convenient. A marriage that's more akin to a business arrangement. She tells me she'd like a man in her life to share household expenses and responsibilities with, who will provide "companionship" and "security."

  I listen to the ball point pen scratch against the notepad and feel my face pull into a frown.

  The answers she's given both me and my assistant when we've talked to her in person say she's only willing to maintain a sexual relationship with her husband because it's to be expected, but the answers on the questionnaire tell the story of a woman with a passionate appetite.

  A few more notes, lining up a few tell-tale answers and making connections between some key factors, and I feel confident I've narrowed down the thing that has me so hung up on Tiffany's application.

  She can keep telling me she's only seeking a "sensible arrangement" all she wants, but Tiffany Henries-Rowe is a woman who's ready to love again.

  Closing down the laptop and setting everything aside on the nightstand, I turn off the lamp.

  Duncan moves his head back onto his pillow and wraps his arm around my waist as I settle in against him under the covers.

  "Do you know who you're marrying her off to yet?" he mumbles sleepily.

  "Not yet, Babe," I say, "but I have an idea."

  Nathan

  Luv u 2," I type out in response to my youngest's last text.

  I can't believe she's in college already. It seems like just yesterday she was cutting her first tooth on the remote control.

  The screen times out and I come to the conclusion that that's really going to be the last thing I hear from her for awhile. I slip my phone back in my pocket and try to remind myself it's perfectly normal to only hear from an 18 year old daughter who just moved into her first dorm room when she needs money.

  Doesn't ease the twinge though. That feeling that I'm losing my kids.

  Now that they're both over 18 they don't have to visit anymore. No more court-appointed visitation on weekends that they'd rather spend with their boyfriends or just plain friends, eating fast food and watching movies and going to games and doing all the same shit I did with them but, of course, it's not the same when you do it with Dad.

  It's not the same when you have to do it with Dad.

  I get it. I really do. I remember when I was that age, high school. Full of hormones and fearless about the future, and the last damn thing in the world I wanted to do was to spend weekends at home with the 'rents.

  Let alone get flown 2 states over to do it with a dad you've only seen every other weekend since you were 8...or 5 in Dani's case.<
br />
  I never did remarry after their mom and I split up. I dated here and there. Not gonna pretend I didn't consider the idea of finding a woman who'd keep my bed warm, keep my kitchen stocked, help me raise the kids I never got to see enough of...maybe help me make a couple more.

  It would have been nice to get a second shot at the married with kids thing. Find a good partner who was willing to stick by me even when I might get a bit challenging. A woman who'd make a good wife and a good mother. Someone who would have given me a chance to find out what it's like to raise children that don't have to be picked up at the airport every other Friday evening and dropped off there again every Sunday afternoon.

  Yeah. I dated. Did my fair share of shopping around.

  Maybe I'm gun-shy after my first marriage went south or maybe I really never managed to find a woman who checked off all the little boxes on my list. Either way-- here I am, all these years later with an empty bed, an empty house, and dare I say, feeling kinda empty-hearted to boot.

  That's probably how, in the space of the time it took me to walk back into the house and grab a beer from the fridge, I find myself thumbing through the results of my latest internet search for love.

  I do it every so often; end up reactivating some old online dating profile just to see what the choices are, or looking to see what new dating sites have sprung up since the last time I swore I was done with the fast food delivery mentality that the younger generation has about dating.

  Tonight I'm feeling lonely and a mite sorry for myself. I can tell because the search terms I just looked up aren't the usual "dating" words. No. What I'm scrolling through as the last of the orange-red sunset fades to blue outside and the temps inside the house start to drop low enough for me to start thinking about stoking up the fire for the night, is a lot of websites about where I can find a wife.

  Seems about right for this time of year.

  Days are getting shorter, nights are getting colder, the kids are back in school-- although I won't be seeing them every other weekend anymore. Knowing I don't even have a few days a month of Dani sitting by the fire with her phone in her hand and rolling her eyes at me when I make her watch a movie with me just makes the early September air in the empty living room that much cooler.

  I glance at snippets of websites as I scroll; mail order brides from around the world. Beautiful women want to meet me now. My fated mate is waiting. Meet my perfect match...I find myself laughing at the tag lines and catch phrases.

  These websites are so damn cliche. I'm scared to death to click on half of 'em for fear of picking up some sort of computer virus on my phone or worse-- getting myself put on some sort of government watch list for sex trafficking.

  Setting the phone on the end table next to my recliner, I decide it's cold enough to get the fire going again. This time of year I let it die down during the day when the sun still warms the house up and I'm still spending most of the daylight hours outside, but this old place is still heated by the fireplace so by the time it's dark out, it's time to get the fire going again.

  Once I've got a new fire rebuilt from the hot coals that were hiding under the cool ash of last night's fire, I relax back into the chair and pick up my phone.

  I've already forgotten about what I'd been looking up just 10 minutes ago. I was just going to do a quick email check and then grab the tv remote and see what kind of nonsense I could waste my night on. So seeing the list of results promising "young," "nubile," "hot," "virgin," and my favorite, "cum thirsty," girls who want nothing more in life than to become my wife, jars my memory and yanks another guffaw from my chest.

  That sarcastic chuckle dies in my throat when my eyes land on a line of text that doesn't fit in with all the other mail order bride offerings, "...better suited to finding your next partner than you yourself..."

  The snippet from the site looks to be less ad and more article and my curiosity gets the better of me. I click on the link and find myself on the website of one Raven Swann. The link takes me directly to a page of testimonials from several couples crediting this Raven Swann for their happiness.

  The quote that piqued my interest is from some high falutin' "human behavior" specialist with a string of letters after his name starting with PhD. I don't have a clue what the other ones mean, but it doesn't take a genius to figure out this guy's got more college degrees than my entire home town.

  I skim through the paragraph that talks about how arranged marriages worked back in the day and why it's an "ideal paradigm for human pair bonding" that we oughta still be putting "into practical application to this day."

  The guy uses a lot of silver dollar words to basically say that if people still let their closest friends and relatives pick their spouse for them, that they'd be happier and stay married longer.

  I may not have a fancy college education to help me with the big words, but I get the gist of it well enough. The thing that really gets my attention is the pictures of all the couples and families on the page under the psycho-babble. Every photo is accompanied by a letter to this Raven talking about how happy they are and thanking Raven for getting them together.

  There's tons of these couples.

  I frown. Most of 'em are just kids. Young, attractive, they look like toothpaste commercials. All walks of life though, that's for sure, and every one of 'em looking at each other like they're starstruck.

  Kinda chokes me up, seeing all these people in love like that. No way these are just paid models from some stock photo site. You can't fake the kind of love I'm seeing in these pictures.

  Some of the pictures show families-- the happy couples with the children these marriages produced.

  I keep scrolling. I keep scrolling and I keep reading and I realize that a whole lot of these pictures are years old. If I click on the link to expand the testimonials I get taken to an entire page dedicated just to that couple. There's the full story, sometimes more updates, and pictures. Lots of pictures. Engagement photos, wedding photos, birth announcements, first teeth, first steps, first days of school, first dates, graduation photos-- shit! Who is this Raven and how long have they been doing this?

  I click out of Josh and Caitlyn's page of family photos and back to the main testimonial gallery. I'm about to go back to the top of the page and look for more information when the couple below Josh and Caitlyn catches my eye.

  A glimpse of gray hair makes me scroll farther down. The next couple is older, looks to be in their 60s. Their bio says they were 64 an 61 when Raven set them up.

  A little more scrolling and I find lots more couples that aren't in their damn 20s.

  So maybe this Raven guy can work with us geezers after all.

  By the time I make my way back to the about Raven page and find myself staring an attractive woman who doesn't look any where near the mid 40s her bio claims her to be, I'm not only surprised to find out that Raven is a woman-- I'd kinda been picturing some sort of new agey Native American dude wearing linen pajamas and a puka shell necklace-- but I'm also a lot more interested in her services than I'd care to admit just yet.

  Tiffany

  I reread the email, still not believing it. This is probably the thirtieth time I've read it in the last 2 days but every time it still says the same thing.

  My application was accepted.

  Even though I don't meet half the criteria to be one of Raven Swann's clients, she still accepted my application.

  I have thousands of questions to start answering now. I stare at the .pdf file open on my desktop computer and scroll through the questionnaire.

  If I thought the initial application was invasive, I had no idea what invasive meant but when I asked about the entirely too personal nature of most of the questions, Raven's explanation made sense. I mean, after all, she is a match maker. I understand that, for most people, sexual compatibility is an important part of what they're looking for in a spouse.

  Looking over some of the questions in front of me, I feel myself blushing. I certainly don't think I
'm a prude-- God knows how surprised I've been that some of the stuff I read soaks my panties and keeps me awake at night till I make myself come with my fingers and some fantasies that leave me sweaty but pleasantly exhausted-- but there's stuff on Raven's questionnaire that I just can't believe anyone would answer honestly.

  Of course, sex is part of the deal. If I'm going through with this-- and I'm really going to agree to get married again-- then it's only reasonable to expect that my husband is going to want sex.

  The heat in my cheeks flares again as I stumble into a series of questions on the form that cause me to press my thighs together tightly and squirm in the chair.

  Let's face it-- part of the reason I'm doing this is because well...it'd be nice to have a man in my life for more than opening pickle jars. I should make sure I don't get paired with a man who expects me to tolerate a mistress on the side, and I feel I have an obligation to my future mate to make sure I don't misrepresent myself in a way that would drive him to need a mistress on the side. So I glance at the open door of my office, making sure my assistant is occupied and then I go back to the beginning and start answering the questions as honestly as I can bring myself to.

  I came across Raven's website about 3 years ago. I remember thinking how practical it all seemed. Hire this woman to head a team of your most trusted friends and relatives, complete a series of interviews so the professional has a good feel for what you need in a partner, and let them decide on the man that's right for you...or woman, I guess, depending on the client.

  Of course, when I had called for a consultation, I immediately discovered that Raven doesn't take her business lightly. She's no dating service and she was quick to explain that to me. She calls herself a marriage broker-- with heavy emphasis on the marriage.