Page 90 of No Match Found
No. This wasn’t just thecompany I’d built or my livelihood. It was the very ideology that shaped my life. If I betrayed it, where did that leave me? Where did it leave Matchify? I couldn’t stand at the head of a company I didn’t believe in.
I opened my office door, and Grant’s head turned. His mouth spread into a smile—the type you reserve for one particular person. I still couldn’t fathom I was that person for Grant.
“Urgent meeting?” The knowing glint in his eye told me he guessed exactly what Katie and Brooke had pulled me aside to discuss.
It was so flipping cocky of him. And so flipping accurate.
“Yeah,” I said calmly. “There’s a problem with the?—”
“Uh-huh,” he said, cutting me off. “I’m sure there is.”
“I’ve got a lot of work to get done today,” I said, refusing to meet his twinkling eyes.
He leaned back in his chair and watched me. “Is that your polite way of telling me to put a sock in it?”
I took my seat and opened my inbox. It was a mess. “I love how perceptive you are.”
“What else do you love about me?”
I shot him a look over the top of my glasses. “I think we covered it all.”
He twirled the pencil in his hands and grinned.
I suppressed a responsive smile and turned back to my work, but the number of times Grant and I met eyes across the desk over the course of the next few hours was criminal. It was a head and heart rush, like I’d stood up too quickly and run a hundred-meter dash all at once.
It meant trouble for me, and it meant trouble for Matchify.
The worst part was how badly part of me wanted that trouble.
Or maybe the worst part was when I caught eyes with him and found him looking at me not with his characteristic twinkle but with a littleVin his brow. It disappeared almost immediately, but it had been there long enough to make my stomach lurch and my mind fill with little whispers.
It’s already happening. He’s realizing he doesn’t want you.
TWENTY-SIX
When I gotto work the next day, there was a maple bar sitting on top of the tray Grant had designed for me at Swirl. Now that the tray was out of the silicone mold, the light reflected off the gold flecks and amber streaks in a way that held me captivated even more than the warm donut.
Grant himself was nowhere to be found, and around 10:00, I stopped looking up from my desk every time I noticed movement outside the office.
I picked up my phone to text him three times only to decide against it. My brain was staging a full-scale blitz on my heart. I’d always considered myself a rational person, but the assumptions my brain had ready like a full chamber in a revolver made me wonder if I’d always been wrong.
It was ridiculous that Grant could bring me a donut and that my first thought was whether he’d seen Jill there. Maybe seeing her had made him realize what a better option she was andthatwas why I’d noted the little frown yesterday—and why he wasn’t here and hadn’t texted me.
I knew my mind was running wild with limited data, and yet I still felt sick.
I opened my Matchify inbox, then closed it just as quickly. There was nothing new there—not from Jeff, Tanner, or Leo. Just the continuing echo of my own voice reminding me that I’d built a company I couldn’t even put my trust in.
My foot tapped anxiously on the floor, and I forced it to go still for the third time in fifteen minutes. My gaze flicked to the eerily silent Truth Machine.
I pulled in a long, slow breath, then got up. I needed to walk around. I was bursting with nervous energy.
I opened the door of my office and stood in the threshold, looking over the Love Pit with its long rows of employees. These were people who relied on Matchify for their homes, food, health insurance, and even social lives in many instances. Matchify wasn’t possible without them.
A wave of gratitude washed over me, and in its wake a rush of responsibility.
Was I toying with the stability they relied on by being in this little…situation with Grant?
Or was it pure hubris for me to believe my personal love life was relevant to the company?
