Page 3 of Making Over Maris

“The cost doesn’t matter. It’d be worth it. If you could teach me what I’m doing wrong…it would be worth everything I own.” This last bit he offered in an agonized whisper that echoed in the empty reaches of her soul.

He seemed so…vulnerable. So lost. Desperate, maybe.

So unlike the Jack she knew.

Jack Maris always had an evil grin and a cheesy joke or a super-snarky comment in the offing. He was completely self-assured—even when he probably shouldn’t be.

But now this. An annoying, helpless, wounded expression that made her feel like a royal jerkess. She shouldn’t be such a douche. She was kidding around but he wasn’t.

He fixed his gaze on the tabletop and scratched at the Formica with a nail. “It’s just…I’m…so tired of being alone.”

His wrenching confession tugged at her heartstrings. She knew exactly how he felt. She was tired of being alone too. But she could get a date—even though all the guys she went out with somehow magically transformed into croaking, wart-covered, slimy toads by the third date. She glanced at her phone even though she’d promised herself she wouldn’t. Even though she knew—knew—Todd hadn’t called.

Amphibians though they inevitably proved themselves to be, guys asked her out all the time. She dated more than she wanted to. For some reason she kept hoping somewhere in that veritable knot of toads was a prince.

She’d even settle for a nice guy.

A nice guy who called.

But for someone like Jack—someone who looked like he did and wore clothes harvested from a pile on the floor of his closet, someone who preferred video games to sex games, someone whose encyclopedic knowledge of the female gender had been gleaned from C-grade porn—for someone like him, dating was out of the question.

Oh sure, hot chicks would be all over him if they knew his net worth, if they knew he co-owned one of the most successful software companies in the country and wrote some of the hottest video games on the market.

But they didn’t know and they wouldn’t. Because Jack rarely left his lair—his lair being the computer lab where he worked with a herd of the smartest interns on the planet.

None of them dated either.

Yeah, hot chicks would be all over him if they knew what he was. But for some reason, Jack kept himself incognito.

Which was fine with Sara. She didn’t want him with that kind of woman anyway—someone who would only want him for his money. Even though he was dorky and awkward and “nerdlinger” shy, he deserved someone who would love him for himself.

Everyone did.

She sighed. “I’ll think about it.”

You’d think she’d agreed to play Halo with him, the way he leaped up from his seat and yanked her into a big, warm hug. “Thank you, Sara! Thank you! Thank you!”

She pulled away and frowned up at him. At six-four he towered over her. “I said I’ll think about it.”

“Yeah. I heard.” He grinned. God, he was almost cute when he grinned like that. “You’re awesome. Thanks.” He headed out the door but then stopped in his tracks. “Oh. Do you want to do movie night?”

She stilled. She loved movie night. “What do you have?”

“A pirate copy of A T-Rex on Pleasure Island.”

She wrinkled her nose. “It sounds awful.”

“It is.” One of their shared passions was watching—and ripping—atrocious movies. “So this planeload of Italian models crash-lands on a remote island in the Bermuda Triangle—”

“Naturally.”

“And there happens to be a pack of radioactive carnivorous dinosaurs living there.” He chortled. “There should be lots of screaming. And bloodletting. Body parts.”

“Lovely.”

“Roberto Tintoretto is the star.”

“Oh my God. He was execrable in The Squid Thing.”