Page 4 of Matched By Mistake
A shiver of awareness went through him, not surprisingly. The intensity of his obsession with her had pretty much guaranteed that there’d be a spark. But he hadn’t expected to like her. She flushed and then pulled her hand back and rubbed it with her other hand.
“You designed this space, didn’t you?” she asked.
He nodded, not sure if she wanted him to launch into a description of the building like he’d almost done with Brian earlier. Instead he looked around, hearing Misha still talking on the stage.
“What are we going to do about this?” he asked. “My brother is an investor in the app so I don’t want to do anything to generate any negative publicity.”
“Same. Misha’s my best friend. We could do it, just go out on a date and then say we don’t have any chemistry or something like that,” she said. “My family is probably going to have a conniption.”
“The entire family?”
“Like yours isn’t going to,” she said, raising both eyebrows at him.
“They are. I get it. I kind of think it’ll be fun. People won’t be expecting us to go on a date.”
“No they won’t. I hate being predictable,” she said. But he wasn’t sure that was the truth. Something in her eyes made him realize she was hiding something.
Before he could ask her about it, Misha came rushing up to them.
“Oh my gosh. Y’all, I had no idea that you were going to get matched. So what do we want to do?” Misha asked. “I had to practically twist your arm to get you to do this, Maggie. Do you want to back out? I can say it was a glitch.”
“I’m pretty sure you don’t want to say the Surprise Me! button made a mistake on your live match,” Maggie said. “You didn’t twist my arm,” she said, giving Misha a look that Jericho couldn’t read.
“We both decided to just give the people what they aren’t expecting,” Jericho said. “What does this match entail?”
“It’s up to you. The app will suggest dates that fit y’alls profile and then you go on them,” Misha said. “I had been planning to set up the first one live but if you’d rather do it privately...”
Maggie chewed her bottom lip again and he realized she was nervous. He looked at Misha and asked her to give them a moment. She looked over at Maggie first before stepping away to give them some privacy.
“What do you think? If we hamper her demonstration, it could hurt the appearance of our match,” he said, realizing he wanted her to say yes to this. Wanted to do whatever the app thought would be a good date for them. So why was he acting like he just wanted it for Trey’s investment? His brother would do fine if the app didn’t go public. And he’d never been someone to hedge before.
“Let’s do it,” she said.
Two
Seated on the stage next to Jericho was doing nothing to stop her racing heart. Misha had asked Jericho his thoughts on the dating app, and though she knew she should listen to his words, it was the deep timbre of his voice and the cadence of his words that distracted her.
From the side profile, his strong jaw and sharp blade of a nose were visible. There was strength in his face and, as she let her gaze dip down, in his broad shoulders as well. There was something substantial about Jericho. In a way, he was the opposite of Randall, who’d been more gym muscles than body strength.
“Maggie?”
“Hmm...?”
Jericho’s neck was corded with muscles, and as he turned to face her, humor was in his expression and in his dark brown eyes. She smiled back and she heard murmurs from the crowd and snapped out of it. “Sorry about that. I guess I like the unpredictability of Surprise Me! matching me with Jericho. Let’s face it—the two of us weren’t going to ever hook up on our own.”
That drew laughter from the crowd and a nod of agreement from Jericho.
“That’s one of the very things that I had in mind when I designed the app,” Misha said. “I think we are limited by our perceptions of what we want.”
“I agree with that,” Maggie added, remembering her own “perfect” match who’d left her high and dry. She wanted to get this back on track. They were up here to help show the benefits of using the k!smet app. She remembered that the program that Misha had written had search parameters different from other dating apps. “So what did the app see in us?”
“Great question. We can look at the back end and see where you two overlap and where you might each bring a quality the other is lacking,” she said.
Misha started tapping on her smartphone and the screen behind them lit up with their profiles side by side. Jericho’s photo was clearly taken on the lake on a boat. He smiled easily at the camera, he had his shirt off and she could clearly the strength of him that she’d only guessed at earlier. He was tanned and had thick muscles on his pectorals and then a flat abdomen. The photo cut off at his waist.
“Jericho’s profile shows an outdoorsy guy who is active. Maggie, you have checked the same box,” Misha said.
“I sure did. You know how much I love to walk on the weekends,” she said.
