Page 32 of Matched By Mistake
“Until you, you’d be right,” he said.
Until her. She breathed in deeply and for a brief moment pretended she could believe him. But the line sounded...well, like a line. “Don’t do that.”
He cocked his head to the side. “Do what?”
“Say what you think I want to hear. You’ve been so real tonight... I can tell the difference,” she said pointedly.
“Sorry. Was just trying to keep things light. The truth is this is harder than I thought it would be. I mean the no-touching challenge was always meant to be a bit of fun. But these dates keep showing me things about you that...well, that I like.”
She licked her lips as she watched him. “And?”
She had to ask that because it seemed like he had more to say.
“And I feel a bit like I did trying to get that wastewater to heat the house. Like I’m close to figuring everything out and getting it to work but that I might be closer to failure.”
Nine
“How’d the date go?” Misha asked as they sat down to coffee the next morning. They were seated outside across the street from the chamber of commerce.
It was a sunny August morning and luckily not too hot just yet. Maggie had opted for an asymmetrically cut dress that left one shoulder bare, then fell in a slim-fitting sheath. She had a meeting with the Del Rio Group board this morning to present her plans for the Christmas campaign’s graphic art she’d designed and this outfit made her feel strong and powerful.
“Really good,” Maggie said, smiling to herself as she remembered the evening with Jericho.
“How good?” Misha asked, pushing her large sunglasses up on top of her head.
“Well... I sort of freaked a little dealing with the whole last-time-I-was-in-there-I-got-dumped and he just... He was there for me,” she said. She was still trying to reconcile all the things she’d learned about him with what she’d always thought of the Winters family. He wasn’t cold or calculating and not one time had he tried to make her look bad. Though to be fair, he could have. In fact, she was hard-pressed to understand how a man like Jericho could have been raised in a family who was as horrible as she’d been led to believe.
“I’m sorry, hun, that you had to go through that. I’m not surprised about Jericho, though. Trey isn’t what I was expecting, either.”
“He isn’t?”
“I mean he’s sort of all about the business but he’s not unkind. I think based on what I’d heard from your family at gatherings I’d been expecting something different from him.”
“That’s interesting. I was thinking that maybe Jericho was the exception because he’s not really part of Winters Industries. You know?”
“Yeah, I do. I’m not a Del Rio so I can’t say how Trey would be with you,” Misha said as she took a delicate sip of her coffee.
Maggie’s phone pinged and she glanced down to see a message from Cecily and groaned.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she said. She wasn’t going to tell anyone that Cecily wanted her to dig up dirt on the Winters clan. For one thing, Maggie didn’t feel comfortable with it and for another she had decided that she’d only mention it if she saw something egregious, which she hadn’t at dinner. “Just a family thing.”
“That bad?”
“Nothing major, not like what you’ve got going on with Nico,” she said. Misha’s brother had been in prison for three years for a crime he didn’t commit.
The story was basically Nico, trying to be the good guy that Maggie knew him to be, had been in a bar when a woman was accosted by a drunken man in a dark corner of the bar and Nico’s friend jumped in to help. Just as Nico arrived to break up the fray, the accoster went down hard, hitting his head.
Bouncers stepped in to break it up as the police arrived. Everyone zeroed in on Nico because he was larger and more physically fit than his friend. Nico didn’t resist, taking the blame for the blow knowing it meant spending the night in jail.
The accoster turned out to have a fractured skull and was too drunk to realize Nico wasn’t the man who hit him. The accoster was also the nephew of a prominent politician. Still, Nico’s lawyer was hopeful they could cut a deal with the DA since the most serious injury resulted from the fall, which was accidental.
But things went awry. The DA wouldn’t make a deal. In too deep to back out and refusing to let his friend go to jail just months before his new baby was born, Nico stuck to his story and was convicted. Everyone was shocked and horrified by his three-year sentence. Only Nico’s friend, Misha and Maggie knew the truth.
“That’s good. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone,” Misha said. “But he’s out now. New beginning.”
Her friend looked sad and angry, and Maggie reached over to squeeze her hand. “Are you free for lunch?”
