Page 59 of Matched By Mistake
“I definitely am,” she said. “You got me, too. You saw that even though I wasn’t cowering around town, I was still shy and damaged from my past and you never did anything but try to help me heal from it.”
“I did but I had ulterior motives,” he said.
“Did you? Why?”
“I must have been falling in love with you even then. I knew there was no way you could fall for me unless you could trust me. So I did everything I could to show you that I was trustworthy until...”
“Until that night that really tested us. And you stumbled. I did, too. I’m sure it won’t be the last time, but I think we both know that what we have is worth fighting for.”
“It definitely is. Always know that I love you, Maggie Del Rio.”
“And I love you, Jericho Winters.”
Keep reading for an excerpt fromRancher Meets His Matchby J. Margot Critch.
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The Rancher Meets His Match
by J. Margot Critch
One
“Love is in the air as Jericho Winters and Maggie Del Rio have been seen together all over Royal, Texas.” Trey Winters shook his head as he read aloud from the screen of his phone. Trey rolled his eyes and looked at the sign on the building in front of him. k!smet. Because of the dating app, his brother Jericho was now in a relationship with Maggie Del Rio, despite the bad blood between their families that went back almost one hundred years, when a woman named Eliza Boudreaux left her fiancé, Fernando Del Rio, and instead married his rival, Teddy Winters.
He got out of his SUV and strode up to the door. He had a bone to pick with the one running the show—Misha Law, the woman who created the whole app. He strode into her office, expecting to see an assistant sitting outside of the private office, but instead, he saw Misha, the woman herself, sitting alone at the center of a large boardroom table. It seemed that she’d unpretentiously taken over a boardroom instead of setting up a traditional office space.
Her fingers were flying over the keyboard of the laptop that was in front of her, with two large monitors connected, a tablet at her elbow and several plastic cups that he imagined had held iced coffee at a point earlier. Her eyes were locked on one of the monitors, and he would have assumed that she hadn’t even known he’d entered, except, still typing with one hand, she held up the first finger on the other hand, instructing him to wait.
Trey glowered. Not many people ever told him to wait.
Finally, Misha looked up at him. Trey had been filled with a fiery anger, but when her hazel eyes met his, it transformed to a heated flush of lust, just like it always did when he faced her. Even though he was a key investor in k!smet, Trey had not spent much time in Misha’s company, one-on-one. Sure, they’d crossed paths before, most recently at ByteCon, around town and at tech events. And every time he found himself in front of her, he was always completely taken aback by her beauty.
“Trey Winters, my biggest investor,” she greeted him with a playful smile. “What an unexpected surprise. What can I do for you today?” she asked with a bright smile.
Her smile was welcoming as she looked up at him from the table, her eyes amused. Distracted, transfixed, by the way the sunlight reflected off her auburn hair, he found himself wanting to reach out and wrap one of the short, wavy strands around his finger. He straightened, however, forcing himself to remember why he was there, and he looked past her stunning beauty and cleared his throat. “There’s a problem with your app,” he said simply.
Her smile fell into a frown, and she narrowed her eyes at him. Her bubbly energy was gone, and she turned serious.
“Come in,” she told him, her voice low and serious. “And close the door behind you, please.”
He did as she asked. As he walked farther into the room, he caught a whiff of the floral scent that lingered in the air. It was pleasing and he inhaled again.
“There’s a problem with k!smet?” she asked him when he took a seat on the opposite side of the table she was using as a desk. “What makes you say that?”
He didn’t have any proof, of course, and in that moment, he felt like a complete blockhead for even barging in there, but he had to let her know his dissatisfaction. “Well, I don’t believe that there’s any reason why it would have paired my brother Jericho with Maggie Del Rio.”
She sat back in her chair, her eyes moving, as if she was trying to work through what he’d just told her. “I’m sorry, what was that?”
“You heard me. Maybe not the whole app. Maybe just the Surprise Me! function. There must be something wrong with your code, or a funky algorithm, for it to have had that result. They share no common interests—they want different things. There’s no reason why they should have been paired up. Unless there’s a problem with the app, or it was sabotaged.”
She let out a humorless laugh. “Are you serious?” she asked. “You come in here and accuse my app of being faulty when it made a perfectly good match between your brother and Maggie?”
