The Love Market by Carol Mason Read Free Book Online Page B

the north east of England. Mike and I had already decided I should leave my job and stay home until Aimee was school age. So I decided to run some ads in the right magazines, to treat it more like a hobby at first and see what happened. I came up with a name—The Love Market, which felt like an obvious choice—bought a Mac computer and designed my own website, drew up my business plan, all this while Aimee took naps or played beside me. After the first six months I had eleven clients and growing. After the first three years I was successfully matching more than fifty per cent. Now, I have a manageable portfolio of eighty: fifty women to thirty men, and a success rate of seventy per cent. Is it a bad life? Well, sometimes it’s frustrating. But it can be entertaining and rewarding. Occasionally it puts me on a such a high that it renews my faith in the concept of their being ‘the right one’ for all of us. That’s more than you can say for most jobs.
     
    ~ * * * ~
     
    James Halton-Daly is everything that Trish said he is. I can tell this the moment I catch sight of his handsomeness as he sits at the table. He looks up from the menu, and sees me striding towards him. He stands to greet me, beams an honest, warm smile, and gives me the quick and shameless once-over.
    It strikes me that I’ve never been on a fake date since Mike walked out, which makes this feel more like a test-run than a business-meet.
    The Instant First Impression. Hair: blond and shaggy, like a Wheaten Terrier’s. Handsome, in a Sebastian Flyte meets Hugh Grant way. I already know he went to one of the top public schools in England, then Oxford (where he met Trish), and now at thirty-eight, he’s a partner at a top Manchester law firm. A charming, likeable toff. “A” for style. The tweed blazer with the turned up collar. The pink, striped, dress-shirt, open at the neck, and the dark jeans with the turned-up cuffs.
    ‘We could forget that I’m about to hire you to find me a girlfriend, and you could be my girlfriend,’ he says.
    ‘I’m taken.’
    ‘Are you?’ he lays a hand on his heart. ‘Well, I imagine it must be one of the leading credentials of being matchmaker, right?’
    I hope not.
    ‘How do you become a matchmaker, anyway?’ he asks, as I sit down. ‘I mean I thought you’d have to live in New York and look like Cher.’
    I tell him how I wish I looked like Cher. Then I tell him how I got started, and what it is about the business that gives me a buzz. He seems fascinated. We chat easily. He is shamelessly checking me out, but I’m flattered. I like his boldness. I like the thick silver ring he wears on his left index finger and the way he corrects the waiter by reminding him he should be taking the lady’s order first.
    I finally get him onto the topic of women.
    ‘Well, the last ten I went out with—’
    ‘Ten?’
    ‘Well obviously not all together. Over a period of…’ He pulls a thinking face, ‘…a year and a half maybe, went from bad to catastrophic. There was, in no specific order: the smoker, the inferiority complex, the one that was more interested in my friends, she who thinks all lawyers get murderers off, Jen who was obsessed with Tango dancing, then there was Miss Religious, Miss Missing Front Tooth, the one that was only fourteen years older than her daughter, then Frannie Fat Fingers—’ he recoils, squeamishly ‘—and then the one who compulsively checked her mobile for messages.’
    ‘Whoosh! That’s quite a list of fatal flaws. Especially the compulsive checker of messages.’ I tease him, sipping on the Kir Royale he insisted I have.
    ‘It seems that every single woman in her late thirties has issues. Desperation issues, confidence issues, ex-issues, chips on the shoulder…’ He shrugs.
    ‘Fat fingers and chips aside though, what is it that you’re looking for?’
    He seems to think about this, lolling back in his chair, totally at ease. ‘Well, an independent, free-minded brunette,