Heartstrings and Diamond Rings Read Online Free PDF Page A

her.
    “No. It really is. Particularly since you haven’t been at this very long. Like, hardly at all. How am I supposed to trust you when you have no track record?”
    He pointed to the mahogany staircase along the far wall that led to the second floor. “See those stairs over there?”
    Alison turned around. “Yeah?”
    “When I was a kid,” he said, “I used to sit on those stairs, listening to my grandmother talk to her clients. Most of the women were a lot like you. They’d been out there trying so hard to make the kind of love connection they’d always dreamed about, but they always came up empty. But my grandmother…” A smile passed over his lips. “She had a knack. An intuition. Almost a sixth sense about who belonged with whom. And no matter how skeptical they were when they walked through the door, six months later, when they were wearing a ring, suddenly they weren’t skeptical anymore. Was she a hundred percent right all the time? No. But she sure increased the odds for a lot of women to find good men.”
    The sincerity he radiated seemed to waft over to Alison and wrap itself around her like a warm blanket. But the very reason she was here—because she didn’t trust herself when it came to making decisions about men—was precisely what kept her from feeling comfortable trusting this one.
    “But that was your grandmother. I don’t mean to be negative, but are you sure you can do this?”
    “My grandmother took tremendous pride in her business. If she didn’t think I was competent to run it, why else would she have willed it to me?”
    Okay. So that was a pretty good point.
    “What kind of guarantee do you have?” she asked him.
    “No guarantee. I offer five quality introductions. If I made my services unlimited, would my clients make an effort to really get to know the people I match them with? Or would they give it a half-hearted effort, always assuming somebody better was just around the corner?”
    “So I could give you fifteen hundred dollars and end up with no one?”
    “That,” he said with a smile of supreme confidence, “is not going to happen.”
    Everything about this man seemed positive and sincere. Even if she wasn’t quite sure he was up to snuff as a matchmaker, she didn’t doubt he believed he was. And because she was a little short on self-confidence herself, she really admired it when she saw it in somebody else.
    “Excuse me,” he said suddenly, reaching into his jeans pocket. “Sorry. I need to take this call.”
    Call? She hadn’t heard a ring. Then she realized he must have had his phone on vibrate.
    He hit the talk button. He turned away a little, as if to make his conversation more private, but she heard him loud and clear.
    “Brandon Scott,” he said, and then a big smile crossed his face. “Hi, Susan!” he said in a cheery voice. “So you and Jeff had lunch together. How did it go?”
    Alison’s eyes may have been on a Victorian print on the wall to her right, but her ears were tuned to every word that came out of Brandon’s mouth.
    “Wow,” Brandon said. “That’s great news! I’m so glad you hit it off.” A pause, and then he laughed. “Now you know that’s not true. I’m not better at this than my grandmother was. I’m just glad I was able to pick up on the work she’d already done with you and go from there.”
    They chatted for a few minutes more, with Brandon admonishing Susan that no matter how much fun she and Jeff were having, next time she needed to watch the clock so she wasn’t an hour late getting back to work.
    Alison felt a shot of envy. She wanted to be the woman on the other end of that phone who’d had such a great first date that she’d forgotten all about the time. Not once in her life had Alison done anything but muddle through a first date and pray there was more to the guy than bad table manners and a driving need to talk endlessly about his divorce.
    Finally Brandon hung up and turned back to Alison. “I’m