The Matchmaker Meets Her Match Read Online Free PDF Page A

to Hilda Glazer. Hilda was a forty-seven-year-old scientist whose buttoned-up ways had made it hard for her to connect with anyone. Rilka had started by setting her up with other buttoned-up types, whom Hilda called rigid, frigid prudes. “I’m precise, not rigid,” Hilda had said when Rilka had questioned her about the differences between her anal-retentive behaviors and those of her dates.
    How little we know ourselves
, Rilka had thought at the time, sighing over the amount of self-delusion a typical grown adult required to get through any given day. Lately, she’d been pairing Hilda with more laid-back types, but they were directionless and lazy and their invitations for her to loosen up drove her to near-homicidal rage. Rilka felt it was probably time to have the
You know, we need to talk about lowering your standards
discussion but she knew how Hilda would react to that, so she kept putting it off.
    “How’d it go last night?” Rilka asked mildly. Hilda’s date had already threatened to sue Rilka for the infliction of mental distress, so she felt their get-together had probably not gone well. She was going to have to see her lawyer about adding a no-suing policy to the standard disclaimer.
    “He was insufferable,” Hilda snapped, vibrating with remembered outrage. “Hands all over me. Disgusting.”
    Privately Rilka doubted his hands had gotten anywhere near Hilda but she said, “I’ll have to have a little talk with him. He presented himself as a perfect gentleman.” She’d found him a little prissy and sanctimonious, in fact, but she always kept her most slanderous opinions to herself.
    “Oh, they do that in
public
,” Hilda said with a sniff. “But get them alone and all they can think about is one thing.”
    Yeah, and that one thing is, How soon can I get the hell out of here
, Rilka thought uncharitably and wondered if McDonald’s was still hiring.
    “So what should we consider doing now?” Rilka asked. She herself had run out of ideas. What did she know about matchmaking? She knew less now than she’d known five years ago when she’d started. Gran had always made it seem so effortless, like choosing matches out of the air, apparently at random, and no one had ever threatened to sue her for infliction of mental distress. Rilka wished she’d paid more attention to how Gran had done it. There must have been a method, but none of Rilka’s methods were working.
    “I want a classic gentleman,” Hilda said, as she had said countless times before and yet somehow Rilka’s idea of a classic gentleman and Hilda’s obviously did not mesh. “Someone charming but not presumptuous.”
    Rilka herself agreed that presumption was not charming, but she had no idea who —
    And then the image of Marcus van Buren popped into her mind. Marcus was a perfect gentleman, in the classic sense, no matter what you meant by it, so Hilda would at least think Rilka was competent. His main failing — the thing that kept him from finding the love of his life — meant he and Hilda would not enjoy a long-term camaraderie, but putting them together for a date would buy Rilka some time to think about what to do next.
    Gran would have expected a serendipitous stranger to cross the threshold, but Rilka thought serendipity was a ridiculous way to run a business. Gran seemed to have relied on it for all those years and it had worked, but the operative word was
seemed
. There had to have been a method to Gran’s madness. If only Rilka knew what it was. Rilka was not the kind of person who believed in serendipity.
    Anyway, a relationship between Marcus and Hilda had no hope of going anywhere, but it would give Hilda at least one pleasant date. Marcus could be counted on to be suave and charming. He would also steal your valuables the minute your back was turned, an extremely bad habit Rilka had tried to encourage him to kick. Once Rilka had figured out what Marcus was — it hadn’t been that hard, what with Gran’s silver