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Elise shook her head, hardly sure where to start slashing and burning Jenna’s incorrect and provoking statements.
“I’m a matchmaker. Only. I care about helping people find love, even someone like Dax.”
“Someone like Dax?” he repeated silkily as he focused his attention on Elise instead of Jenna. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
And now everyone had turned against her, even the one person who’d been on her side. Who should have been on her side. She and Dax were embarking on something with no label, but which she’d wanted to explore. Or she had before she walked into this confrontation, this ambush.
The room started closing in. “It means you don’t believe in love, and I naively thought I could show you how wrong you are. But I can’t.”
Her heart hurt to admit failure. Not only had she failed to accomplish a reversal in Dax’s stance with a soul-mate match, she had almost set herself up for a more spectacular disaster by giving in to his day-by-day seduction routine.
She met the gaze of each ex-girlfriend in succession. It wasn’t their fault they weren’t the one and she held no hostility toward them.
“Dax is no longer a client as of today. So your protest is poorly timed. Candy, I’ll refund your money. Expect the credit to appear on your statement within two days. Please see yourselves out.”
She fled to her office and shut the door with an unsatisfying click. Slamming it would have been unprofessional and wouldn’t have made her feel any less embarrassed. But it might have covered the sob in her throat.
The door immediately opened and Dax ended up on her side of it. He leaned against the closed door. “I’m sorry. I had no idea they were waiting around to pounce on you. It was uncalled for and entirely my fault.”
She let her head drop into her hands so she didn’t have to look at him. “It’s not your fault. And I was talking to you, too, when I said see yourself out.”
“I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
The evident concern in his voice softened her. And it pissed her off that he could do that.
“I’m not. And you’re the last person who can fix it.”
“Elise.” His hand on her shoulder shouldn’t have felt so right, so warm and like the exact thing she needed. “I have to get back to the office, but I’ll make it up to you tonight.”
Why did he have to be so sweet and sexy and so hard to pin down?
She shrugged it off—the hand, the man, the disappointment. “I can’t do this with you.”
“Do what? Have dinner with me? We’ve eaten plenty of meals together and you never had any trouble chewing before.”
That was the problem. He wanted it to be dinner with nothing meaningful attached. In a few weeks, she’d end up like Jenna.
“Dinner isn’t just dinner and you know it. It’s a start and we have different ideas about what we’re starting.”
“That’s completely untrue. Dinner is about spending time together. Making each other feel good. Conversation.”
“Sex,” she said flatly.
“Of course. I like sex. What’s wrong with that?”
“Because I want to get married! I want to be in love. Not right away, but some day, and I need the possibility of that. I need the man I’m with to want those things too,” she shouted.
Shouting seemed to be the only way to get through to him. This was not going to work and he kept coming up with reasons why she should feel differently, as though there was something wrong with her because she didn’t want to get in line behind the ex-girlfriends.
He swiveled her chair around to face him. “Maybe I will want that. And maybe you want those things but you’ll realize you don’t want them with me, and you’ll think that’s okay. Neither of us knows for sure what’s going to happen. Nobody does.”
No, but she had a pretty good idea what would happen, and it didn’t lead to happily ever after. “Did you imagine yourself marrying Jenna while you were dating her?”
He flinched. “Don’t let a few disgruntled women spook you.”
The flinch answered the question as well as if he’d flat out said no.
“I’m not.” That might have been the genesis, but the gang of ex-girlfriends had only brought suppressed issues to the surface. “This was a problem yesterday and the day before that. I let a few hot kisses on a park bench turn my brain off.”
“So that’s it then. You’re done here?”
