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ONE
Saskia Bloom flicked her dark fringe out of her eyes and peered through her vintage glasses at her laptop screen before madly scribbling notes on the yellow legal pad under the mouse.
“I’ll eat my shoes if you’re even a day under forty,” she mumbled at the photo of a guy grinning inanely back at her from the Dating By Numbers website.
Undeterred, StudMuffin33 kept on smiling, as if the dauntingly athletic profile was so appealing any woman would let the age-fib slip.
Favourite Movie: The Fast and the Furious
Collects: surfboards
Who’d Play You in the Movie of Your Life? Jason Statham
Looking for: an open-minded lady with a twinkle in her eye
Good lord.
Mouse hover and click.
The photo of the next guy gave her such a fright she flinched. BirdLover28 had tufty hair, wore a grimace rather than a smile and had a chicken on his shoulder. A live one, she hoped.
Favourite TV Show: Dr Who (the original!)
Sundays are for: garage sales
Celebrity Crush: Tyra Banks
Looking for: fun in all the wrong places
Alas, Saskia would not be partaking of said fun. For, even though it had been several months since she’d been booted back into the dating pool, she wasn’t online looking for The One. Or a “Saturday night special” as one possibility had so gallantly offered.
Her account with Dating By Numbers was research, pure and simple. She and her business partner, Lissy—together known as SassyStats—had been hired by the site to collate a fun statistical analysis of online dating. In order to do the best job possible, she’d jumped from an aeroplane for a piece on adrenalin junkies. Dived with sharks for a study on phobias. In comparison, creating a dating profile was cushy.
Saskia lifted her booted foot to the chair, wrapped an arm around her woolly-tights-clad knee, and, chewing on the end of a pen, shook her head at the dozen more possibilities in her inbox.
Research or not, it was actually pretty flattering.
With her wavy brown hair, her mother’s olive skin, eyes that were kind of brown and a lean frame that puberty had pretty much ignored, under the right lighting, with humidity low, she could just about pull off cute. The idea that so many guys had considered her for a follow up email was a marvel.
If she’d known this was the response she’d get, she’d have signed up long ago! She’d met Stu in a pub, and look how that had turned out.
There he’d sat hunched in his old coat, looking so dark and mysterious, with pen smudges on his fingertips. He’d looked as if he’d needed a warm meal and a hug. Turned out he’d needed her mobile phone, her TV, her computers, her appliances and more. In recompense he’d left a nasty note, a huge debt and his dog.
Saskia glanced over at Ernest, the big wiry Airedale currently lying on his back, legs in the air, snoring on the dinky old armchair in the corner of her office.
With a sigh, she slid her feet back to the floor and shifted the legal pad an inch. She and Ernest might have discovered a bona fide fondness for one another, but she’d never get used to the angry red envelopes that fell through her mail-slot on a weekly basis. Never wanted to. The only way to make them go away was to work. And work some more. And then, when night fell and her bed was beckoning, get back to work.
Mouse hover and click.
Saskia lifted her hand off the mouse, ready to take notes on the next candidate, but at the sight of him her hand wobbled pointlessly in midair.
She might, in fact, have gasped at the sight, because Ernest suddenly snorted, his legs twitching like an up-ended spider, before settling back into a dream-filled sleep.
Gorgeous didn’t even begin to describe the man. Drop-dead, movie star, take-your-breath-away gorgeous came a tiny bit closer. The shot was candid, with the man looking at something over the photographer’s shoulder. Dark blond hair precision cut. Sleeves of a pale blue business shirt neatly rolled up to his upper arms, a vein or two roping from wrist to elbow. A solitary raised eyebrow, a barely there lift to one corner of a truly sensuous mouth. But who’d even notice, considering the guy had the bluest eyes Saskia ever seen.
How does a man who looks like that not have someone in his life? she wondered. Though, considering the fibs the other men had told, she couldn’t count on it!
He did look resolute, as if he wouldn’t be used to hearing the word no, so maybe he was plain mean. Or into cross-stitching. Or he had halitosis. Or really gnarly toenails. Or maybe he was looking for something even more outrageous than “fun in all the wrong places.”
Intrigue levels rising, Saskia wriggled the blood back into her fingers and scrolled to the mini-profile that had been sent out with the guy’s initial contact.
