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  He hated that the words of the meddling matchmaker came back to him in that moment. He hated it because there was a lot of truth in what she said. Truths that his ex-fiancée just confirmed.

  “I didn’t know we had any problems,” Anson admitted.

  Carina’s eyes shifted away from him.

  Anson took a step back from her. “Would have been nice to be clued in before you went looking for a love connection elsewhere.”

  She looked back at him and smiled softly as she took a step toward him. “Listen, I just thought we could have a little fun . . . for old time’s sake,” she said, stroking one of his nipples with her index finger.

  Anson caught her hand. “I don’t do dick on demand for anybody,” he said.

  She arched a brow and stepped back from him to let the dress fall from her shoulders to a puddle at her feet. Striking a pose, she looked deeply into his eyes, daring him. “So you don’t want this?” she asked after a moment, her voice disbelieving.

  Anson’s head below his waist stirred to life, but he forced the head on his neck to remain in control. “Yes . . . but I want everything that comes with it and I just realized everything else is not available, and maybe never really was.”

  Carina sighed and bent over to pick up her dress and pull it on. “Look, Anson, I had a long, stressful day at my practice and I just wanted to relax a little bit. That’s all.”

  He shrugged one broad shoulder. “That’s not enough.”

  “Fine,” she said, securing the dress with jerky movements that revealed her agitation. She bent to scoop up her shoes.

  He stepped aside as she moved toward the front door.

  “Good-bye, Anson,” she said over her shoulder.

  “Why did you go to the matchmaking service?” he asked just as she opened the door.

  She paused and hung her head low, as if she wished she had made it out the door before the question could have been asked. “Don’t, Anson,” she pleaded.

  “Do, Carina,” he insisted with censure.

  She turned. “You’re cold. Distant. Unreachable,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “Even in bed—as good as it was physically—there is a part of you that is closed off to me emotionally and I can feel it. There is a shield around your heart. And it made me feel less than. Lacking. Wanting more than a wet ass from you, Anson. More than a big house and the white picket fence and the two kids and a dog. I wanted to feel loved, not acquired like a business.”

  Anson crossed his arms over his chest and frowned deeply at her critique.

  Carina eyed him up and down and shook her head as if she found him lacking. “It’s not all about your plan, Anson, and until you realize that, or find the woman who makes you forget it, you will continue in a long line of meaningless relationships or wasting the time of another woman like me who wants more than just to be respected for her career. I am a woman, Anson,” she finished with emphasis.

  His eyes squinted and his brain raced to dissect everything she said. To find any meaning between the lines.

  “Say something,” she almost screamed, her frustration with him obvious.

  “We were together for two years and you felt this way the entire time and said nothing?” Anson asked, his voice hard and cold . . . and distant.

  Carina shook her head. “What happened to you to make you so coldhearted?”

  He brushed away what he saw as feigned concern. “Was the trip to the matchmaker your first time looking elsewhere for this love you claim I didn’t have?”

  Her shoulders slumped and she looked defeated by his words. “No,” she admitted.

  Anson’s eyes hardened as he stared at her.

  Carina held up her hands. “You gave me no choice, and if you really are honest about us, you didn’t love me, and in time I realized I didn’t love you either,” she said, turning and exiting his house.

  Anson stood there long after the lights from her car flashed across the windows of his home as she reversed and left his yard. His life.

  It wasn’t anger and jealousy that left him rooted in that spot. The woman he’d been in a relationship with for the last two years, whom he’d proposed to just two months ago, had admitted she’d cheated and she had no use for him outside sex. He was waiting to feel the classic signs after receiving such news.

  Those feelings never rose in him. He didn’t even care to find out the details of her infidelity. The “who, what, when, where, and why” of it was futile to him. She was untrustworthy. Period. Point blank.

  “What happened to you to make you so coldhearted?”

  Anson walked out onto his porch, leaving the front door slightly ajar. He took a seat on the padded bench lining the rails and extended his legs to cross his ankles as he looked up at the night sky beginning to fill with stars. He and Carina were done. He could admit that he had no deep and profound love for her, but he’d expected the same faithfulness he’d given to her. Their sex life had been heated enough, but had it been the best sex he ever had? No. The type of soul-searing connection that all those foolish romance novels proclaimed existed? Never.

  Although he’d been successful in business, his personal life had been a run of one-night stands and meaningless relationships. In Carina he’d thought he’d found the ideal candidate to wed and settle down with. Someone who understood the importance of career focus and the “American dream.”

  His architectural firm and other small business ventures were his priorities. He’d seen too much and came through too much to ever go back to having wish sandwiches for dinner and living pillar to post. He doubted that he would ever meet the woman who’d make him put love before financial security.

  Chapter 3

  Two weeks later

  Mona sat her iPad down on the sofa beside her and wiped her face with her hands, wishing it was that easy to wipe the fatigue away. Pulling her bare feet up onto the sofa, she wrapped her arms around her legs and settled her dimpled chin in the groove between her knees. Through her bright pink spectacles she looked off into the distance at the rain pelting against the window. She was exhausted and briefly closed her eyes as she took a deep breath....

  “No,” she cried out, sitting up straight and looking around bewildered.

  Her heart was pounding and she was relieved to still be in her living room. She wiped her eyes with her fingertips as she pressed her feet to the floor.

  “Not another one,” she moaned.

  Over the last couple of weeks she had been plagued by brief visions that alluded to the faltering health of Anson Tyler, the angry ex-fiancé of her current client, Carina. Mona was determined to forget the irate man and their whole confrontation, but the dreams plagued her. They were just flashes lasting no more than a second or two, but in each one he was injured—by fire, by illness, by drowning, and so on. This time he had fallen off the cliff in true Wile E. Coyote getting played by the Road Runner fashion from those Looney Tunes cartoons. She’d never had such a vision and didn’t know if it was a true premonition or her just taking out her frustration because he’d questioned her motivation in her business. She took the integrity of her business very seriously and hated that it had been questioned.

  That had to be all it was.

  Rising to her feet, she jumped around and rolled her shoulders. “Wake up, Mo. Wake your butt up, girl,” she kept saying, even squatting to playfully box the air with her tiny fists.

  Moving her successful boutique matchmaking services to a smaller town should have meant downsizing, but if anything business was booming even more. In the last few weeks she had more than twenty new clients complete the initial online sign up for her services adding to the already large base of clients in varying stages of receiving her amenities, from the required interview either in person or by FaceTime to one-on-one coaching or image consulting, prior to her searching her database for matches.

  And she still had to make time for the purely business end of it. The paperwork, the advertising and marketing, the bills, the collection
of past due accounts.

  “Fuuuuuuuuck,” Mona said, tilting her head up to the ceiling and childishly kicking her feet.

  Giving herself a mini time out for her mini tantrum, Mona sat on the sofa for a few moments and just breathed. Slowly and deeply. “I need help,” she said, hating the anxiety that was consuming her and hating even more that she had to humble herself and ask for assistance.

  Mona rose and walked across the cozy and intimate living room to slip her bare feet into a pair of rubber boots, pull on her trench coat, and grab an umbrella from the white milk can umbrella holder she kept by the front door. Spring showers in the Southeast came often and that night was no exception.

  With her car keys in her fist, Mona stepped out onto the porch and opened her umbrella before dashing down the stairs to her vehicle. Luckily the night rain was gentle and she barely got wet before unlocking and opening the door and sliding onto the leather driver’s seat. She gripped the wheel tightly as she steered, but it wasn’t for fear of losing control on the wet road. It was tension. Plain and simple.

  With one last turn down a long, muddy, dirt road, Mona looked out at the white two-story home that her mother had inherited from her father upon his passing. It was where they’d lived once they moved to Holtsville from New Orleans, and upon their father’s death the house was willed to Mona and her sisters.

  Only Reeba resided there now. Shara was off seeing the world, and Mona had found her own place after the animosity stewing between her and Reeba made the house tension-filled and stressful.

  “Am I crazy?” Mona wondered aloud as she parked the car and reached for her umbrella on the floor of the passenger side. “Watch how quick this shit go left.”

  Mona got out of the car and hurried up the brick path leading from the driveway to the front stoop. As she stepped onto the porch, the front door opened and Reeba stood there behind the screen.

  All of the Ballinger girls resembled each other, and ever since they were just chubby toddlers, people mistook them for triplets. Same build. Same bronzed cinnamon complexion most people accomplished with high end cosmetics. Same jet black hair reaching their midback.

  As Mona stood before the screen door it was almost like looking at a mirror reflection save that Reeba wore her hair bone straight and parted like Pocahontas. “Hey, sis,” Mona said, reaching for the door handle as Reeba stepped back to allow her entrance.

  “Where you going in this weather . . . dressed like that?” Reeba asked with a smile, eyeing Mona’s bright yellow pajamas and fire-engine red rain boots with a hot pink trench with a ruffled bottom.

  “I need to dress up to come see you?” Mona asked, moving over to the crackling embers in the fireplace. She rubbed her hands together and enjoyed the warmth of the fire.

  “You want some tea?” Reeba asked, turning to head back to the large kitchen at the rear of the house.

  “Not without a splash of amaretto.” Mona removed her trench and boots before padding behind her sister.

  “One Mama’s special coming up,” Reeba said, picking up the copper teapot on the stove to fill with water.

  Mona smiled as she looked around at the warm and bright decor that easily rivaled the dark rainy skies outside the many windows lining the walls. “You haven’t changed anything,” she said, moving over to the fireplace once used for cooking to stroke her mother’s cast iron pot.

  Many winter nights her mother had lit the fire and they’d all sat around it as she made cocoa. Not from necessity, but because she knew her girls loved the idea of a fireplace in the kitchen.

  “Why would I?” Reeba asked. “It’s not just my home . . . I’m just the only one who never left.”

  Mona stiffened. That was true, but she didn’t understand why Reeba made her feel guilty about it. Her love for the small town had been long to come, as it had for Shara. Reeba, like their father, had clung to it instantly and upon graduation had chosen to stay, attending the College of Charleston and commuting every day to campus.

  “There’s nothing wrong in either of our decisions on where to attend college and live after graduation, ReeRee,” Mona said gently, referring back to her childhood nickname to diffuse the far too familiar tension she felt rising between them.

  “I was speaking of after Daddy died.”

  Mona glanced over her shoulder. “I thought I was doing you a favor by moving out,” she said.

  Reeba just shrugged before turning with two steaming cups to sit on the large island in the center of the kitchen. “Once again you were wrong,” she said with a twist of her lip. “But you always see and do things your way . . . regardless of anything else.”

  “How is the air up there on that high horse?” Mona asked.

  “Peaceful,” Reeba returned with ease.

  Mona plopped down onto one of the bar stools and pulled her cup and saucer closer to stir. “I can’t believe I even considered asking you to come help me at Modern Day Cupid,” she balked, the spoon hitting sharply against the porcelain as she created a mini whirlpool in her tea.

  Reeba dropped her spoon. “What?” she gasped sharply in disbelief. “Girl . . . please. I wouldn’t dare walk foot in that place, far less help you with pissing all over family traditions.”

  Mona released a heavy breath. “I don’t see why you or the aunts get to tell me what I do with the gift God gave me.”

  “That God gave to generations of women in our family who have all respected the way things are done,” Reeba snapped.

  “I respect it as well, maybe more so because I use it for what it is intended rather than hide it like it’s something to be forgotten or forgiven.” Mona rose to her feet and held up her hand. “Just forget I even brought it up.”

  “Mona—”

  “No,” Mona said forcefully. “I should be able to ask my sister to help, but that’s my dumb-ass fault for thinking that.”

  “Sure was.”

  Mona had moved to the door, but paused and turned. “You don’t even know you’re wrong. You’re so caught up in this supposed indignation that you’re not even using common sense. And as much as I respect the college education we both have, it is that common sense that I leaned toward more.”

  Reeba arched one full, shapely brow. “So I don’t have common sense?”

  Mona shrugged one shoulder. “Not if you think a business that has been thriving in the black for the last three years is all dependent upon me touching everybody who comes through the door and hooking them up with the person I see in that vision,” she said, her tone as tight as she felt. “I have clients across the country. Some I have never met in person. Some I am not able to lay hands on. My database is only made up of people who come to me for a match. I am successful because I built a network of professionals who want to cut out some of the chase in falling in love.”

  Reeba shook her head and looked down into the tea she continued to stir. Clink-clink. Clink-clink.

  “Now every so often do I have two people in the database and I’m able to touch one of them and see a vision that they are meant to be. Yes. And every time it happens I feel honored and blessed to help them connect, but that’s less than three percent of the business I do. Most times it’s just me doing the work outside the premonitions and I still have a more than seventy-five percent success rate,” she snapped. “So this assumption that my business is all about the use of my gift is bullshit. It would be nonsensical and I shouldn’t have to tell you that, Little Sister All High and Mighty Think She Know It All and Don’t.”

  They both jumped as a potted plant fell from one of the windowsills.

  Reeba rose to pick it up. “Mama and Daddy don’t like your tone either,” she said.

  Mona felt some of the tension from her shoulders ease. “Maybe they don’t like that you don’t respect your elders,” she countered, walking back into the kitchen to grab the dustpan and brush set from the pantry by the back door.

  “Twenty-three months does not make you my elder,” Reeba said, reaching up from where s
he squatted to take the set from Mona.

  “Two years older plus a minor in marketing in addition to the same business degree we both have . . . does make me your elder, boo. Sorry, but you need to go on ahead and swallow that nugget of truth.”

  Reeba dumped the dirt back into the pot and righted the roots of the plant before sitting it on the edge of the island. “I still don’t absolutely agree with you, Mo,” she said, looking up with some emotion in her eye that let her know their estrangement bothered her just as much.

  “Fine, you don’t have to. You don’t have to agree with me, but stop judging me for making money on my visions and for leaving home,” Mona said.

  Reeba made a face. “I could care less y’all heifers flew the coop. It just made me the favorite,” she boasted.

  Mona arched a brow. “Hmph. You were the only one to get a new car when you graduated high school.”

  “For the commute, that’s all. For the commute,” she said, pouting her lips playfully as she nodded.

  Mona laughed. “You full of it,” she said, reclaiming her seat at the island. “And put some more amaretto in my drink.”

  “Chick, please. This is your kitchen too and not the bar at the club,” she said, reclaiming her seat as well. “You better handle your handle.”

  Mona rolled her eyes, but moved over to the cabinet over the counter to remove the bottle of liqueur. “All we need is Shara and some nut cake,” she said.

  “Well, Shara is in Thailand this week, but I got the nut cake,” Reeba said, taking the lid off the round metal can in the center of the island. “Thank God one of us knows how to cook Mama’s recipes.”

  “Forget the recipes. I wish we had her luck in finding the right man to even feed some good soul food—and other things—to,” Mona said, retrieving a cake knife from one of the metal canisters filled with utensils lining the counter by the stove.

  “You were just whining about not having time to run your business,” Reeba said. “So when would you have time for a relationship?”