Pamela Browning - Life Is A Beach - Life Is A Beach / A Real-Thing Fling

She dug the office key out of her purse and promptly dropped it.

The cowboy immediately bent down and picked it up. He didn’t immediately straighten, however. That took a while. His eyes moved up, up, studying her ankles, her calves, and what he could see of her thighs, which was probably too much considering the fact that her skirt was very short. She had a hard time finding clothes that were long enough.

“Thanks,” she said dryly as he handed her the key. At the moment that their hands touched, their eyes locked. His were the bluest eyes she’d ever seen. They were brilliant, sparkling like sunlight on the sea, heating up like a blue flame. They took her breath away.

She made herself shove the key in the lock, but the door opened before she turned the key. She’d better get that lock fixed one of these days, but it was low on her list of priorities since there wasn’t much worth stealing in the office at present.

The cowboy was right behind her. She followed his gaze as he took in the half-painted lime-green wall, the plastic bead curtain that screened off the supply closet, the TV alcove for viewing client videos. She supposed the decor was startling, but this was her style. After downsizing the office into a mere one and a half rooms due to lack of funds, she’d painted over plain vanilla walls, banished Aunt Sophie’s heavy mahogany desk, thrown out the dusty chintz curtains at the windows so she could look out at the multicolored pastel facade of the Blue Moon Apartments across the street where she lived.

“You—um, well, you could sit down,” she said.

He looked puzzled. Oops! She’d forgotten that she’d sent the couch and client chairs out for cleaning yesterday. The only places to sit were on a couple of floor cushions that she’d brought over from her apartment and her desk chair.

Omigosh, she thought, if I sit in the chair he’ll be able to look right up my skirt.

“There, ma’am?” the cowboy asked politely, staring down at the nearest floor cushion, the bright orange one.

“Why, yes,” Karma said, acting as if nothing was amiss. “I’ll take the pink one.”

Looking disconcerted, the cowboy lowered himself to the indicated cushion. The position he took, knees upraised, back straight, strained the jeans tight against his thighs and calves. He didn’t look at all comfortable. What he did look was sexy.

Karma’s secondhand 1940s rattan desk was covered with an assortment of papers, old diet-drink cans, a dried-up paintbrush, and a dead hibiscus blossom awash in a jar lid half full of water. Karma yanked a form from a stack and, trying not to appear as ungainly as she felt, she also sat down on a cushion. Maybe she was crazy for going ahead with this. Maybe she should tell this man to come back tomorrow when the couch would be here and the chairs would have been delivered. But to dismiss him might mean losing him, and the business couldn’t afford that. Clients had been very few and far between, and this might be her last chance to succeed. At anything.

“What do I have to do to sign up?” asked the cowboy.

Karma fumbled in her tote bag for a pen. “At Rent-a-Yenta we chronicle your personal information, collect a registration fee and then we videotape our clients. We’ll study our database and pull up clients of the opposite sex that we think would be a good match for you.” There was no “we”; there was only her. But she thought it sounded more impressive than admitting that she did everything herself.

“And I get to watch videotapes of the clients you pick?” He looked visibly cheered by the thought.

“Right. And they’ll watch videotapes of you.”

“Okay. That sounds like a good way to go about it.”

“Oh, it is, I assure you.”

After he wrote out the check, he folded his arms across his chest. A very broad chest. “Well, let’s get started.”

“Name?” she asked brightly.

“Slade,” he said.

“Is that your first name or last?”

“Slade’s my given name. Braddock’s my last.” His voice rumbled deep in his throat.

“Slade Braddock,” she repeated, liking the sound of the name almost as much as the way he said it. She wrote his name down on the form.

“Age?”

“Thirty-awful.”

She blinked. “Excuse me?”

“Thirty-awful. Too old for the young ones, too young for the older ones.”

She tried not to smile. “Should be thirty-awesome, if you ask me,” she retorted before she thought. She was always retorting before she thought, and before the words were out of her mouth, she wished she hadn’t said that.

He grinned, expanded it to a smile, then let out a hearty guffaw. She tipped her head uncertainly.

“That’s pretty good,” he said. “Thirty-awesome. I’ll remember that one.”

She wanted to laugh, too, but this was a client. She cautioned herself to remain businesslike, but her next words sounded like a reproof. “Are you going to tell me your age, or should I leave this line blank?”

He sombered up then. “I’m thirty-five,” he said. “Now I’ve told you my age, how about you telling me yours?”

“You’re not supposed to ask a lady that,” she said.

“But I just did.”

Those eyes again, piercing right through her. They demanded an answer. “I’m twenty-seven,” she said.

“A good age,” he said thoughtfully.

She made herself look down at the form. “Address?”

“Sunchaser Marina. Route three, Okeechobee City.”

“That’s the whole address?”

“That’s two addresses.”

She forced herself to look at him. “Let’s get this straight. What’s your primary mailing address?”

“That would be the Okeechobee City one, ma’am. The marina one’s sort of borrowed.”

This, then, explained the cowboy outfit. Okeechobee City was cattle country, a small town on the shores of Lake Okeechobee some miles west of Palm Beach, that much she knew.

She wrote down both addresses. She knew the Sunchaser Marina well; she’d bicycled past it many times. It was home base for pleasure yachts, houseboats and assorted other watercraft, all of them expensive, none of them suited to a guy who dressed like he’d recently thundered on horseback right out of a John Wayne movie. Bermuda shorts in assorted pastel plaids and Gucci loafers with no socks were the preferred mode of dress at Sunchaser Marina.

Slade Braddock shifted on his cushion. She’d better rush this along or he might cut the interview short.

Karma fixed the cowboy with what she hoped was a serious and businesslike gaze. “And what brings you to Rent-a-Yenta?” she asked.

“I want to get married,” he said doggedly. “I’m ready to find myself a bride.”

Karma swallowed. She wasn’t accustomed to clients who came right out and stated their purpose. Most of them weren’t too sure what they’d be getting into when they signed with her, and they usually said something vague. “Introduce me to somebody nice to date,” was the usual statement. Sometimes they added embellishments, such as “He has to have a platinum Visa card with his picture on it,” or “I don’t go out with anyone who doesn’t know how to refold a map,” but that was about as specific as they got. No one, in the months since she’d become a match-maker, had flat out said, “I want to get married.”

Slade Braddock looked so earnest that Karma was sure he meant it.

“To what kind of woman?” she blurted.

“Oh, I’ve got a woman in mind. I can describe her if you like,” he said as a dreamy expression filtered out the fire in those remarkable blue eyes.

This wasn’t standard operating procedure, but Karma was fascinated by his honesty. Honesty was all too rare in this business, she’d learned. “Go ahead,” she said, realizing that she was holding her breath. She let it out slowly, wondering if it was too much to hope that he’d describe a five-foot-eleven natural blonde with large feet, green eyes and breasts slightly on the small side.