Read the book: «Life Is A Beach: Life Is A Beach / A Real-Thing Fling»

1

SLADE BRADDOCK WAS JUST a big old lonesome cowboy, and he was bound and determined not to be that way for much longer.

Big? Well, that was one thing he couldn’t change, he reckoned. He was six foot three, so tall that he kept bumping into things in his cousin Mack’s houseboat, where he had squatter’s rights for as long as it took to find himself a wife.

Old? He was thirty-five, which was part of the problem. All the young women in Okeechobee City, Florida, were married. The older ones tended to mother him. So even though in some circles cowboys were said to be babe magnets, Slade had not found this to be true. He had heeded his cousin Mack’s suggestion to seek out a Miami Beach dating service.

Lonesome? The dating service should take care of that.

Slade sauntered across Toy Boat’s salon, which was a high-class word, he figured, for a living room. He twirled his Stetson off the wall sconce where he’d tossed it after getting royally drunk with a couple of rowdies from South Beach last night, and he stopped for a moment to squint critically into the floor-to-ceiling wall mirror.

Yeah, he looked all right. He wasn’t suave. He wasn’t dapper. He was a little worn and tattered around the edges. But he’d do. The woman he was looking for wouldn’t mind that a scar bisected his left eyelid, and she’d let him love her the way a woman was meant to be loved. He wanted a shy, sweet, old-fashioned girl to take back to Okeechobee City with him, to help him run the ranch. A small woman who would make him feel manly. And he’d find one before he left Miami Beach. He was determined.

He was so determined, in fact, that as he was striding purposefully toward the deck, he forgot about the low doorway and whacked his head.

A COWBOY DRESSED OUT in full regalia was not exactly what anyone expected to see ambling down a street in Miami’s trendy South Beach on an ordinary morning.

But that was exactly what Karma O’Connor saw. This guy looked as if he’d galloped in fresh off the range after herding a bunch of cattle or chasing rustlers or something.

“Your aunt Sophie, she wanted you to inherit the business,” said Uncle Nate as he admired the new brass plate beside the door.

Rent-a-Yenta, it said. Karma O’Connor, Matchmaker.

Very reluctantly, Karma peeled her eyes away from the cowboy and bent down to bestow a quick kiss on the little man’s cheek.

“Thank you, Uncle Nate,” she said warmly. “You could have closed up Aunt Sophie’s office. You two could have let me go on being unemployed instead of scooping me up practically out of a welfare line and—”

“Never,” said her great-uncle. “A girl like you should have a chance. Sophie thought about leaving the business to your cousin Paulette, but, well, she respected you, a single girl trying to make it on her own.”

“Paulette is single. She’s trying to make it on her own, too.”

“Ah, Paulette. She’s a go-getter, that one.”

Privately Karma thought that her cousin Paulette was an overbearing little snip. She adopted an expression of mock dismay. “Hey, Uncle Nate—you’re hurting my feelings. Aren’t I a go-getter, too?”

He blinked up at her, a wizened little gnome with eyes that crinkled charmingly around the edges. “You are, bubbeleh, you are. Sophie said you reminded her of herself when she was young,” and with that pronouncement, he launched into an emotional reminiscence about his late wife, who had died six months before.

Karma listened, and she agreed with Nate that her great-aunt had been a kind, charming, and, in fact, brilliant woman. While Nate rattled on as was his wont, she distracted herself from his monologue by searching for the cowboy’s Stetson above the sleek blond heads of a bunch of roller-skating beach bunnies.

The hat was there, all right. It shaded the cowboy’s face so that she gleaned only a quick impression of craggy cheekbones, a strong straight blade of a nose, and a tan that put those beach bunnies to shame. Wide shoulders, too. And, farther down, slim hips slung with a pair of well-worn jeans. Almost as if he knew she was watching him, the cowboy headed in her direction.

“How cool is he?” she murmured to herself in awe.

“It’s hot today like always in Miami,” Nate said as he eased himself down on the bench beside the door to the corridor that led to her office.

Karma kept forgetting that she had to speak loudly so that her uncle could hear. He wore a hearing aid but often forgot to turn it on.

“No, I wasn’t talking about the weather. I was admiring that cowboy heading our way.”

Nate scoffed at this. “You should be thinking about business, not some meshugeneh cowboy. Like I told you before, Sophie managed to make fifty good matches a year and you haven’t made any yet.”

“I wish I could have trained with her for a while,” Karma said wistfully. Unfortunately Aunt Sophie had been too sick during her final illness to work, and the business had gone downhill fast.

“An apprenticeship with my Sophie might have helped. Then again, maybe not. No offense, Karma dear, but a two-time college graduate like you doesn’t necessarily know the human factor.”

“My degrees are in psychology,” Karma reminded him gently as the cowboy continued toward them.

“Psychology, shmycology. You got to know people. Not that you don’t,” he added hastily. “Sophie thought you had potential. ‘That girl has real potential,’ she’d always say after we saw you at one of those family dinners at your parents’ house.”

This was nice to hear, but Karma couldn’t remember a single one of those dinners in which she’d been able to get a word in edgewise, what with all the big talkers in the family. She’d always been the quiet one, the too-tall sister who passed the hors d’oeuvres while her three siblings noisily showed off their piano-playing and dancing talents.

And since when had any of her relatives thought she was anything but a loser compared to her talented and brilliant sisters, not to mention that colossal suck-up, Paulette? “I hope I can live up to your expectations,” Karma murmured.

Truth to tell, her full attention was drawn to the cowboy. In a tropical climate where people customarily wore sandals or even went barefoot, this man was clomping along Ocean Drive in cowboy boots. A couple of children hung back on their mothers’ hands and stared.

“Come along, Chuckie,” urged one of the mothers, tugging.

“Aw, Mom, I want to see the cowboy.”

So did Karma. She wanted to see him up close. And it looked, at this very moment, as if she might have that opportunity.

His boots were finely tooled leather, elaborated worked. She’d heard you could tell a lot about a cowboy by his boots. These were clearly expensive, maybe even hand-made, and definitely too dusty. The boots didn’t jingle, however. This cowboy wasn’t wearing spurs. Which she supposed made sense, since she didn’t see a horse around anywhere.

“I guess I better stop talking about Sophie, I’m getting hoarse.”

“Horse?” Karma said, caught off guard.

“Yeah, my throat itches. Sit down for a minute, Karma, while I catch my breath.”

Karma felt her own breath grow shallow as the cowboy’s gaze fell upon her. Up it went, then down. Never mind that this took a few embarrassing seconds because of her height. Was she blushing? No, she wasn’t that susceptible to nuanced glances. She was twenty-seven years old and the veteran of more than one ill-fated heavy relationship. She was dedicated to carving a career for herself out of the match-making business. So why did this man make her heart beat like—well, like thundering cattle hooves?

Because he was possibly the handsomest man she had ever seen. Because his cowboy boots had stopped right in front of the bench. Right in front of her.

The cowboy stuck a hand in one of his back jeans pockets and rummaged around. Going to roll a cigarette, Karma thought. That’s what cowboys always did in the movies, and the movies were the only place she’d ever seen a cowboy. She watched spellbound, expecting him to extract a fistful of rolling papers and some tobacco. Instead he pulled out a red bikini bra. A very ample red bikini bra.

He stared at it and then, with a puzzled and pained look, he crumpled it up and stuffed it back in his pocket.

As Karma watched, her mind was racing faster than a spooked mustang. She wasn’t exactly thinking about this cowboy. What she was thinking was that things never came easily to her. Not graduating from college nor getting a master’s degree, and certainly not holding a job. People always thought that if you were a natural blonde, you were home free in life. Well, nothing was free, and at the moment, Karma didn’t have a real home. What she did have was a couple of possibly useless degrees in psychology, a generous great-uncle and a third or fourth chance to make something of herself.

She jumped up from her seat, feeling absurdly like a jack-in-the-box. She said to the cowboy, “Sir, I don’t suppose you could use the services of a matchmaker, could you?”

He looked her over. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking. “That’s exactly what I need,” he said.

“You’ve come to the right place,” Karma said, praising whatever gods were in charge of lucky coincidences.

The cowboy angled his head toward the shiny new sign on the building behind them. “That your place?”

“Yes. As of two months ago.” She held her breath, half expecting him to walk away.

“The thing is, you’ll have to tell me something. Just what exactly is a yenta?”

Nate stood up. “It’s a Yiddish word. In Jewish communities, where marriages used to be arranged, you would go to a yenta that you trusted to find the right person for you. It’s a family tradition, like with my Sophie. She was a good businesswoman, Sophie was. Knew how to change with the times.”

“So Rent-a-Yenta is a dating service?” the cowboy asked politely. His voice was deep and rich, slightly raspy. It reminded Karma of Clint Eastwood’s but with considerably more expression.

Nate’s head bobbed up and down. “Yes, you might as well think of a yenta as someone who matches people up with their significance.”

The cowboy looked slightly confused.

Karma found her tongue. “He means their significant others,” she injected hastily.

“Hmm,” said the cowboy. He appeared to be thinking this over.

Two things occurred to Karma in the next stretch of thirty seconds or so. One was that she wanted to make a success of this matchmaking business that had so providentially and unexpectedly landed in her lap. The other was that this was a client—a real walking, talking, live client.

“Won’t you come into my office?” she asked, smooth as silk. Despite the bra in his pocket, this man needed her services. He’d said so.

“Sure,” said the cowboy. He had a way of smiling that lifted one corner of his mouth and cocked the opposite eyebrow, and the effect was intriguing.

“I’ll just amble along,” said Nate. “Leave you to business.” Karma knew he was running late for his daily game of pinochle at the café down the street.

“If I’m interrupting,” said the cowboy.

“No, no, you two go right ahead,” said Nate. He patted Karma’s arm. “See you tomorrow, bubbeleh.”

“Well,” Karma said as she watched Nate disappear in the throng of people on the sidewalk. She spared a look at the cowboy. He looked more resigned than eager, which was typical of the clients that she’d dealt with so far. She supposed that resignation was the last step before jaded. She hated jaded. It was so hard to win those folks over.

She aimed her brightest smile up at him. Up at him was a miracle, since she was almost six feet tall herself. Ever since puberty, her smiles had been mostly aimed downward. “Follow me,” she said.

Karma had been told that she had nice hips. This was a good thing, considering that the cowboy’s eyes never left them as they walked up the flight of stairs to the tiny cubicle that was Rent-a-Yenta. She’d rather have him staring at her hips, or, more accurately, her derriere, than, say, her feet, which were overly large. Or her mouth, ditto. Or her breasts, which weren’t. That bikini bra in his pocket had looked like about a 38DD.

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.

“She’ll have light hair. Yellow, like sunbeams. Kind of like yours, only straighter.” He studied her. Appraised her. She didn’t know exactly what that look meant, but she took it that he didn’t exactly disapprove of what he saw. Until he went on talking, that is.

“She’ll be tiny. A little bird of a woman. And her voice will be sweet. Maybe she’ll like singing in the church choir.”

Karma couldn’t sing a note. And tiny she wasn’t. As her hopes faded, she said stoically, “Go on.”

“She’ll be comfortable on the ranch, know how it works. Or be willing to learn. I don’t expect her to rope and brand cattle, but she should understand that this is part of what I do. And she’ll be crazy about me. From the very beginning if possible. I aim to have me a wife by this summer.”

“What’s happening this summer?”

He looked at her as if she was crazy for asking. “Why, our honeymoon. I’ve already signed us up for an Alaskan cruise.”

“Oh.” Karma was nonplussed.

He zeroed in on her astonishment. “What do you mean, ‘oh’?” Is there something wrong with that?”

“Occasionally a wife likes to help choose the honeymoon spot,” Karma said, holding back the sarcasm with great effort.

She judged from the perplexed expression in his eyes that this had never occurred to him.

“I figured that if the woman loves me, then anyplace is all right with her. For the honeymoon, I mean.”

She took pity on him. “In some cases, that’s true,” she relented, and his smile warmed her heart.

Her heart had no place in this. She willed it to stop leaping around in her chest and pretended to make a notation on the form. But as she concentrated on her task, one side of her was having an argument with the other side. Sounding very much like her aunt Sophie, the yenta side counseled, “You’ve got yourself a client. You’ve got a paying customer on the hoof. Don’t scare him away.” The Karma side hissed, “Stupid! This is a really great guy. Why give him away to someone else? Why not keep him for yourself?”

A disturbing thought. She’d given up on men two or three relationships ago.

She cleared her throat. She cleared her mind. Or attempted to, anyway.

“Mr. Braddock. This is certainly enough information for me to match you up with some charming clients.”

He beamed. “Now that’s good news.” He produced a money clip and peeled off several bills. “Here’s the registration fee.”

Karma’s eyes bugged out at the wad of cool cash. Most people paid with a credit card. Most people didn’t carry that much money around.

He put the money back in his pocket. “I can’t tell you how downright scared I was coming in here today. I’d rather face a nest of full-grown rattlers than do this, I can tell you.”

She turned the full wattage of her best smile on him. “Oh, everyone feels that way at first, I’m sure. The next step is, of course, our videotape session. Normally I’d be able to do that today, but my video camera is out for repairs. So I hope it will be convenient for you to come back tomorrow?” She’d play soft sitar music on the boom box, wear something flowing. She’d make carob-and-pine-nut brownies and serve them with flair. She’d—but of course she wouldn’t. She wasn’t in the market for a guy, even one as appealing as this one.

Slade Braddock unfolded himself from the floor cushion, rising with spectacular grace. He looked down at her, a half smile playing across his well-sculpted lips.

“No problem, but why don’t you stop by the marina this afternoon? There’s a video camera on the houseboat. No point in wasting time. Got to get me a bride by June, you know?” His smile so unnerved her that she levered herself upward, stumbling over the corner of the cushion and catching herself on the doorknob, barely averting an unladylike sprawl across her desk.

“You okay?” he asked, frowning slightly.

“Y-yes. And where will I find you at the marina?”

“I’m staying on what they call Houseboat Row in a floating palace called Toy Boat. Silly name, isn’t it?”

“Well,” Karma said, unsure how to answer this. She didn’t want to hurt his feelings. Guys sometimes got very attached to their boats.

“I didn’t name it. That honor belongs to my second cousin’s wife. Renee thought it was cute.” He grinned, and Karma was totally charmed. Never mind that he had already told her the type of woman who appealed to him, and never mind that she wasn’t it. All her misgivings about men evaporated in that moment.

“I’ll be glad to stop by the marina,” she said. “Would five o’clock suit you?” She’d bring hors d’oeuvres, wear something revealing. She’d—yeah. She’d make a fool of herself. Again.

“Five o’clock. Right. Thanks, Ms.—O’Connor, is it?”

She scooped one of her cards out of the jumble on her desk. “Karma O’Connor. Like on the sign out front.”

He looked at the card, looked at her. “Nice name, Karma. What does it mean?”

“Destiny,” she said, staring him straight in the eye, and despite her reservations, in that moment she was certain that she had found hers.

AFTER SLADE HAD LEFT HER OFFICE, Karma immediately dashed across the street to the Blue Moon, where she rented a tiny three-room pad.

The Blue Moon was exactly the kind of place Karma would have chosen to live even if it hadn’t been right across the street from Rent-a-Yenta. The building had seen its heyday in the late 1940s. It was painted pale pink, the doors and windows were outlined in aqua, and a lavender-blue stripe circled the top of the building. A blue bas-relief half moon hung over the door. Karma had heard the place variously described as “an iced pastry,” and “a Wurlitzer jukebox done in pastels.” After the heavy dark brick of her apartment block in Connecticut, she loved it.

Goldy, manager, desk clerk, custodian and security officer all rolled into one, sat inside the doorway behind a counter. She glanced up from her knitting with rapid-blinking brown eyes. Her short spiky hair gleamed in the sunlight from the nearby window; it was an energetic shade of copper this week. In the background a radio blared some sixties girl group singing, “Today I Met the Man I’m Going to Marry.”