Harte Strings: The Billionaire Matchmaker, Part Two

C
opyright
© 2016 by Gina Robinson

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Gina Robinson

http://www.ginarobinson.com

Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

Cover Design: Jeff Robinson

Harte Strings: The Billionaire Matchmaker 2/Gina Robinson. — 1st ed.

F
our funny
, sweet, lonely guys who want wives and one hot Jet City billionaire who definitely doesn't. What's a matchmaker to do?

Ashley Harte's partnership with sexy billionaire Lazer Grayson is barely off to a start and already he's trying to bend the rules of their agreement. And get her back into bed using every romantic trick in the book. How long can she resist him? Long enough to make a committed man out of him?

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isit
ginarobinson.com
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The Billionaire Matchmaker Series

Part 1—
Lazer Focused

Part 2—
Harte Strings

Part 3—
Pair Us

The Billionaire Duke Series

Part 1—
The Billionaire Duke

Part 2—
The Duchess Contest

Part 3—
The Temporary Duchess

Part 4—
The American Heir

The Switched at Marriage Series

Part 1—
A Wedding to Remember

Part 2—
The Virgin Billionaire

Part 3—
To Have and To Hold

Part 4—
From This Day Forward

Part 5—
For Richer, For Richest

Part 6—
In Sickness and In Wealth

Part 7—
To Love and To Cherish

The Billionaire’s Christmas Vows

Gina Robinson’s Contemporary New Adult Romance Series

The Rushed Series

These standalone romances can be read in any order. But it’s more fun to read them all!

Book 1—
Rushed
, Zach and Alexis’ story

Book 2—
Crushed
, Dakota and Morgan’s story

Book 3—
Hushed
, Seth and Maddie’s story

The Reckless Series

Ellie and Logan’s love story begins one hot August night. This series should be read in order.

Book 1—
Reckless Longing

Book 2—
Reckless Secrets

Book 3—
Reckless Together

A
shley
Harte

If Jane Austen were alive today and living in Manhattan, she would give up her matchmaking ways
immediately
. Even writing about it would be too depressing. I knew how she felt. There were days when I wanted to give up, and I made matches for a
living
. It was either make beautiful matches or starve, so I soldiered on.

Poor Jane would have never written
Emma,
about a conniving upper-crust matchmaking gentlewoman. Who could have blamed her? In Manhattan today, women seeking mates have never had it so bad.

Straight, single, college-educated men in this city were outnumbered by college-educated women looking for husbands by nearly two to one. There were plenty of available blue-collar men. But as Jane herself might have said, “The educated women won’t have them!”

And there was no way I could convince them to take them.

I struggled against the new taboo marriage of the times—what some experts were calling “the mixed-collar marriage.” In layman’s terms, when a woman with a college degree married a man without one.

Women were attending college in much larger numbers than men. It was fast becoming a worldwide crisis as far as college-educated women seeking similarly educated mates were concerned. Since the early 1980s, in the US and across the world, women in college outnumbered men by a significant margin. Even in China, where men hugely outnumbered women in the general population. Great for women’s careers. Great for the business marketplace. Not so great for college-educated women seeking similarly educated mates.

There were a lot of theories floating around about why this might be. But no definitive answers. It wasn’t my concern, really. On the one hand—hooray for women! One the other hand, it had created a dangerously lopsided dating dynamic in the city that was threatening my matchmaking business, Harte Mates. Now that I took
very
seriously.

Here was the problem—when desirable men in the dating pool are significantly outnumbered by women, the men become exceptionally picky and commitment averse. A hookup culture thrives. Women become highly competitive for male attention, cutthroat even. Men are able to date up. Women get frustrated, desperate, depressed, and bitter. Which sends them running to me for help. Which should have been great for business, but—why was there always a “but?”—bitter women are hard to match under the best circumstances.

Without a large enough pool of available men to match them with, what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t take these women’s money like a con artist or snake oil salesman and offer them false hope. Unfortunately, I wasn’t in possession of a love potion.

The sad reality was that by the time the men decided to settle down at somewhere around forty, they wanted younger women, women under thirty. Maybe as old thirty-two or three, tops, but that was it, and rarely. I’d had to lower my maximum age for female clients. Which resulted in being mercilessly hammered in the court of public opinion as some kind of sexist. Me?
Laughable
. Or would have been if the accusation hadn’t been so damaging to my reputation and business.

I’d been a professional matchmaker in Manhattan for the past five years. I’d grown Harte Mates into a multimillion-dollar-a-year business. Besides myself, I employed two fulltime matchmakers, an assistant, and an assistant for my assistant. I’d put together hundreds of happy couples, 251 of whom had tied the knot. Most of whom still kept gratefully in touch. Which was touching and rewarding.

But now? I’d never seen it
this
bad.

When something threatens your livelihood, you have few options—lie down and let it die; do what you’ve always done and hope for the best; or innovate. Never one to go down without a fight, I’d chosen to throw my lot in with innovation. I was taking a huge risk with both my business and my heart. Manhattan had a shortage of men. But Seattle was
desperate
for women, the kind of women I could provide.

And so I had made a deal with an angel. The investor kind of angel. A handsome, charming, tempting billionaire angel from Seattle—Lazer Grayson. Seattle’s hottest bachelor. A committed commitmentphobe. Kind of ironic, in a way, that he wanted to invest in a matchmaking venture when it so clearly went against the grain of his personal vow to remain single. But where there was money to be made…

Sitting there in Seattle with his group of lonely single male friends, he’d noticed the shortage of women and observed how picky Seattle women were when it came to men. Of course they could be, since they were the ones in demand. The women set the rules and the men simply had to try harder and compete. Sad to say, but simple supply and demand economics affect even our love lives.

Lazer, being Lazer and highly entrepreneurial, and his friends weren’t about to roll over and accept the status quo. Like their famous Seattle pioneer forefathers, particularly Asa Mercer, they were going to even the odds. And if necessary, bring more women to Seattle. I’d told Lazer that there were more available women in the suburbs. If the men would only venture outside the city…

But where were those suburban women hanging out? The men came up with an idea for an app that would solve their problem. The app would tell the single men where the women were and the women where the men were at any given time. The idea was simple. Say on a Saturday night a single man wanted to go out to a place where he had a better chance of meeting single women, he could check the app and see which bar, movie, etc. they were hanging out at. It would also have a feature that would show the cities with the best ratio of single women to single men. That kind of thing.

My deal with Lazer was simple.
In theory
. He wanted me to bring fifteen to twenty single Manhattan women to Seattle to beta-test his man/woman-finding app. At the same time, I was going to set up an innovative new matchmaking service that not only matched people with mates, but also matched them with jobs. So women from female-saturated dating markets like Manhattan could move to markets with more available men, like Seattle and San Jose. And still be gainfully employed. And men could move to markets with more women. And they could do it all with a one-stop matching service for mates and jobs.

My very first clients were four of Lazer’s good friends, whom I had yet to meet. He was paying me to make them matches in Seattle. With luck, early wins for us. Always stack the deck in your favor if you possibly can.

As part of our business agreement, I’d insisted Lazer be a client of the new matchmaking service, too. A high-profile client. But he was just a shill. Bait to draw Seattle women into our client pool. Or so
he
thought.
I
had other intentions. Can you imagine what it would mean for me and my business if I matched a billionaire?

I let my fantasies run wild. Me, the billionaire matchmaker! The fame. The street cred. The joy. The wealthy clients rolling in. I pictured so much press attention I’d have to hire a press secretary of my own. Interviews on all the talk shows. A multimillion-dollar book deal. More franchises…

Dreaming and reaching for the moon was fun but, of course, life wasn’t all upsides. Against my will, against my better judgment, against all common sense, I was already losing my heart to Lazer. Now I was in the proverbial spot between a rock and the rock-hard arms I longed to be in. Successfully matching Lazer could launch my career into the stratosphere and give me matchmaking fame beyond imagination. But it could also very well devastate my newly awakening heart.

For that reason alone, he was the last man I
should
have wanted. But that old saying that the heart wants what it wants was true for a reason.
Damn rogue hearts
.

Deciding whether what my heart thought it wanted was the real Lazer, or simply a fairytale version my mind had created, was part of what this business partnership was about for me. I wanted to get to know Lazer better. I absolutely had to. It was either that or risk
what-ifs
for the rest of my life. I had to see for myself whether he was meant to be mine, someone else’s, or to simply to play the field for the rest of his life.

That was how I found myself with my highly efficient, no-nonsense assistant, Lottie, on Lazer’s private jet bound for Seattle, holding the first meeting of our new, as yet unnamed, joint venture. A corporate retreat to get this party started and the startup off the ground.

Lottie, usually boisterous and outspoken, and I had been riding in hushed opulence since boarding and being given the tour of the plane. Trying to play it cool, like it was no big deal to be riding in a private jet with a flight attendant to wait on just the two of us. Even though I had no real idea how to act in such a situation. Class and politeness were always in style.

It wasn’t as if I didn’t make good money or didn’t mingle with wealthy people on an almost daily basis. I had many clients who were multimillionaires. You had to have a certain amount of money to afford my services. But this was a whole new level of wealth. A fantasy level.

The interior of the jet was as plush, comfortable, and elegantly decorated as any expensive living room in Manhattan. Lottie and I each had a cream-colored overstuffed pod seat that reclined into a sleeper. Where, during most of the five-hour flight, we studiously sat working on our laptops while being waited on hand and foot.

In addition to the pod seats, there was a small sofa in cream leather. A desk and fully stocked bar in dark cherry wood. A mounted large-screen TV and a round dining table and chairs where we’d been served a champagne lunch that was as delicious and delicate as any I’ve had prepared by a five-star chef. And did I mention the private lav, as the pilot called the bathroom, and the bedroom?

Fresh flowers sat on the table and bar. We were free to walk about the cabin at will without pesky warnings about sudden turbulence. The trip had so far been smooth and pleasant. And so much less tiring than flying commercial. This was the way to fly, no doubt about it. Affording it on my own was another matter.

As we neared Seattle, Lottie came back from a last-minute trip to the lav and made the heavenward gaze, mouthing,
Wow!
She hitched her thumb toward the back of the plane and whispered, “I took a closer look at the bedroom. You know, before we land and I miss my chance. It’s stocked with robes and
silk
pajamas.” She shook her head in amazement. “And did you see the shower in the bathroom? Nicer than mine at home! I was half tempted to shower again.”

We were both on the edge of breaking out into an embarrassing round of girlish giggling. I grinned at her, barely containing myself. “Go ahead.”

She grinned back. “Too late. I took one at home. If I’d known I could use the plane, I wouldn’t have bothered.” She settled into her pod seat. “The new boss knows how to live.”

“New boss?” I arched an eyebrow.

“Isn’t he?”

“That’s up for debate. I thought I was.” I took a sip of the seltzer water next to me. No one bossed me. That was the beauty of owning my own business.

“Whoever tames Mr. Three Commas is going to be a very lucky woman. At the very least, a pampered one.” She shot me a pointed look.

I gave all of my clients private pet names, which helped preserve their privacy, especially when other people were around. Mr. Three Commas was Lazer’s.

Sometimes Lottie was irritatingly intuitive. I’d been careful to keep my hookup with Lazer to myself. Sleeping with a man who became both a business partner and client was an embarrassing mistake for a matchmaker and businesswoman of my caliber to make. If it got out…

It wouldn’t get out. But the fact that she was picking up on the attraction between Lazer and me wasn’t good news. I ignored her pointed look.

“You’d better make him the match of the century.” She managed to make her simple statement sound like a warning.

She was taking a career risk, too. Since she had hitched her star to mine, maybe I owed her the truth. Then again, why worry her?

I smiled. “Of course.”

“You know what I mean.” Lottie wasn’t one to let me off the hook. “The man is
smoking
hot. Could charm the skin off a snake. As if that isn’t bad enough, it’s not going to be easy to find a woman whose head won’t be turned by all this.” She gestured around the plane. “And I have the feeling this is only a tiny taste of what living with a billionaire is like.”

I nodded, sure she was right on both counts.

“Mr. Three Commas is a sweet guy,” she said, making it sound like an understatement.

How had he made my assistant go all sappy on me?

“He deserves a woman who loves him for him.”

Lottie was a believer, like I was, in true love. In our opinion,
everyone
deserved a love match. Having been with me from the start, she’d seen too many gold diggers and social climbers. Too many women—men, too—who would have happily married someone they didn’t love, even secretly despised, for the perks of fame, power, wealth, or all of the above.

She shot me another piercing, almost pleading look. “How are we going to separate the wheat from the chaff of gold diggers?” She sighed with exaggerated heaviness and shook her head in a mama bear sort of way.

“Some of our clients
prefer
gold diggers,” I said with a tease. Although it was true. Not many. But the odd few wanted a trophy wife or husband and nothing more. I mostly considered these people shallow and insecure. But I wasn’t responsible for changing their basic nature.

“Not this one!”

Whoa.
If Lottie really had been a bear she would have charged at me like I’d just threatened her cub.