Meeting His Match (Single In the City 1)

“I get a lot from work.”

He grunted, trying to wipe her ruby-red lips from his head as he moved past her vanity to the picture on her dresser. She stood next to a woman who was obviously her mother—arms wrapped around each other, feet sinking into a sandy beach. Marti could be her twin. Apart from age, they had the same auburn hair and startling blue eyes. It wasn’t hard to see where Marti got her beauty.

“Nosy much?” she snipped, hunched over on the floor of her large closet.

“Afraid of what I’ll see, McBride?”

He noted the flicker in her jaw as she clenched her teeth and chuckled when she hurried back to her search.

His eyes scanned past the dresser, over the bed covered in a pale cream comforter, to the wall opposite, covered in framed prints of all shapes and sizes, each one containing a quote.

He began to read them to himself. To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong, Joseph Chilton Pearce. Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself, George Bernard Shaw. Dozens of inspirational sayings leapt out at him from the frames. The fact that

a woman so seemingly emotionless had these plastered on her walls perplexed him. Then again, it was only men she was cold with. It was him she shut out, and that knowledge stung just a little more than it should.

“You have quotes on your wall?” he asked, needing to know about it.

Marti turned and her gaze quickly shifted from him to the frames. “They’re just words that speak to me.”

He nodded, even as his gaze flickered to her bed again. “They’re the last thing you see when you go to bed and the first thing you see when you wake up.”

She ignored him, but he could tell by the way she avoided his eye, he had hit too close to the mark. Maybe Miss Queen of Single was a romantic after all.

Logan turned back to the wall, his eyes taking in the words and catching on one quote in particular. He read the anonymous quote out loud, “Understanding is deeper than knowledge. There are many people who know you, but there are very few who understand you.”

He let the words settle like dust in the silence. Something about them stuck with him—lodged in the space between his ribs and ached with the need to acknowledge it. Maybe because he desperately wanted to understand Marti.

But as he gazed around her room, seeing a whole new side to her, he wondered if she even understood herself, because it was clear to him she seemed so far removed from her own truth—of why she shut people out—she couldn’t even see through the façade.

He watched her closely now, the quote lying thickly between them. She swallowed and glanced away from him and said, “I’m ready.”

Blink and he’d miss the softening in her expression, the catch in her voice. She was so closed off to love and relationships she couldn’t even see it. She wanted someone who understood her but wasn’t willing to put herself out there first. Underneath the tough, cynical façade was a vulnerability that made his chest ache. If she’d only let him in, he’d show her it could be different. He understood her, maybe all too well.

“Interesting quote for you to have up there,” he said, not wanting to ignore it.

“I have a lot of quotes.”

It was true. But it didn’t make this one any less significant. Still, maybe he should back off. So, he turned to her bookshelf instead. “Sophisticated choice in literature, I see.”

“What’s wrong with it?” she snapped.

“Nothing. I just didn’t take you for a Harry Potter fan.”

“There’s nothing wrong with—”

“And Jane Eyre . . . That’s interesting . . .”

She growled. “What’s so interesting about it?”

Logan shrugged, earning him a scowl. When he took a step closer, his pulse raced with anticipation.

“Say it,” she said, poking him in the chest, but she had all the strength of a fly. “You’re obviously making some kind of judgment. I can see it written all over your face.”

Logan shrugged. “It’s a love story.”

“Jane Austen is a classic.”

“Doesn’t change the fact it’s most definitely a love story.”