The Dating Game

Being an author is one of them – something I’ve longed for ever since I left childhood behind and imagined working for a living one day.

The other was a dream job because of the industry I was in – global aviation and travel – and the crazy, fabulous people I worked with. Without naming all the lovely folk who came into my orbit during my long career in one of the best airlines in the world, I’ll say that in this moment, I’m specifically looking at you Holly, Dickon, Lloyd, Melissa, Joe, Nicky, Lucinda and Sophia.

These are the people who contributed the most to one of the best professional years of my life – the year I privately refer to as ‘The Year of Holly’, in honour of my smart, beautiful PR colleague who decided the time had come to find the man of her dreams and stationed the rest of the team along the sidelines to provide romance advice date by hilarious date.

Which brings me to an acknowledgement that although this book is a work of fiction from start to finish, some of its funniest scenes were inspired by actual events from that time – one reason The Dating Game has become my favourite book.

And for those of you who like a Happily Ever After…? Well, I can tell you that Holly nailed it when she found Mike during that unforgettable year.

Thanks guys – all of you! – for the fun and the memories.

For Jarrod – my nephew

Heroes don’t come any more gorgeous

CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_88b4b35e-407f-57a6-894d-84ab93fa817e)

… but not sixdays! Six miserly, measly, paltry, pitiful—

Uh-oh.Fist against mouth. Hold … hold … hooold … aaand…whew! Under control. She was not going to give in to those hideous sobs again, even if she had to stuff her fist down her throat to throttle them.

Not that it mattered if she bawled herself into a snot-laden seizure, since there was nobody here to witness it. Well, nobody except the bespectacled bronze head on the shelf to her right, and ‘Clarence Donleavy’—his name, according to the plaque affixed to his wooden base—wasn’t going to be tattling.

In fact, Clarence was regarding her with unwavering apathy, which Sarah decided was the perfect look to carry her out of the storeroom and back to civilization. She swivelled the wheeled footstool she was perched on so she could face him, contorted her face into what she hoped was a matching expression, realized a more scientific approach would be to actually look at herself while she did it, and reached into the evening bag on her lap for her compact.

But it was her phone that her fingers closed around and lifted out.

Perhaps she should check the message. To see if she’d misinterpreted. Because she might have, mightn’t she?

She brought up the text, read the words …

And her breath eased out like a slowly deflating balloon. Nope. No misinterpretation possible.

Liam had dumped her. At the six-day mark—a new low, even by her plummeting standards.

‘It’s a curse, you know,’ she explained to Clarence. ‘I can’t get Lane and Erica to believe me, but I’m definitely afflicted by some sort of anti-love hex. And it’s so unfair, when I try. So. Hard!’ She stamped her foot for emphasis, which proved a little too violent an action for the footstool, which would have shot out backwards from under her if she hadn’t caught it with a lightning-fast shoe-plant.

And wouldn’t that ice tonight’s cake, to tumble onto the unforgiving concrete floor and knock herself out? Who knew how long it would take for someone to come looking for her?

Someone.

Anyone.

Or maybe, the way her life was going, no one.

‘Not my big, bold brother Adam, that’s for sure,’ she told Clarence, with a snort of disgust. ‘He’s too busy whipping himself into a jealous rage over Lane flirting with the hot banker guy with dimples. And certainly not Lane, who I’m starting to think is too obtuse to notice anything. I’m telling you, Clarence, never set your friend up with your brother for any reason whatsoever,not even to save them from their own insanity, unless you enjoy watching train wrecks.’

She was in the mood for another foot stamp, but decided not to tempt fate with the surprisingly agile footstool. The thought of gasping her last breath, unconscious among a collection of mounted body parts while everyone else in the building was hobnobbing with flesh and blood humans, was too depressing. Instead, she was going to find a bathroom, fix the sodden mess that was her face, and return to the party in the art gallery.

Where, for all she knew, the man of her dreams might be waiting for a newly single Sarah Quinn to find him. And even if the man of her dreams wasn’t out there waiting for her, at least she’d be on hand to stage an intervention should Adam decide to attack the hot banker guy with dimples in a Gladiator meets Walking Dead frenzy.

But first, she’d send a masterfully crafted text to Liam and close that demoralizing chapter of the book of her life.

Depositing her evening bag on the floor beside her, she ran feather-light fingertips over her phone keypad, ruminating over word arrangements. She wanted to sound philosophical, but not stoic. She wanted to express wistfulness but not dejection. She wanted to insinuate that although dumping a girl by text was lily-livered, she was nevertheless relieved. That she agreed it was time for the two of them to call it quits; that she’d been on the verge of severing their connection herself; that he’d beaten her to it by mere seconds.

‘Clearly what I need most is italics,’ she said, and laughed as she caught Clarence’s eye. He seemed to be telling her to stop boring him and get on with it.

‘Okay, okay!’ she said, and bent her head over her phone to start tapping.

Thank you so much for your thoughtful mess—

‘Well, blow me!’

—age.

Sarah’s fingers stilled. Had Clarence offered up that ‘Well, blow me’ in a hallucinatory moment?

Nope, one glance confirmed he was supremely uninterested in being blown by her or anyone else.

Which had to mean the ‘Well, blow me’ had come from a human. A male human she’d been too preoccupied to hear entering her sanctuary. A male human who was now taking an audible breath in, then out.

‘This is more like it,’ the male human said softly, presumably to the room at large, since he could have no way of knowing he wasn’t alone.

Sarah considered doing the sensible thing and walking out of her hiding place with a cheery ‘Hello there’ until she remembered the tear-stained state of her face. Nobody—as in nobody, let alone a guy who, for all she knew, may turn out to be single and ready for a relationship—would be seeing her until she’d visited the bathroom.

Mystery Man, meanwhile, was on the move, his shoes making a tapping noise on the concrete, which meant they had those steel toe tips on the soles that Sarah equated with quality footwear.

Tap, tap, tap. Coming closer.

Sarah’s heart leapt into her throat. She tried to swallow it back down, but it stayed wedged there like a football with a pulse. She waited, listening for where he was heading, hoping he didn’t have a sculpture fetish that would bring him her way, wondering if she could manage to soundlessly extract her compact from her evening bag and check exactly how bad the face situation was …

Stop.

He’d reached the row next to her. The one with the paintings. Tap, tap, tap, as he entered it.

Reprieve!

Sarah’s heart slowly returned to its usual position as a solution to her problem presented itself: wait him out. No guy was going to stay in a storeroom looking at paintings when he could be drinking champagne at a party. She’d give him five minutes, max, to come to his senses.

Sarah heard him slide a painting out. There was a pause. Then the painting was slid back in. It happened again. Again. And it kept happening. Painting out, pause, in, as the little clicks of his toe taps on the floor marked his progress up the row. Five minutes passed. Ten. Occasionally, the pause was punctuated by a low murmur. ‘Brilliant.’ ‘Those colours!’ ‘Is that … yes, it’s gouache, but it looks so …’ ‘How did he do …?’ ‘Ah, it’s been smeared off.’

Fifteenminutes!

Okay,theguy appeared to be as much of an art tragic as Adam, which meant—face it, Sarah—he wasn’t going to leave until he’d checked out every swirl of paint in the place. After which he’d probably wander her way in search of other treasures.

The plan to wait him out, therefore, had to be abandoned, leaving only one option: sneak out while he’s too engrossed to notice.

Sarah looked down at her smack-you-in-the-head chartreuse cocktail frock with its generous scatter of spangles. Then up at the glaring overhead fluorescent bulbs—not what you’d call mood lighting. She doubted she’d make it past the end of the aisle he was in without sending a shaft of searing luminosity to at least a corner of one of his eyeballs, no matter how stealthily she moved or how distracted he was.