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.