style="font-size:15px;"> “I’m in,” Laila said.
Connie nodded agreement. “I think I’d better make mine a double.”
One of the few things that hadn’t changed since Jake had married Bree was that he, Mack Franklin and Will Lincoln continued to have lunch every day at Sally’s. The lunches had started when Jake needed support after he and Bree had split up a few years ago. Now that they were together again and happily married, the lunch tradition had become an occasion for the three men to keep their friendship grounded. Will counted on these two men more than either of them probably realized.
As a psychologist, Will spent his days listening to other people’s problems, but he didn’t really have anyone other than Jake and Mack to listen to his. Even though the three of them knew just about everything concerning each other’s lives, there was one thing Will had been keeping from them for a while now: his new business, Lunch by the Bay.
The dating service had been born out of frustration. He spent way too much of his time counseling singles on the relationships in their lives and way too little of his time nurturing any kind of relationship of his own. The name of the company, which had come to him in the middle of a lonely night, was meant to be ironic, if only to him. As much as he loved getting together with his buddies, he thought it was past time to start having lunch with people who wore dresses and perfume. Jake might occasionally smell like roses, but it was only after he’d spent a morning planting rose bushes for one of his many landscaping clients. It was hardly the same.
It was also, Will thought, way past time to stop carrying the torch for Jess O’Brien, youngest sister of his friends Kevin and Connor O’Brien. Over the years Jess had had ample opportunities to indicate even a whiff of interest in Will, but she mostly treated him like an especially annoying big brother.
Worse, since he’d become a psychologist, she regularly accused him of analyzing her because she had ADD. She didn’t trust his slightest bit of attention, fully expecting him to turn her into some professional case study. None of his denials had gotten her off that ridiculous tangent. Since they were thrown together a lot, her suspicion made most of their encounters awkward and testy.
Which meant it was time to move on once and for all, no easy task in a town with a population under five thousand except when tourists and weekenders filled it during the spring and summer. Lunch by the Bay had been created not only to fill a gap in the Chesapeake Shores social scene, but also to save him from growing old alone.
He explained all of this to Jake and Mack, who stared at him as if he’d suddenly sprouted antlers.
“You’re starting a dating website?” Mack repeated, as if checking the accuracy of his hearing.
“Exactly,” Will said. “If you weren’t so busy not dating Susie, I’d encourage you to sign up. You’re one of the town’s most eligible bachelors.”
“You intend to use this site yourself?” Jake said, looking puzzled. “I thought you were seeing some psychologist who bought a summer house here.”
“I was,” Will said. “Two years ago. It didn’t work out, which you would know if you ever paid attention to a thing I tell you.”
“But you’ve been dating,” Jake persisted. “I’m not imagining that. You’ve blown us off to go on dates.”
“What can I say?” Will said with a shrug. “None of them have amounted to anything.”
“I suppose it makes sense,” Mack said eventually. “Susie is always grumbling about the dearth of available men in town.”
Jake barely managed to swallow a chuckle.
Mack scowled at him. “What?”
“I thought she had you,” Jake responded.
“We’re not dating,” Mack repeated for the umpteenth unbelievable time.
“And yet neither of you seems to be looking for anyone else,” Will pointed out. “If I’m wrong and you are open to other possibilities, I can sign you right up on the new website. You’re an ex-jock and a semi-famous sports columnist. I’ll have you matched up with someone new by the end of the week.”
Jake regarded him incredulously. “You already have clients?”
“About thirty so far,” Will confirmed.
“Anyone we know?” Mack asked, then frowned. “Susie, for instance?” There was a discernible hitch in his voice when he asked, proving that there was more to that relationship than he wanted to acknowledge.
“I’m not at liberty to say,” Will told him.
“When did you start this company?” Jake asked.
“Three weeks ago officially, though I’d been working out the criteria for matching people for a while. I finally incorporated, then put out a few brochures around town. I had no idea what to expect, but when the clients started signing up, I figured I ought to tell you all about it before you heard about it from another source. Someone’s bound to figure out I’m the professional psychologist behind it. After all, there aren’t that many of us in the area.”
“So you’re doing this to make money?” Mack said, clearly still trying to grasp his motivation. Before Susie, Mack had had absolutely no difficulty attracting single women, so he didn’t understand Will’s frustration.
“It could be a gold mine, yes, but that wasn’t really my motivation,” Will insisted. “I think of it more as a community service.”
“Nice spin,” Jake commented wryly. “You’ve already admitted that you’re doing this so you can meet women. Couldn’t you just have hung out at Brady’s more often?”
Will shook his head. “That wasn’t really working for me.”
“What about church? I hear a lot of men meet women at church,” Mack said. “Come to think of it, if I’d known you were this desperate, I could have asked Susie to fix you up. She has a bunch of girlfriends.”
“I’m not desperate,” Will said, offended by the characterization. “I’m being proactive.”
Jake and Mack exchanged a glance. It was Jake who dared to ask, “What about Jess?”
Will stilled. “What about her?”
“You’ve always been crazy about her,” Jake said.
“But she’s not crazy about me,” Will said, not denying his feelings since he’d never been all that good at hiding them. “Leave her out of this. She has nothing to do with it.”
Neither of his friends looked convinced, but they backed off.
Mack regarded him with amusement. “So, are you going to hold mixers like they had in college? Have everyone wear cute little nametags? Or what about those sixty-second dating things? You know, the ones like musical chairs? I hear those can be lively.”
Will scowled at his flip tone. “Bite me.” He stood up. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going back to my office to play matchmaker.”
“You and Dolly Levi,”
