“Right.” I handed her the skillet to place into the pre-warmed oven. “But, I’m not interested in pursuing anyone right now, especially not my friend’s brother. Besides,… he was rude to me. There’s nothing there.”
Lynne twisted up the corner of her mouth in disbelief. “You’re about to make me send you outside to get a switch!”
“What did I do?”
“Lying to me! Talking about there’s nothing there. I saw the way those little pretty hazel eyes lit up when you were talking about him, before you remembered about your little disagreement.”
“It wasn’t a little disagreement.”
“Mmhmm. Fine. Doesn’t have to be him.”
“It’s not gonna be anybody,” I insisted. “We talked about this.”
With a softened expression, Lynne placed the top over the bubbling pot of peas and came to sit down beside me. “Victoria, you are way too young to be talking about giving up on love. You know that, right?”
“All I know is I’m thirty years old, and I’ve never had a successful relationship. I got divorced a month ago and I’m a matchmaker. What sense does that make?”
“It makes perfect sense when I know you give everything to helping other people fall in love. When are you gonna keep something back for yourself?”
I shook my head. “I did. That’s how I ended up with Rafael. I took a chance because it said I was a match, and we see how that turned out.”
“Your little program said you were a match, but did you feel like he was the right one for you?”
“I was definitely attracted to him.”
“That’s not what I asked you.”
“We had a lot of fun together.”
“Still not what I asked you.”
“We had a ton of sexual chemistry.”
Lynne raised an eyebrow at me. “And that is definitely not what I asked you. How many times have you come in here, talking to me about how frustrating it was when your program gave you matches that just didn’t feel right to you?”
“I don’t know. Dozens, maybe,” I admitted.
“Exactly. So I don’t care about what the program said, or any of this extra stuff you’re trying to tell me. Answer my question. Did Rafael feel right to you?”
I swallowed hard before I responded, with a whispered “No.”
“Then why, Victoria? I could see sleeping with him, but you saw fit to marry this man. I left you alone about it before because that was your husband, but I want you to make me understand why you made that decision.”
With my elbows on the counter, I rested my chin in my hands. I wasn’t sure I knew for myself why I had married Rafael. Yes, I loved him. I wasn’t so naive that I thought love was the only thing you needed to make a relationship work, but at least we — well, I— had that. And good times, followed by good sex, whenever he bothered to give me his attention. But that was part of the problem right there, I had to bother him to get what a man who loved me should have been willing to give freely. Then again, who could blame him? I liked to have fun, but I wasn’t exciting, or wild, or crazy like the other young celebrities Rafael met on a daily basis. I’d known I couldn’t compete with his glitzy lifestyle from the beginning, but that’s part of what had attracted me to him. I was bored. And lonely. God, I was so lonely.