And he was smiling.

In that moment, Alison had the most startling revelation. He used to look at Mom like that.

"I don't believe it," she said, her voice hushed with amazement. Tears welled up in her eyes. She blinked quickly, but not quickly enough. She turned away from Brandon and wiped them away with her fingertips.

"Alison?" Brandon said, sounding worried. "What's the matter?"

"Nothing," she said, turning back. "Nothing at all."

"You don't seem happy about your father and Bea."

"Oh, no. I am. Trust me. This is good. He's barely talked to another woman since my mother died."

"When was that?"

"About fifteen years ago."

"That's a long time. So this is a big thing for him?"

"Very big. I want so much for him to be happy, and he hasn't been. Not completely. Maybe this will change things. I don't want him to be alone for the rest of his life."

She'd told the truth. She could see her father heading down the path of solitude, and she wanted so much more for him than that. But she wanted more for herself, too. What if she were the one who ended up alone from now on?

"I'm sorry I haven't found you another match yet," Brandon said.

It was as if he was reading her thoughts. He'd done that from the first day she'd walked into his office-read her as clearly as the average man reads a newspaper. It had unnerved her at first. It was strangely comforting now.

She forced a smile. "Hey, when you take away the drug dealers and the ex-wife addicts and the sexually conflicted, who's left?"

"Nobody who's good enough for you."

His voice was strangely serious, and his eyes never left hers as he spoke. The strangest tremor of awareness shot right up her spine.

"I don't know whom to fix you up with anymore," he told her. "I go through the files, and I seem to find something wrong with every one of them."

"You're just afraid of making a mistake again."

"What if none of those guys are right for you? What do I do then?"

"I don't know. I guess I'm back to square one. But, hey. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?"

"You deserve better than that."

Yes, I do. How about the matchmaker himself?

"It's okay," she said. "I've been so busy. I don't know if I would have had time to go on another date, anyway."

"No time? You're here with me now."

"Yeah, but this isn't a date."

"Maybe not. But is it what a date with you is like?"

Her heart stuttered, not so much because of his words, but because of the sound of his voice-soft and low and suggestive. Or was she hearing things that weren't there?

"Yeah," she said. "You get to watch me play a lousy game of pool and listen to my father flirt with women. How exciting is that?"

"Sounds like good times to me."

Oddly enough, he seemed to mean that, and Alison decided she could move that twenty-five percent up a little. Say, to twenty-six.

As Brandon sat at that table with Alison, listening to the music and watching Bea and Charlie play darts and argue, he ticked off in his mind the dumb things he'd done recently, one by one.

He shouldn't have kissed Alison that day she came to his house to apologize.

He shouldn't have come here tonight, where there was too damned much temptation in the form of the woman sitting next to him.

He shouldn't have had that second beer, which made him all the more willing to give in to that temptation.

And he shouldn't be sitting so close to Alison that he could feel her warmth and see her smile and think about that kiss all over again.

It was an endless cycle that he really needed to find a way out of. But there was something about this night, this place, and this woman that gave him a sense of wellbeing he'd never felt before. For once in his life, he was more than just a face in the crowd. He felt as if he belonged there, and he wanted to enjoy it as long as he could. And as long as he kept things on friendly terms, a little casual flirting with Alison wouldn't do any harm, would it?

No. It wouldn't. Then next week he'd get serious and double down on finding her another match, and everybody would be happy.

"Funny thing," Alison said. "Did I tell you that one of the Preservation League board members knew your grandmother?"

Brandon was startled by the question. "No. You didn't tell me that."

"She went to the First Baptist Church with her. And she remembers you when you were a teenager."

Brandon had no idea where this was going, and he was pretty sure he didn't want to know. "Oh, yeah?"

"Yeah. And she said you didn't just visit your grandmother. You actually lived with her for a couple of years."

All at once, Brandon's mind was spinning, trying to remember what he'd told Alison. Had he ever said he just visited? He wasn't sure.

"Yeah," he said finally. "I did live with her. Didn't I tell you that?"

"No, I don't think so. So where were your parents?"

"It was just my father. My mother was dead."

"Oh. I'm so sorry! How old were you when she died?"

"I was only four. I don't remember much about her."

"Do you have brothers and sisters?"

"No. It was just me."

"So why did you go to live with your grandmother?"

"My father traveled a lot with his job."

"What did he do?"

Damn it. The last thing he wanted to do was talk about his father, or anything else about his past. He wasn't proud of the fact that his old man was a pool hustler who'd dragged him all over the country with zero regard for his own son's well being. So Brandon ended up stretching the truth so hard it almost snapped.

"He was a professional pool player."

Alison sat back with a smile. "Ah, so that's why you're such a good player. You learned from your father."

"Oh, yeah. He taught me everything he knew."

Yep. When it came to hustling, his father was the best teacher on the planet.

"Judith told me you gave your grandmother a pretty hard time," Alison said. "Now, understand that she's a bit of a stick-in-the-mud. To her, a hard time could mean that you didn't say 'Yes, ma'am' at the appropriate time."

It had been more than a lack of polite behavior. Way more. By the time he went to live with his grandmother, he'd had a chip on his shoulder so big that nobody could knock it off, even the one person on earth who tried so desperately to give him his first taste of the normal life his father had always denied him.

"I was a teenage boy," he said with an offhand shrug, even as the memory of those days still ate away at him. "They can be real pains in the ass, and I was no exception. Sometimes my mouth got the better of me."

"But I thought you had a good relationship with your grandmother. You told me you used to sit on the stairs and listen to her with her clients, and-"

"I listened to a lot of things. But admit I listened? Hell, no. Again. Teenage boy." He forced a smile. "It's all about the attitude."

"Let's see..." Alison went on. "What else did Judith say? Oh, yeah. You were once...arrested."

He didn't know who the hell this woman was, but he sincerely wished she didn't have quite so good a memory. Just downplay it. It's all you can do.

"A friend and I were arrested for vandalism," he said. "Which only proves exactly how stupid teenage boys can be. It was kid stuff, Alison. I wasn't a saint." He paused. "I'm still not."

Given the lies he'd told her, that was the understatement of the year.

"But at least you don't vandalize things anymore, do you?" she said with a smile.

"No," he said. "I did outgrow that."

"Oh," she said. "One more Judith thing. She said you don't actually own your grandmother's house. That if you move out, it goes to her church?"

Good God. Was there anything this woman didn't know?

"That's true," he said. "It was the only asset my grandmother had of any real value, and she wanted the church to have it. But she also made the provision that I can live there as long as I want to before that happens. So if I never move out, I guess I have a house forever, don't I?"

Alison smiled. "Yeah. I guess you do."

He smiled back, but it was the last thing he felt like doing. He'd told her the truth-if he stayed there forever, he had a house forever.

But he wasn't staying forever. Not even close.

Suddenly every bit of the euphoria he'd felt earlier had seeped right out of him, leaving him feeling like crap. He'd done nothing but lie to Alison since the day he'd met her, making her believe he was somebody he wasn't. And she believed every word of it.

That was the hardest part for him. That she believed every word.

If he'd never gotten to know her, it wouldn't have mattered. If he'd just kept things professional, he wouldn't be sitting there trying to put a spin on his past that wouldn't have her questioning the things he'd already told her. This conversation was proof positive that he was in too deep with Alison and he needed to get out now.

Then all at once he heard a commotion across the room. Bea's voice rose above the crowd. "Alison! Something's wrong! Get over here! Now!"

They both spun around to see Bea hovering over her father, who was lying on his back on the floor.

And he wasn't getting up.

Chapter 21.

The next half hour was a sickening blur for Alison. By the time the paramedics got her father to the hospital, he was fully conscious and talking to them, but until a doctor saw him and said he was going to be okay, Alison was going to keep worrying.

Brandon insisted on driving her to the hospital, and he was there now, sitting in one of those uncomfortable plastic waiting room chairs beside her as they waited for the doctor to come out and tell them her father's condition. Heather and Bea were there, too, assuring her things were going to be just fine.

"But what if he had a heart attack?" Alison said. "Just because he was conscious doesn't mean there wasn't heart damage."

"The paramedics didn't think it was a heart attack," Brandon said.

"But they won't know for sure until they do tests."

"That's true," Heather said. "But I don't think he's in any immediate danger."

Alison just nodded and stared down at her hands. They didn't understand. Bea or Brandon, or even Heather, who'd known her forever. They didn't understand the gutwrenching feeling she'd had when she saw her father passed out on the floor, that horrible fear that something terrible had happened and he was gone. From one instant to the next, he could have been gone from her life forever.

Sometimes in the middle of the night, she lay awake in bed, huddled under the blankets, waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for the bad news she was sure was coming. Then daylight would come, and it would all be shoved to the back of her mind and she'd forget about it for a while, but it was always there.

"I hate hospitals," Alison said.

"I know," Heather said.

"It makes me sick just to get near one. It's hard even sitting here."

Heather patted her arm. "Your dad will be out of here soon."

They sat in near silence for another fifteen minutes. Alison tried to focus on the Good Housekeeping magazine on the waiting room table and the smiling woman on the cover who looked as if she didn't have a care in the world.