Bethanne Dupree runs a computer dating service and pretends she doesn’t need it, too. She manages to separate her personal life from her business life until Ray Greco comes to the office of the dating service to make a video. The handsome Greco distracts her staff, and his video crashes her server. In fact, he crashes a lot of things. Including Bethanne.
“Geeks Bearing Gifts,” by bestselling author Kristine Grayson, is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook on Amazon, Kobo, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, and from other online retailers.
Geeks Bearing Gifts
Kristine Grayson
Bethanne Dupree did not know a lot about mythology. In fact, what she knew, prior to what she later called The Event, her employees called The Incident, and her customers called The Class Action Suit, were a handful of names. Venus, Jupiter, and Zeus were the ones she could recite, not realizing that two were different names for the same guy.
On the day that the Event/Incident/Class Action Suit started, she had no idea that gods existed outside of musty textbooks and yummy Brad Pitt movies. She didn’t know that gods got bored. And she had no idea that bored gods used humans.
She certainly didn’t expect to be the victim of those gods.
And when she found out that she was, she knew she didn’t have a defense that would stand up in court.
In fact, she didn’t have a defense at all.
***
The whole mess started on an ordinary day at Eros.com. All days were ordinary at Eros.com. Eros.com wasn’t the largest Internet dating service, nor was it the smallest. It wasn’t the oldest nor the most famous.
But it had started back in the days when the Internet was young. Bethanne’s then-boyfriend, Larry, wrote a program to help his geek friends find the perfect mate.
Larry named the service Eros.com, figuring anyone who didn’t know the name Eros wasn’t smart enough to find a mate on Eros.com. Bethanne never told him that she didn’t know who Eros was. She just quietly—and unobtrusively—looked up Eros in the dictionary. And found that Eros was what the Greeks called that cherubic half-naked boy with the bow and arrows, whom most of the known world called Cupid.
She never liked the name Eros.com and she wasn’t that fond of the business, but by the time Larry’s friends had all hooked up with potential mates (and Larry realized that the girl of his dreams was actually a guy), Eros.com did 2.5 million dollars a year, had sixteen employees, and a web network of over 10 million lovelorn souls.
Whatever Bethanne was (and she’d been called a lot of things), she wasn’t the kind of woman to walk away from millions, no matter how bogus she thought the company actually was.
There were a lot of desperate people out there, all willing to pay $25 per month for a standard subscription to Eros, whose best promotional campaign had claimed that you could actually trust Geeks Bearing Gifts.
Bethanne paid Larry $200,000 for the whole company with a promise that he’d get an extra 20K every time he upgraded the program—money she earned back in the first month alone. Fortunately for her, Larry, for all his brilliance, cared less about money than he did about code.
Fast forward ten years, through the dotcom crisis (which she weathered by never trying to go public) into the Bush era and beyond. Eros.com still wasn’t the big gun or even, really, a small gun. It was just a bet-hedger for the desperate daters, the ones who didn’t care if their date weighed 350 pounds, so long as he could carry on a decent conversation and earn a pretty good living.
Which was why the Greek God’s arrival at the office was so very stunning.
First of all, he wasn’t calling himself a Greek god. The staff started calling him a Greek god from the moment they saw him. He called himself Ray.
He came to the office’s front door. Some clients did that. The website did say that clients could come to the office to make their initial video blog if they so chose. Most did not so choose. After all, Eros.com had been designed for and still catered to the geek, and most geeks figured they could make a better v-log than some random employee at an Internet dating service.
What the geeks didn’t know—and probably didn’t care about—was that Bethanne kept some make-up artists on hand. These people were supposed to make even the ugliest client look passable. Sometimes that was easier said than done. But she did keep before and after pictures, just to prove that an improvement had been made.
The office’s front door opened onto a side street near the company parking lot. Bethanne had installed a lot of security, since occasionally Eros.com had to protect itself from dissatisfied clients.
Dissatisfied clients weren’t really upset with the service—they were upset with the date. They hadn’t read the fine print, which said that Eros.com wasn’t responsible for the experience or really, the match. It just facilitated a meeting while—to the best of its ability—trying to screen out anyone with a criminal record.
But that didn’t stop dissatisfied customers from occasionally pounding on the door. Some hated their dates. Some hated the marriages born of the dates. And some just plain hated everything and needed someone to blame.
So Bethanne had installed a state-of-the-art security system, complete with cameras. The cameras showed a 360-degree view of the person at the door, as well as scanned for weaponry and (although she’d never admit it to the cops) used a scanning system that was similar to (but more sophisticated than) the ones airports used to see bombmaking material hidden under the clothes.
All of this meant that the moment the Greek god knocked, someone got to see a 360 degree (mostly naked) view of one of the handsomest men of all time.
What did one of the handsomest men of all time look like? Well, he was Greek after all, which meant he had a slight accent—although no one noticed that for a good half hour. His eyes were the startling blue of a sun-dappled sea, his skin a Mediterranean olive that accented his black-black hair.
He had broad shoulders and narrow hips (and, Bethanne thought privately as she reviewed the footage later, the best ass she’d seen on a man in her entire life). His lashes were long, his lips delicate, and his cheekbones high.
His eyes sparkled with an intelligence that might have seemed higher than normal simply because it was attached to such an astonishing face.
He—quite literally—glowed. The glow was an amazing special effect, almost as if he were lit from the inside.
“What’s he doing here?” Rachel Vadder, who was monitoring the door that day, asked to no one in particular. But her question brought Anna Cummings, the security chief, and Stuart Robinson, the IT guy in charge of facial recognition over to Rachel’s screen at a run.
“I’m sorry,” she said as they crowded around her, wanting to know what the problem was. “I didn’t mean ‘what’s he doing here?’ as in ‘oh, no! Not that guy again!’ but as in ‘What the hell is he doing here?’ As in ‘What’s wrong with him that he feels he needs us?’ I mean, really. I’ll go out with him now and he hasn’t said a word to me.”
“With that body, he doesn’t have to,” Anna said, leaning closer to the monitor.
“He can stand there for hours,” Stuart said. Stuart was another of Larry’s love-’em-and-leave-’em conquests who stayed at Eros.com. “I really won’t mind.”
“You’re supposed to be looking at his face,” Rachel said tightly, even though she was the one who had just implied that this man didn’t need to be vetted.
“I…am…did…am…looking at his face,” Stuart stammered.
“I certainly am,” said Anna. “Not to mention the rest of him.”
“I don’t think we should mention the rest of him.” Bethanne spoke from behind the group.
They jumped as a unit, but didn’t turn away from the screen.
Bethanne had come to see what the commotion was all about and had found three of her most trusted employees drooling over a man standing outside the office door. A man who appeared mostly naked, at least on the computer screen. A man who appeared mostly naked on that screen without his permission.
“In fact,” Bethanne said as calmly as she could, “I think we should let him in before we violate his privacy even farther.”
“Yeah, right, sure,” Rachel said, and was about to press the enter button when Bethanne leaned forward and caught her hand.
“Follow procedure, Rachel,” Bethanne said.
“Oh, yeah, right,” Rachel said, her cheeks turning bright red. “I…I…I’m…”
She was probably trying to say she was sorry, but she couldn’t seem to finish the sentence. So Bethanne swept her employees aside and slipped into a nearby chair.
As she scooted that chair closer to the screen, she finally saw the man who would soon identify himself as Ray Greco, and her breath literally caught in her throat. Her heart sped up and her hand started to shake.
A man had never ever made her forget what she was about to do next, but this guy did. Finally, she understood all the romance novel clichés—love at first sight, so beautiful that it was impossible to see anything but him, so appealing that all she wanted to do was…
She got a grip on herself and her mental process. Then she pressed the intercom button.
“Sorry to keep you waiting, sir,” she said. “This is Eros dot com. Please state your business.”
He looked around until he saw one of the tiny cameras. Then he smiled at it.
Bethanne was stunned that the camera didn’t explode from the sheer wattage behind that smile. She’d never seen anything quite that powerful before.
She heard herself gasp audibly, glad she hadn’t kept the intercom button pressed, so that the only people who heard her indiscrete little reaction to that unbelievable handsome man were her three employees.
“Hi,” the Greek God said. “Your website says that I can make a video blog here if, um, you know, I want to be a client. And I do want to be a client.”
Bethanne had to replay his words in her head twice before she understood them. Because, when she first heard them, she simply reacted to the timbre of his voice. Then she thought about it, and found herself distracted by the word “timbre.” Was his voice like Gregory Peck’s? Or like Hugh Jackman’s? Both had that rich baritone that could delve into bass or rise to tenor if need be. But each had a slightly different quality, a different take on that theatrical warmth—
She had to shake off that thought too before she could replay the words one final time in her head. He wanted to be a client. He wanted to do a v-log.
If he liked making v-logs, he could come to the office every week and update. She could look on his beautiful face every week.
“I’m sorry to keep you waiting, Mr.—?”
“Greco,” he said.
“Mr. Greco.” Bethanne prided herself on her professional tone. Only she knew how hard-won it was. “Of course you can make a v-log here. If you wait near the entrance, one of our employees will get you and take you to processing, where you’ll fill out the information forms and make your first v-log.”
“Okay,” he said, but she cut off the word mid-way through the “O” and the “K.”
Her hand was still shaking.
“See?” Rachel asked, still clinging to her chair. “Why is he here? Shouldn’t he be—I don’t know—dating a supermodel or something?”
“Maybe he’s so deep in the closet that his dates with women never go well,” said Stuart in a wistful tone that Bethanne had never heard before. “Maybe he needs to find a man who—”
“Or,” Bethanne said, not wanting to hear the extent of Stuart’s fantasies, “maybe he’s shy.”
“Oh,” Anna breathed. “Imagine if he’s shy. I do so love shy men.”
“Especially if they look like Greek gods,” Stuart said.
Bethanne rolled her eyes. Before she dealt with this crew—and the still naked-appearing man outside—she had to think of someone in processing who was male and straight. Very, very straight. So straight that he might not notice a good-looking man unless the man bit him in the ass. And then he’d punch said good-looking man without a single qualm.
Everyone in this room would never punch Mr. Greco, even if he deserved it. After all, they wouldn’t want to mar his lovely skin.
She pressed a different button on the intercom.
“Craig,” she said to the straightest, most macho man who worked at Eros.com, a manly man who made the Marlboro man seem like a gun-toting wimp. “Get down to the main entrance pronto. We have a potential client who has been waiting much too long to go to processing.”
“Got it,” Craig growled and signed off.
She trusted Craig to get Greco to the right department. What happened after the man arrived would be anyone’s guess. She might have to supervise that as well, given everyone’s reaction to the man (including hers).
But she would think about that in a minute. First, she had another matter to take care of.
“Your behavior,” she said to the three beside her, “was extremely unprofessional. And if Mr. Greco ever finds out about our security scanning—which is supposed to take place in less than 20 seconds—you could open us up for a lawsuit. What do you have to say for yourselves?”
Anna bowed her head. “I’m sorry.”
“I was looking at his face,” Stuart said, in a tone so defensive that he probably never really saw the man’s face at all.
“C’mon, Bethanne,” Rachel said. She’d been at Eros.com for nearly fifteen years, through ups, downs, and Bethanne’s rather ugly break-up with Larry. “You saw him. We’ve never had a great beauty from either gender. He was worth staring at.”
“He’s a client,” Bethanne said. “We’re professionals. Let’s act that way.”
Then she stomped back to her office, hoping that she could remain professional along the way.
***
Professional was hard. Professional was very hard when you were single, pushing forty, and concentrating on helping not-so-attractive people find their soulmates each and every day.
Bethanne’s office had become her refuge. She had created it during a particularly bad stretch in her life. She had broken up with Larry (over, of all people, Stuart), had bought the business, and then had been sued by six different clients who all alleged failures in the Eros.com system. One client believed her new boyfriend was a stalker, another’s new boyfriend got arrested (and later convicted!) for rape, and a third had married a man who had four other wives. The remaining three cases were simple cases of buyer’s remorse—the three men claimed that the women they dated weren’t the same as the way the women had been presented on Eros.com’s website.
So Bethanne had hired a big name law firm who made all of the cases go away and then redesigned the company’s disclosure forms to better protect Eros.com, its owners, and its employees. Bethanne soon realized it was cheaper to hire an in-house counsel and pay an exorbitant salary for prevention than it was to keep the big name law firm on retainer.
But in the course of winning these cases, preventing future cases, and figuring out how to save herself some money, Bethanne nearly had a nervous breakdown. The shrink she’d hired (and later fired) recommended a bit of feng shui at the office, just to help Bethanne calm down.
Bethanne didn’t want to spend another fortune redesigning the Eros.com offices which, in those days, were in a dying strip mall on the outskirts of town. So she bought the warehouse that became Eros.com’s current offices and built a loft on the top floor.
That loft became her office. Actually, it was her office suite. The kind of office suite that most people in corporate America could only dream of. It had three sections: the reception area, where she greeted her guests and often met with them; her private working office, with her files, her various computers, and her various desks; and the apartment, complete with built-in kitchen, full-size bathroom (with a shower built for five—not that she had ever shared it with anyone), a full-size closet with enough clothes that she wouldn’t have to go home for the rest of her life, and a bedroom with a queen-sized bed and a wide-screen television hooked up to every single cable channel her provider had.
She didn’t live at the office, but she could. Mostly, she used that queen-sized bed for baby-sized naps, guaranteed to calm her and help her through very long days.
After her confrontation with her staff and her own unprofessional behavior, Bethanne would normally have fled to the bedroom of her office suite, flopped on the bed, turned on the Cooking Channel, and gotten a few moments of shut-eye.
But she couldn’t look at the bed at the moment. Because if she did, she wouldn’t think of sleeping. She would think of how wonderful Mr. Greco had looked without his clothes, and she would…
She shook that not-so-tender thought from her brain and went into the office part of her office suite. Really, what she needed to do was go to the shower of her office suite, set the water temperature on frigid, and hope that it cooled her down. But the shower was built for five, so it could easily accommodate two…
She had to shake that thought out of her head too, and several other thoughts that came in rapid succession. Mr. Greco, whoever he was, was not just the most beautiful man she had ever seen but he was also the only man who had ever inspired this kind of uncontrollable lust in her.
If asked—even two hours ago—she would have said that women didn’t feel the same kind of uncontrollable lust that men felt. She would have said that women never thought with their gonads, while men always did.
But she would have been wrong. Because her gonads—or her hormones—or her (sadly neglected) sexual self—had controlled every thought she had since she first saw Mr. Greco (naked).
And she was somehow going to have to get over that.
***
Staying in her office obviously wasn’t calming her down, so Bethanne decided to supervise Mr. Greco’s intake exam. She wasn’t the only person who had found her way to receiving. So had every woman in the place and about half the men.
As she pushed her way through the crowd, she saw Mr. Greco lounging in front of Craig’s desk, answering questions as if the response really didn’t matter.
The crowd didn’t seem to matter to him either. He was clearly the kind of man who received attention wherever he went.
Which begged the question: What the hell was he doing here?
Bethanne almost pulled him aside and asked, but she got wrapped up in watching the way his hands moved as he made a point. His fingers were long and tapered, his movements graceful, and that voice—she still couldn’t decide if it was more Hugh Jackman or Gregory Peck.
She completely lost her opportunity to talk to Mr. Greco during intake because she found herself wondering if his hands indicated the size (and elegance) of other parts.
And while she wondered, Craig led Mr. Greco to the small video section of the warehouse.
Craig also had the foresight to order everyone else back to work.
They went, reluctantly, not because Craig told them to, but because Bethanne was there. And the young geeks all believed that Bethanne was too old and dried up to be interested in Mr. Greco. She clearly had to be in the intake area to supervise Craig (and the rest of them). She certainly wouldn’t be interested in a man as gorgeous, luscious, and just plain amazing as Mr. Greco.
Still, she was glad they left. She trailed her employee and his beautiful charge to the video wing, and settled on a chair to watch.
The video wing was small but state-of-the-art. Bethanne could have produced an independent film in that little section of the warehouse—if the independent filmmaker wanted a choice of three sets (a bedroom, a comfortable kitchen, and an outdoorsy scene that varied depending on what the interviewee wanted, thanks to a more-expensive-than-she-wanted-to-think-about blue screen).
Mr. Greco chose a sun-dappled Mediterranean scene—lots of white with marble stairs and columns and an unbelievably blue sea sparkling in the distance. The image, viewed through a monitor, made his eyes bluer and his hair a richer black. It also brought out his glow, as if that sun-dappled whiteness had reflected on his own incredibly lovely olive-colored skin.
Craig gave him the option of doing one, two or five v-logs. (“You won’t have to return as often if you do the first five right now,” Craig said, admirably repeating the pitch, “and you get a price break. Mr. Greco smiled at him. “Everyone loves a price break,” he said.)
Bethanne watched, listened, absorbed, and didn’t remember a word the man said. When he finished, she turned to one of the lab techs (whose name escaped her—damn near everything was escaping her at the moment, including her usual level of perfection), and said they needed someone like Craig to do the edit.
Of course, she had to whack the lab tech twice before she even got the woman’s attention. And then the woman asked, “Who the hell else will be as oblivious as Craig?”
It took five minutes to remember who Bethanne’s macho employees were, and another two minutes to confirm that a couple of those macho, macho men weren’t simply compensating.
Then she excused herself, went into the corridor, and took several deep breaths. Crazy, crazy, crazy.
A single man shouldn’t make a sensible woman crazy. He shouldn’t make an entire business crazy, yet he had done that with hers.
She finally got a grip on herself—or could at least pretend to have a grip—when she headed down the corridor to the intake area, determined to read his profile.
Instead, she ran into him.
Literally.
The man smelled of sunshine. She noticed that first. He wore no cologne, none of that damn bodyspray so many geeky men thought improved their chances with the opposite sex. He put his very firm hands on her shoulders and helped settle her.
Instead, shivers ran through her. His touch was quite unsettling.
She wanted to melt into him, but that would be unprofessional. More than unprofessional. It would be embarrassing.
And the idea of embarrassing herself in front of this man made her untangle herself from his grasp.
She extended her hand. “Bethanne Dupree. I own Eros dot com.”
His smile was slow and sexy, not the full wattage thing he’d done outside, but something infinitely more effective. “Ray Greco.”
He took her hand, but didn’t shake it. He just held it, as if it were the most precious thing in the world.
Her cheeks heated. Her whole body heated. She had a full-on major hot flash, even though she hadn’t reached that time of life yet.
She made herself shake his hand once and let go. His fingers released hers a little slowly, almost reluctantly it seemed.
She blinked. Each breath was a struggle for control. She held onto her brain like a woman under anesthesia trying to remain conscious.
“I must say, Mr. Greco, you’re not our usual client.”
He raised a single eyebrow. The movement was elegant, simple, and not affected at all. Had any other man done it, it would have seemed affected.
He didn’t seem to know how to be affected.
“Really?” he asked, and she couldn’t tell if the tone was sarcastic or not. (Hell, she couldn’t tell if his voice was more Gregory Peck or Hugh Jackman, so how was she going to hear nuance?) “What is your usual kind of client?”
She bit her lower lip. Mr. Greco hadn’t been vetted yet. For all she knew, he was a representative of the competition, with a teeny tiny webcam attached somewhere on his person. If she spoke the truth about her clients, she might see a video of that truth on YouTube, and that video might make its way to 20/20. She could almost see the teaser: Internet Dating Services—what they really think of their clients, followed by her own voice-over saying, Well, usually, Mr. Greco, they’re fat, pimply, socially awkward men who make more money than should be allowed….
But she didn’t exactly know how to answer Mr. Greco without insulting him too. Because she couldn’t say, Our usual client is a high-achieving male with an IQ off the charts since that would imply that Mr. Greco wasn’t a) high achieving or had b) an IQ off the charts.
(Although she did think that. Why did she think that? Because he was so pretty? Pretty men could be smart, couldn’t they? Couldn’t they?)
“It just seems,” she said, “that a man like you wouldn’t need a service to get a date.”
“Ah,” he said, as if he just understood the secrets of the universe. “You’re right. I don’t need a—what do you call it?—service to get a date. I’m hoping that Eros dot com will help me find the right date.”
“The right date,” Bethanne repeated. Why hadn’t she thought of that before? The right date. Not any date. Not just a date. But the right date.
Already she could picture the advertising. Of course, Ray Greco would be front and center, saying in that delightfully deep voice, Eros dot com helped me find the right date. It’s so hard to find the perfect person on your own…
“You know, Mr. Greco,” she said, “this would make a spectacular marketing campaign. I’m just heading to dinner. Would you like to join me? We could talk about the difference between a date and the right date.”
His eyes narrowed and for a moment, she thought she had made a mistake.
Then he smiled that multi-megawatt smile.
“Of course,” he said. “Dinner would be absolutely lovely.”
***
And dinner was absolutely lovely, and so was dessert, and so was the long, incredibly aerobic sleepless night that followed, along with the wonderful breakfast, and the too-soon parting. Ray—and he was Ray now, not Mr. Greco—promised he’d pick her up after work for another dinner and, she hoped, another sleepless night, and maybe an even better breakfast.
Bethanne was whistling as she came into work.
Only to find her staff running around in tight circles, everyone with an air of complete panic because, as Stuart finally informed her, the server crashed.
“Why didn’t someone call me?” Bethanne asked.
“Why didn’t you answer your phone?” Stuart snapped in response.
She flushed, but he was too distracted to notice. He and the other IT guys were trying to bring the server back on line, but every time they did, the damn thing crashed again. Stuart was making mumbly noises about calling Larry, which was something he hadn’t done since their awful break-up—Larry & Stuart’s, not Bethanne & Larry’s—nearly a dozen years before.
“Why is the server crashing?” Bethanne asked.
“Why is the sky blue?” Stuart snapped at her. “No one knows.”
“Actually,” one of the IT guys said from behind a stack of microprocessing equipment, “they do know why the sky is blue….”
“And we know why the server is crashing,” Stuart said, still using that awful tone. “You should know why the server is crashing. Everyone else on the planet does.”
Then he disappeared into the bowels of the IT department, choosing not to answer her question. So she peered around that stack of microprocessing equipment at the IT guy who actually knew why the sky was blue.
This IT guy—who called himself BloggerBoy and whose real name she couldn’t remember—looked like a typical Eros.com client, the kind she couldn’t describe to Ray yesterday.
(Was it only yesterday? Her entire life had changed since then. Surely it must have been weeks, maybe even months ago. So many things shouldn’t have happened within twenty-four hours…)
“The sky is blue,” he said, “because of the way light—”
“I know why the sky is blue,” she lied. “I want to know why the server is crashing.”
“Oh,” he said and somehow managed to sound like a man who just realized his boss didn’t know how to add two plus two. “Because of the v-log.”
“The v-log?” she asked.
“You know,” he said, “of the really pretty guy.”
He said that with such disinterest that she realized BloggerBoy was one of her extremely straight employees. He could note the attractiveness of another male, but only in a disinterested, just-the-facts kinda way.
For some reason, that little detail about BloggerBoy surprised her.
It took her a moment to get past the surprise and realize what he was talking about. “Someone put up Ray Greco’s profile?”
“And his v-log. He paid for everything. And Rachel said to get it onsite as soon as possible because we’d get so many new subscribers that we’d probably make this year’s nut in a single day. Which, I suppose, we would have, if everyone who tried to log onto the site had been able to log onto the site. But we’re not set up for this kind of volume and it’s not going away. Everyone wants a piece of this guy, and if they don’t want a piece of this guy, we want to know how to become this guy…”
His voice trailed off as he noticed his own slip.
“I mean,” he said, “you know, they want to know how to become this guy.”
“I know what you mean,” Bethanne said. She had gotten a piece of this guy and enjoyed every single bit of it. “Do what you must to get us back on line.”
“Aye, aye, Capitan,” he said in a really strange accent—probably some film reference that she didn’t recognize. Then he buried his face in the electronics again.
The server was down for the first time in their history. Ray’s beautiful self had brought down the business, creating the first real crisis since the early lawsuits.
Somehow that didn’t bother her as much as his profile did. Not what was in it, but the fact of it. The fact that her staff had put it up, when it was clear she and Ray were involved.
Only it wasn’t clear. It couldn’t be clear. Even though it felt like she had known him all her life, she had known him less than twenty-four hours, and in those twenty-four hours she had done things she hadn’t even imagined possible…
She took a deep breath, trying to get the slow-motion replay out of her head.
She had a crisis to solve and a dinner to have and an all night-aerobic session to look forward to and then of course breakfast and what had Scarlett O’Hara said? Tomorrow is another day.
Bethanne whistled all the way to her office—which, she would admit later, wasn’t her normal crisis response.
It wasn’t normal at all.
***
But then again, dinner followed by aerobics followed by breakfast wasn’t normal for her either. Although it could become normal and she wouldn’t complain. Even if she collapsed from lack of sleep.
The server came up on day three, Eros.com got hit with more subscribers than it had gotten on its most successful four subscription drives combined, and all of the newcomers—every last one of them—wanted a date with Ray.
Who seemed just tickled pink about it.
Well, tickled gorgeous, anyway.
When that man smiled, he was not just the prettiest man Bethanne had ever seen, but he was the prettiest man in the entire universe.
She would swear to it.
And so, she thought, would everyone else in the office.
Somehow Ray had arrived at the office right at the moment the server came back on line. Bethanne wasn’t notified of his presence for several hours.
In fact, she wasn’t notified of his presence at all. She saw him as she walked to the lunchroom for yet another cup of coffee.
He was sitting on a desk in reception, staring at Stuart’s laptop. Stuart was sitting on a chair beside him, looking up at him worshipfully. Several members of the staff sat in a circle around him, offering comments.
“I do hope this is work,” she snapped as she stepped into the room.
A dozen people got up and ran to their desks. Stuart and the receptionist remained.
“He’s scrolling through the responses so far,” Stuart said to Bethanne, proudly or so it seemed.
“I never expected so much information.” Ray didn’t lift his head from the screen. He barely acknowledged her. “How am I supposed to pick the right date from this much information?”
“There’s a program embedded into your account,” Stuart said. “You can sort potentials by whatever means you deem necessary.”
“Hmmm,” Ray said, and pressed a few keys. “Like this?”
Stuart leaned toward him, brushing against his thigh. Bethanne’s lips tightened. She wasn’t going to say anything. She had no right to say anything. After all, Stuart hadn’t done anything wrong, just flirted with a man who seemed oblivious to him.
And Ray…Ray had paid for the dating service. He had the right to look through the responses.
Hell, she would have looked through the responses if she had gotten that many. Which she hadn’t. Not that she had ever posted her own profile on the site. (She wasn’t, she kept telling herself, that desperate.)
“By Olympus in all her majesty,” Ray said, “who knew that so many sour-faced women described themselves as intelligent.”
“Maybe they are,” Bethanne said.
Ray finally looked up at her. And smiled. That multi-megawatt smile warmed her just like it had the first time—every part of her except the little chill forming in her heart.
“This is going to take me all night,” he said.
“I certainly hope not,” she said. “We have reservations.”
Stuart looked up at her in surprise. So did the receptionist. Bethanne smiled, even though she really didn’t feel like smiling at all. She wasn’t one of those sour-faced women, was she? What was wrong with her that her staff seemed surprised she would go to dinner with the handsomest man to ever walk into Eros.com?
“Yes, dinner,” Ray said. He didn’t seem to notice the harshness (and hint of panic) in her tone. “One always needs to eat. Especially with all of this facing him.”
“You can borrow the laptop,” Stuart said a bit too eagerly.
Ray turned that smile on Stuart, who almost fell out of his chair.
“Thank you,” Ray said.
“Any time,” Stuart said. “It’s my pleasure. Really. To have you touch—”
“Stuart,” Bethanne said, “don’t you need that laptop for work?”
“No, not if I’m at my desk.” Then he flushed. “Which is where I’m going right now.”
The receptionist looked at Ray, then at Bethanne, and finally she stood. “I should probably get some Post-Its from supply.”
Bethanne could see the Post-Its on her desk from across the room. “Stay,” she said. “I’m sure Ray’ll be busy until we leave for dinner.”
“And after,” he said distractedly, tapping a key as he scanned the material.
And after. Bethanne would normally have been heartened by those words, but now. Because she knew he wasn’t speaking about dessert or aerobics. He was talking about the profiles on the screen.
She sighed and walked back to her office, reminding herself all the way that he had come here to find the right date. Not any date. The right date. And what man, when faced with a willing applicant pool, took the very first volunteer?
Except that he had taken the very first volunteer. The question wasn’t taking her. It was whether or not she was right applicant, not just the first available one.
And he was clearly going to go through each and every one of those profiles to make sure he hadn’t made a mistake.
***
She was able to keep it all in perspective—Ray, the aerobics, the profiles, the crashed server, the drooling women (and some men)—until the maitre d’ at the restaurant Ray had chosen let his arm brush Ray’s shoulder as he put the menu into Ray’s hands.
The restaurant was exclusive, the interior dark and romantic, the table a private one in the back. They had been taking turns paying for dinner. On this night, it was Ray’s turn. He had chosen the restaurant, and if she hadn’t been so on edge, she would have loved the choice. The tablecloth was long enough that she could slip off her shoe and slide her bare foot along his thigh without anyone else noticing.
But the moment the maitre d’ left, Ray brought out the stupid laptop and opened it.
Bethanne slammed the damn thing shut. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m looking over the applicants,” he said, frowning slightly in confusion. “I’m a bit overwhelmed at the sheer volume.”
She stared at him. His eyes widened. He was clearly puzzled, dammit.
“I suppose we should be talking about what to order,” he said slowly. “My mistake.”
“What do you think we’re doing here?” she asked.
“Dinner?” he said slowly as if he were no longer sure.
“The last few nights we’ve had lovely dinners,” she said.
He nodded and looked a little relieved.
“And lovely desserts,” she said.
He relaxed against the chair.
“And even lovelier after-dinner…celebrations,” she said.
He smiled.
“So why are you now trolling for a date?” she asked.
He put a hand protectively over the laptop, as if she were going to take it from him. “I…um…paid for it?”
“So?” she asked.
“I’m…curious?”
“Clearly,” she said.
“I…um…didn’t realize we had a commitment,” he said.
She rolled her eyes. “The least you could do is not look at that crap in front of me.”
“Why?” he asked. “You generated the crap.”
“You did,” she said. “With your lovely face, and your ‘I like to spend as much time in the sunshine as I can’ profile. I had nothing to do with it.”
“Except designing the whole system,” he said.
“I didn’t design it,” she said. “I bought it, and I run it, and I didn’t think you needed it any more.”
The light left his face. The room became noticeably darker.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m here on a fact-finding mission.”
She knew it. He was too good to be true. He worked for the competition, and he wanted to see how well Eros.com functioned. Well, clearly the place didn’t function well in the presence of beautiful men.
“Fact-finding,” she said flatly. “So tell me, who are you really?”
“Um,” he glanced around as if expecting someone to save him. But apparently the maitre d’ or the waiter or whoever was supposed to come over next had the sense to stay away. “My real name is Phoebus Apollo, but it’s not inaccurate to call myself Ray since I am the God of Light nor is it wrong to call me Greco, which is just a word for Greek, which I am—”
“Phoebus,” Bethanne said, ignoring everything else he just said (mostly because she didn’t understand it). “Who the hell names a kid Phoebus?”
“My dad.” That was a whole new voice. It sounded like a trumpet blaring and it came from the chair to Bethanne’s left.
A man was sitting there, a man she hadn’t noticed before. He was attractive in a he-man kind of way—broad forehead, high cheekbones, cruel lips. The romance novels she used to read (before Larry) would have called him an Alpha male.
Now she just thought of men like that as dangerous.
“Who the hell are you?” she snapped.
“I’m—ah—Phoebus’s brother, Ares, although I prefer to be called Mars, even if they did name a red planet after me. The Romans knew how to respect manly men instead of—”
She slammed her palms on the table, shutting him up. “What is this all about?”
“Ah, my fault actually.” Ares looked at Ray—Phoebus or Apollo or whatever his name was—and then shrugged. “I found your little website and thought Eros dot com had something to do with the Greek Gods. I was hoping someone set up a dating service that catered to us.”
“He thought it was a porn site at first,” said Ray. (She couldn’t think of him as Phoebus. That was just wrong. No man that attractive should be called Phoebus.)
“But I scrolled around,” Ares said, “and I thought maybe it might actually help us find, you know, someone to pass the time with.”
“Actually,” Ray said, “he bet me that the site couldn’t handle people like us.”
“And,” Ares said, “it turns out that I’m right.”
“What?” Bethanne asked.
“Look,” Ray said, taking her hand. She snatched it back. He raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Our father slept with everything that moved, pretty much from the time he dethroned our grandfather—”
“Father Time,” Ares said, making Bethanne wonder if he was completely there.
“—actually, our grandfather was named Chronus, but that’s neither here nor there. The important thing is that Dad slept with anything female and fathered—what, Ares, maybe a thousand children?”
“Who counts?” Ares said.
“And we decided long ago that we don’t want to be like him, but it does lead to a lonely life, especially in a family as long lived as ours, and we were hoping when we saw your site—”
“He was hoping when he saw your site,” Ares said.
“That you could help us all find the right person for right now. That way we wouldn’t have to come down from the mountain very often and we wouldn’t have to interrupt our real work and we wouldn’t have to—”
“Real work,” Bethanne said.
“He likes to tell people that he pulls the sun across the sky with his chariot,” Ares said, “but really he just controls the light as it filters through the atmosphere. No one has believed that chariot thing since, what, ‘Pollo, Copernicus?”
Ray glared at his brother. “We don’t discuss Copernicus.”
Bethanne had never discussed Copernicus, mostly because she had no idea who he was. And she wasn’t going to ask.
“You came to my office as a bet?” she asked Ray.
He shrugged a single shoulder.
“You used us?” she asked.
“It turned out better than I’d hoped,” Ray said.
“Idiot,” Ares said. “She really wants to know if you used her.”
The man with the cruel mouth was right, but she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of saying so. Still, she didn’t add anything because she really wanted to hear Ray’s answer.
Ray glanced at his brother, then back at her, then back at his brother again. “You know,” Ray said under his breath, “I’d almost believe your kids were here.”
Ares grinned at Bethanne. “I call the little buggers Terror, Trembling, Panic and Fear. Although it’s not fair to call them little any more. They’ve taken over so much of the world.”
She blinked at him, not certain if he was joking. He didn’t seem like a man who was joking, and yet every word out of his mouth was unbelievable. And where did he come from? She hadn’t seen him arrive on his own.
“I’m sure ‘Pollo mentioned them because he’s feeling all of those lovely emotions. My sister Eris should have shown up. You know her as Discord. She would have loved this conversation.” Ares’ grin wasn’t a kind one. His eyes were as cruel as that mouth of his.
“I didn’t use you, Bethanne, seriously,” Ray said. “When I arrived, I was hoping I’d find a woman to keep me company for the next sun cycle.”
“I was keeping you company,” she snapped.
“I know,” he said, “and I appreciate it. But I’m not all that great with English, and when you said that we would talk about dates and marketing and mentioned dinner, I thought you meant dates and marketing and work, not a relationship.”
“Then what was that all night stuff?” she asked.
He shrugged again. “A delightful work experience?”
“Oh, for godssake,” she said.
“Which God?” Ares asked.
“I hadn’t had time to see if any of the women are appropriate,” Ray said to Ares. “I just started looking through the files….”
“And that’s all the looking you’re going to get.” Bethanne snatched laptop away from him. “You perpetrated a fraud. Both of you. I’m going to fire whoever checked out your background.”
“Don’t do that,” Ray said. “I got one of the muses to write me something pretty. Really, it’s mostly true. I am a well known poet and musician. I invented the flute and the lyre—”
“I doubt that,” Bethanne said. “You didn’t invent the liar, but you certainly are an adept one. Either that or you’re both stone-cold crazy. Which comes back to fraud again. And fraud negates our contract, which no longer gives you the right to look at these profiles or anything else to do with our site. Got that, Ray?”
“Apollo,” he said softly. “I hurt your feelings. I didn’t mean to. I was just—”
“Save it,” she said. “And don’t ever bother us again.”
Ares sighed. “You know, for someone who doesn’t want to be like Dad,” he said to his brother, “you sure know how to piss off women.”
“Stop,” Ray said to Ares. Then Ray stood. Somehow a spotlight illuminated him, making him the brightest (most beautiful, astounding, gorgeous and spectacular) thing in the room.
Bethanne worked at ignoring him.
“You want me to take care of her?” Ares asked. “We could go for a tiny little interpersonal war or something larger—like a conflict between Internet agencies—or something even large, maybe on the scale of Iraq.”
“I said shut up,” Ray said. Then he reached out a hand to Bethanne. “Bethanne, please. I’m apologizing.”
“That’s not going to make things better,” she said. Although she was having trouble walking away from him.
“What can I do to make things better?” he asked.
How many men had asked her that question before? How many of them had asked her that question after screwing up her life?
“Just leave me alone,” she said tiredly, and walked away.
She resisted the urge to look back at him. She really didn’t need to. The mirrors in the hallway leading to the kitchen reflected his afterglow.
The man did seem to have control of the light somehow. Or maybe handsome men just figured out how to use light to their advantage.
She had no idea. It was safer to believe he and his brother were crazy. They used Eros.com and now she would pay for it.
Halfway back to the business, she remembered she hadn’t eaten dinner. She ordered a pizza—extra thick, extra cheese and extra pepperoni—and made sure it would arrive shortly after she did.
Which it did.
She ate the entire thing alone, while she composed the letter she had to send to all the new subscribers. Before she sent it, she called her investigative team, her legal advisor, and Rachel into the office.
She fired the investigative team for failing to do their job. (“Pretty men do not get a pass at Eros dot com,” she said, but even she knew she was speaking about the future, not the quite recent past.) She put Rachel on probation for making the decision that Bethanne herself might have made if she had been in the office that night.
And she listened to her lawyer’s doom-and-gloom predictions, most of which came true. Like the class action lawsuit, not just from the new subscribers (all of whom got their money back—if they asked for it of course), but from some old ones claiming fraud as well.
Bethanne’s lawyer had to meet with some ambulance-chasing class action attorney and show him that Eros.com was a victim of fraud as well. Which wasn’t hard when someone actually investigated the information that Ray Greco had provided the company.
Why hadn’t they investigated that properly? The class action ambulance chaser had asked.
Fortunately, that particular ambulance chaser had been female (as had the arbitrator overseeing everything) and Bethanne’s attorney took the risky option of showing them the security tapes.
The naked security tapes.
Of Ray Greco a.k.a Phoebus Apollo a.k.a. the Greek God waiting outside Eros.com.
No one questioned the security procedures. Both women asked for the recording to be replayed more than once and later, the ambulance chaser asked for a copy, which she did not get.
The class action suit evaporated. Unfortunately, the memory of Ray Greco did not.
Bethanne herself spent too much time on the Internet reading translations of Homer and Ovid. She bought Edith Hamilton’s mythology books, and got angry every single time she saw Apollo presented as the God of Truth.
That alone should have made her Apollo a fake Apollo. But he looked a lot like the statues she saw reproduced online (and some in touring shows when they hit the local museum). And then there was that glow of his…
In the end, it didn’t matter. Pretty men, men who used, simply didn’t belong at Eros.com. She had a few fun nights with a con artist. That’s how she ended up filing the Event in her mind.
And she did get a new slogan out of it for Eros.com. Not “We find you the right date,” but a twist on Geeks Bearing Gifts. Now Eros.com’s slogan read: We Prefer Geeks Bearing Gifts.
Because she did. She really and truly did.
Copyright © 2015 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in The Trouble With Heroes, edited by Denise Little, Daw Books, November, 2009.
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and layout copyright © 2015 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Andrei Vishnyakov/Dreamstime, Cammeraydave/Dreamstime
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
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