Dream Date with the Millionaire

Welcome to the www.blinddatebrides.com member profile of: Sanfrandani (AKA Danica Bennett)

My Ideal Partner… Probably doesn’t exist outside the covers of my Jane Austen collection. I’m independent. I don’t want a guy to be the centre of my world, and I’m not sure I want to be any part of his. Getting my career back on track is my number one priority.

Read the rest of Sanfrandani’s profile here www.blinddatebrides.com

www.blinddatebrides.com is running 25 chat rooms, 248 private IM conferences, and 15472 members are online. Chat with your dating prospects now!

Private IM chat between Kangagirl, Sanfrandani and Englishcrumpet:

Kangagirl: What were you thinking? This profile doesn’t sound anything like the Dani we know and love.

Sanfrandani: That’s okay. I’m not exactly surfing for dates.

Englishcrumpet: But we found our Mr Rights. It’s your turn now.

Sanfrandani: I’m not looking for Mr Right.

Kangagirl: But he may be looking for you!

Englishcrumpet: We can help you modify your profile.

Kangagirl: Yes! A few changes and you’ll have more dates than you know what to do with.

Sanfrandani: Thanks so much, but there isn’t a lot of room in my life for dating. My new job isn’t exactly what I thought it would be, and that’s… complicating things. But I found you two here, so joining blinddatebrides.com has been worth every penny!

BY

MELISSA McCLONE

MILLS & BOON

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To Jennie Adams and Fiona Harper,

my blinddatebrides.com cohorts and new chat buddies

Special thanks to:

Markus Frind with plentyoffish.com,

Virginia Kantra and Gary Yngve

CHAPTER ONE

Blinddatebrides.com is running thirteen chat rooms, fifty-six private IM conferences, and 7828 members are online. Chat with your dating prospects now!

Private IM conference #25 (3 participants)…

Englishcrumpet: Who would have thought I’d meet the man of my dreams at an online dating site? I still can’t believe it!

DANICA BENNETT blew out a puff of air. She couldn’t believe it either.

Alone in her neatly organized cubicle in the otherwise cluttered and messy San Francisco office of Hookamate.com, she reread the purple words written in a funky font on her computer screen. Englishcrumpet, aka Grace Marlowe from London, deserved to be happy. Dani sincerely hoped her friend would find happiness and wedded bliss with her new husband, Noah. Especially with a baby on the way.

But Dani wasn’t so sure living happily ever after was possible. She glanced at the photograph of her family—her mother, her three younger sisters and herself. Winning the lottery seemed more likely. Though she’d never say those words to her newly wed friend. Dani typed, the letters appearing in green—the color of money. Too bad her life couldn’t be as rich and bold as her computer font.

Sanfrandani: It is pretty amazing.

Grace had only known Noah a short time before marrying the bestselling thriller author and then found out she was pregnant.

More words, rust-brown in a plain but strong font, appeared on screen. Kangagirl, their friend Marissa Warren, from Australia.

Kangagirl: Amazing, yes, but not that rare. Apparently one in eight people meet their spouses online.

Dani almost laughed. Marissa sounded like a commercial for online dating. Or like a happy bride. Which she would be in a few months. She’d fallen in love with her temporary boss, not someone she met on Blinddatebrides.com like Grace. Though it wasn’t for Marissa’s lack of trying to meet a guy online.

Sanfrandani: Well, it’s a good thing for me. Or

I’d be out of another job.

Even this crappy job, she thought to herself and stabbed her fork at her lunch, a limp chicken Caesar salad leftover from last night’s dinner.

Englishcrumpet: What do you mean?

Kangagirl: You’ve lost me.

The two messages popped up on Dani’s screen at almost the same moment.

Oh, no. She dropped her fork. Distracted by her friends’ happiness and her own bleak prospects, she’d revealed more than she intended. The three of them had grown so close over the past six months she’d almost let her secret slip out.

Time for damage control.

Sanfrandani: Nothing. I’m just so glad you guys joined Blinddatebrides.com. I don’t know how I would have survived these months without your support and friendship.

But typing the words gave Dani a funny feeling in her stomach. What kind of friend was she? Keeping the truth about what she was doing at Blinddatebrides.com from Marissa and Grace.

Englishcrumpet: You’ve been through a lot, Dani. Losing your dream job and getting used to your new one. Things will turn around. Just watch.

Kangagirl: And then, when you least expect it, you’re going to meet him. That one special man.

Dani hoped not.

Snores drifted from the engineers’ cubicle a few feet away. Someone must have pulled an all-nighter.

She needed to get her career back on track first. She’d spent the last six months trying to find another job with no success. Distractions, especially men, weren’t allowed right now.

Kangagirl: The only question is…how do we make it happen?

We. Unexpected tears stung Dani’s eyes. She ran her fingertips over the bracelet—silver with crystal beads—Marissa had sent her after a trip to Hong Kong. These women, even though they’d never met in person, truly cared about her.

Sanfrandani: Please. No one needs to make anything happen. I’m doing fine. No worries.

Englishcrumpet: We’re not really worrying. We just want to help. You joined this site for a reason, Dani.

But not the same reason as Marissa and Grace.

Guilt welled up inside Dani.

It was time to come clean. To stop lying.

Her fingers flew across the keyboard with light ning speed, in case nerves and fear got the best of her. Or her boss showed up.

Sanfrandani: I didn’t join Blinddatebrides.com to meet men.

Kangagirl: Then why did you join?

Sanfrandani: Because

The cursor blinked, waiting for her to finish. Dani swallowed hard. Her online friendship with Marissa and Grace was the only thing in her life going well these days. Did she want to risk that?

But what kind of relationship did they have, really, if she couldn’t be honest?

Dani took a deep breath and typed.

Sanfrandani: I was forced to.

She stared at the screen, her heart racing, her hands sweating.

Englishcrumpet: Did someone sign you up like my daughter did with me?

Oh, dear. Dani snuck another look around the office before returning her trembling hands to the keyboard.

Sanfrandani: No, I signed up myself.

Kangagirl:???

Dani felt sick, but the truth had to be said. Er, typed.

Sanfrandani: I’m a spy.

“There’s something you should see.”

Bryce Delaney heard his assistant’s voice, but didn’t glance up from his computer monitor and the database query he was writing. He didn’t have to.

Joelle Chang would be standing two feet from the edge of his walnut-stained desk holding a manila file folder with a pen—blue ink only so she could tell the difference on photocopies—tucked behind her ear. Despite her college-girl long hair and trendy clothes, forty-one-year-old Joelle was dedicated, thorough and one-hundred-percent predictable. Exactly the way he liked things. And people. “I pay you enough to see for me.”

“You said you wanted to be kept in the loop about possible security issues.”

Security. A top priority at his Web site Blinddatebrides.com. Bryce looked up. “Possible or probable?”

Joelle’s almond-shaped eyes grew dark. “Two red flags.”

Damn. He didn’t need this on top of the other problems they’d been dealing with. Scammers, spammers, hackers, marrieds, the list went on.

“It might not mean anything,” she added.

In the last year, there had been a handful of false alarms. “But it could mean we have a troublemaker on board.”

It wouldn’t be the first time. He’d dealt with escorts, cheats, thieves and liars. Had charges brought against them when possible, too.

Bryce wasn’t about to let anyone take advantage of his customers. Too many people pretended to be something they weren’t, both in real life and online. He had experience with that. His sister, too. But she was more trusting than him. That was why he’d started a dating—make that a relationship—Web site: to protect good people like Caitlin.

“What do you have?” he asked.

Joelle handed him a file. “This particular client has been a member of the site for over six months. Everything about her looks good, including her background check.”

“Her?”

“Yes,” Joelle answered. “None of the e-mail filters have picked up anything to suggest she’s an escort.”

Those were usually easy to detect since they asked for money in almost every e-mail.

“But the chat filter picked up something so we did a little investigating,” Joelle said. “The subject spends hours logged on to the site each day, but she has not accepted a date yet, even though her profile has been marked highly compatible with several men.”

Bryce had worked with a psychologist to create an algorithm to match clients based on their interests, backgrounds and personalities. Chats, based on compatibility, were also arranged with groups of well-matched people, too, since many people preferred group interactions to one-on-one. Some clients, though, preferred to peruse the profiles themselves and pick matches that way.

He opened the file and studied the photo of a woman. The messy blond hair piled on top of her head and secured with a—was that a red bandana?—caught his eye first. Not the most appealing hairstyle. The picture itself was far from flattering. She wasn’t smiling or looking at the camera. Shadows obscured what he could see of her face, though she looked flushed unless her skin was always red like that. Her profile stated blue eyes, but he couldn’t distinguish the color, really anything about her. “She’s been matched?”

“Yes. The compatibility program has matched her with seventeen clients so far. Five of those contacted her. Others must have seen something they liked in her profile because they e-mailed her, too. She replied back to each one, but that was it. No additional correspondence. No chat invites. Nothing.”

“At least she’s following the guidelines about replying to others even if you’re not interested in them.”

“Yes.”

He read more in the file. Turning down potential dates wasn’t unusual. Bryce remembered one shy female client in particular, but others in the past had misrepresented themselves. Better to err on the side of caution. “You’ve taken the usual steps?”

Joelle nodded. “Customer service called to discuss her experience so far. She asked as many questions as they did, and they were on the phone for two hours.”

“Two hours?”

Another nod. “I called her myself after that. She came across as highly intelligent and very friendly, but remember that identity thief? Never assume anyone who is nice is also harmless.”

“That’s for sure.” Bryce flipped through the pages in the file. He noticed a familiar zip code. She lived here in San Francisco. Many of the scammers he’d dealt with lived overseas. But this was on his home turf. He could follow the prosecution to the end if she were guilty. “Where does she go on the site?”

“Chat rooms, particularly the Ladies Lounge, and private IM conferences. She spends most of her time exploring the Web site. Not client profiles, but the content itself.”

Most people, whether they wanted to date or not, liked checking out the profiles of people in their area. On some Internet relationship sites that earned revenue through advertising; anyone could register and search profiles for free. Not on Blinddatebrides.com. Only paying members, who’d filled out a detailed questionnaire and agreed to a background check if they lived in the United States, were allowed to search the database, read profiles and contact members.

Joelle continued. “She’s online during normal work hours as well as late at night. Two different IP addresses have been linked to her account name, depending on the time of day.”

Nothing unusual about that. “Work and home.”

“Seems likely, but I don’t know many employers who would encourage their employees to spend that much time each day at a dating site while at work.”

“Unless the boss doesn’t know.” Bryce skimmed the rest of the pages and saw one of the red flags. She’d said she was a spy during a chat. “Or she has an employer who wants her checking us out.”

The online dating world was cutthroat. The competition stole from each other regularly, but pretending to want to meet dates went against the terms of service users agreed to when they joined Blinddatebrides.com. But she hadn’t mentioned anything about her job prior to her saying she was a spy.

“What does she do for a living?” Bryce asked.

“She listed sales as her occupation,” Joelle said.

“That’s too vague, given the list of options she could have chosen.”

“Red flag number three?” Joelle asked.

Bryce nodded. He prided himself on making his Web site a safe and secure place to meet and fall in love. His sister had had her heart broken, as well as her bank account drained, thanks to the “love” she’d found on a competitor’s site. The guy had turned out to be the exact opposite of what he’d claimed to be. No one was going to pull a stunt like that on Bryce’s site, during his watch. “I’ll get right on it.”

Joelle smiled. “I almost feel sorry for her.”

“Why is that?” he asked.

“Because, once you get started, you don’t stop.”

He shrugged. “Just doing my job.”

“Remember, it’s just a job.” She pulled the pen from behind her ear. “Grant is e-mailing you a file with additional information you might need.”

“Thanks.” As she left the office and closed the door behind her, Bryce stared at the picture in the folder. He glanced at the user name. “Who are you, Sanfrandani? And what are you doing on my site?”

At three o’clock, Dani sat at the rectangular table that functioned as the “conference room” as well as the “break room” with her five coworkers at the fledgling Internet dating site Hookamate.com. Pacing back and forth across the floor of the converted warehouse was their boss, James Richardson.

James wore ripped-at-the-knee jeans and a black T-shirt. He had long, straggly blond hair. He spoke fast and loud, as if fueled by caffeine and junk food. He reminded her of a stereotypical computer science graduate student in desperate need of a balanced meal, sunshine and a girlfriend, but his first two Internet ventures had made him tons of money. He’d sold them, and now wanted to replicate that success with a new online dating site.

Succeed at any cost, Dani had finally figured out.

During her interview, James had seemed more captivated with her double-D bra cup sized breasts than the qualifications on her résumé. Yet he’d surprised her by asking detailed questions about her schooling and work experience. He’d known exactly what he wanted in a marketing person.

She had the skills so she’d made the most of what nature had given her, just as her mother had taught her to do, and secured the job. Which meant she only had herself to blame for where she found herself today. She wanted to bang her head on the table for her stupidity.

“The good news is we had an increase in traffic thanks to Danica’s marketing efforts.” James winked at her. No one at the company except him knew she was undercover, so to speak, spying on the local competition, Blinddatebrides.com. “Unfortunately the traffic exceeded our capacity so we’ve been having to add machines. But that’s not a bad problem. Traffic will drive our advertising revenue. That means more money for us. Anyone have other ideas to generate more users?”

No one said anything.

“Rethinking our branding might help,” she suggested. “Taglines, image, ads, name.”

James clenched his jaw. “Our Web site name rocks.”

“Totally.”

“Yeah.”

Dani listened to the men in the room support their boss who they held in almost cult leader esteem. The only other woman at the table, Shelley, the office manager, shook her head and mouthed the word sorry to Dani.

The responses didn’t deter her. She had to do something. Say something.

“Look at Blinddatebrides.com.” The name of the fastest-growing competitor brought groans from the three engineers at the table, but Dani kept going. “When people hear Blinddatebrides.com, they can’t help but think about brides. That word connotes weddings, which makes people think relationships, marriage, permanence. That’s appealing to users.”

“Only if you want to end up with a ball and chain,” a Ruby on Rails developer named Andrew murmured.

Dani ignored him. “Granted, your…I mean our…site’s name does have ‘mate’, but ‘hook’ makes people think of…”

“What?” James asked.

“One-night stands,” a PHP programmer, who probably hadn’t showered let alone had a date in a month, said.

People—okay, guys—laughed.

“Yeah, sex,” the interface hacker offered. “Sex appeals to a lot of people, too.”

The two men gave each other high fives.

Dani sighed. “I worry the name brings about images of hookups, not serious relationships.”

No one spoke.

“There’s such a thing as a niche market,” Andrew said. “Hookups can be our niche.”

She stared at all the nodding heads. Male heads. No wonder women had a hard time finding good men to date these days. Not that she was interested in anything to do with dating.

“I appreciate you bringing this up, Danica,” James said finally. “I’ll have to think about what you said.”

Which meant he would never mention it again. That was how things worked around here. James’s way or the highway. He’d given her a choice—join Blinddatebrides.com or quit. She needed the paycheck so did as he’d requested. Up until that point, she’d really liked the challenges of being in on the ground floor of a start-up again. Now she hated getting up in the morning.

“Anything else?” he asked.

No one said a word. No one ever did. Except her. She didn’t know why she bothered.

“Get to work, people.” James clapped his hands together. “We don’t want anyone to be lonely tonight. They need to hook a mate!”

Dani trudged back to her cubicle, frustrated and tired. She’d stayed up late last night sending out another batch of résumés. Speaking of which, she’d better check her e-mail in case someone had replied. She clicked on her in-box. There, at the top, was a new message, but not from a potential employer. This was one was from bigbrother@blinddatebrides. com with the subject header “I read your profile.”

Oh, no. She squeezed her eyes shut. Another guy who wanted to get to know her.

Her stomach churned. She hated this. Sure, she could just hit “delete”—that was par for the course on many dating sites—but Blinddatebrides.com was different. The site touted itself as a community where politeness and manners mattered. Users were requested to reply, even if the intent was to give someone a brush-off. Still, the thought of telling another guy she wasn’t interested in getting to know him better made her feel physically ill.

But what else could she do?

Leading a guy on when she was on the site under false pretenses ranked right up there with corporate spying in her book. She massaged her forehead to stop a full-on headache from erupting. Okay, one rejection wasn’t going to send some guy scampering back to his mommy in tears, but…

Why did this keep happening?

Dani had taken steps to ensure it wouldn’t. What sense of honor she had left had made her fill out the profile questionnaire truthfully so she understood when the compatibility program deemed her a match with someone. But Dani had hedged against the computer algorithms by uploading the most unattractive photo of herself she could find. She looked downright ugly. While other women uploaded more than one picture to their profile page, she hadn’t.

She’d also downplayed her interests to make herself sound…well…about as exciting as a slug inching across a driveway at dawn. She’d listed the library as her favorite place to spend a Saturday night and a collection of Jane Austen novels as her must-have item if stranded on a desert island.

No man should want to date her.

Maybe this one didn’t. Maybe he was one of those guys, the players, who only wanted to have sex. If that were the case, she wouldn’t mind telling him to get lost.

Dani opened her eyes and read the entire e-mail.

To: “Sanfrandani”

From: “Bigbrother”

Subject: I read your profile Who are you searching for? Mr. Darcy? Or Mr.

Knightley?

-bb

Dani reread the message. Twice.

Okay, she was impressed this guy knew the names of two Jane Austen heroes, but who did he take her for? Intelligent, impulsive Lizzy or smug, interfering Emma?

Still, his message intrigued Dani. She typed a reply and hit “send.” With a satisfied smile on her face, she leaned back in her chair. And almost fell over backward.

Uh-oh. What had she done?

She shouldn’t have replied. Dani grimaced. She wasn’t supposed to engage Bigbrother in more e-mails. She was supposed to tell him she wasn’t interested. To. Go. Away. Politely, of course.

Only she hadn’t wanted to do that.

Not when his e-mail had been unlike any of the others she’d received. He’d obviously read her profile and asked his question based on what she’d written. Not on her photo or bra size. Maybe he was genuinely interested.