Relaxing a little on the heels of her inner pep talk, she tried to think of a neutral topic for conversation. Glancing up, she found Isaac watching her in an almost predatory way. It was a look she’d only seen in the bedroom. He seemed to be measuring her for the right size of bedsheets.
“King,” she said without thinking, reaching for a handful of pretzels and popping a couple in her mouth. They would, after all, need room to move.
“King?”
She choked on her drink.
Isaac lunged for her so fast he tipped over his chair. It had barely hit the floor when he had her in the universally approved position for assisting someone with an obstructed airway.
“Rachel?” he said, full of authority. “Raise your hand if you can breathe.”
She wheezed and raised her right hand.
“Take a deeper breath.”
Struggling past the embarrassment of the pub patrons’ watching her publicly choke to death, she managed a deeper breath that dislodged the offending pretzel, thus clearing her airway.
“Thank God,” Isaac muttered, clutching her so close and so tight she had to struggle to breathe all over again.
“I’m good,” she croaked. “It’s okay, Isaac. I just choked.”
“Things can go wrong so, so fast, and you can’t undo what happens in that blink of time,” he said against the back of her neck.
Air rushed across her skin as he drew his own fortifying breath. “We’re good,” he said to those around them. “International incident averted.”
Several people chuckled, and Rachel could only be grateful when the waitress shoved her way through the crowd with a glass of water. “Here you go, ma’am. Scared the evil right out of me, you did, choking like that. Good thing your man was here to intervene!” And she was off, calling back that their food should be ready “soon enough.”
Isaac took his seat, then leaned down and swept his napkin off the floor before asking as quietly as possible over the din of the crowd, “You’re sure you’re okay?”
“Sure. Just one more time I wished a sinkhole would have opened beneath me so my actions would have gone down as heroic versus ‘diedby choking on pretzel salt’ or ‘inhaled piece of lint and perished.’”
He smiled, but the tightness around his eyes prevented her from buying the gesture as genuine.
Anxious to discuss anything but what had just happened, she plucked the first conversational topic that passed through her mind and took off with it. “How do you think Power Match ended up putting us together? I mean, I know we sort of joked about it before, but what do you think we did differently than most of the other participants to end up with a decent match?”
“Decent, huh?” This time, his grin reached his eyes. “I don’t know if I should be amused or insulted.”
She closed her eyes and shook her head. “That came out wrong.”
“Moving along,” he said with obvious mercy. “I’m curious. Why do you think the meet and greet didn’t go well?”
She gaped at him. Literally. Gaped. “Why...? Did you not look around? Did you not talk to another woman? Did you not ask the other two women you were paired with how their introductions had gone?”
“Um, no?”
There was an opening for a tirade regarding men and paying attention, but that would wait. This wouldn’t. “Isaac, I went to the ladies’ room before meeting you. I didn’t hear a single woman in there discuss anything positive. Some were making pacts to leave if the next match was as poorly done. Others were hiding out in the restroom until it was all over. And others still were talking about the fact that Power Match couldn’t hold a candle to Date Me and how they’d be going back to that app exclusively.”
Leaning back in his chair, he crossed his arms over his chest. “I had no idea.”
“Maybe it was a glitch?” she suggested.
“No way. My brother is the app developer. It wouldn’t be in my hands if there was a glitch.”
“What if you missed it, though?”
“If I had, someone else on Jonathan’s team would’ve caught it. There are checks and balances.”
With a look of relief, he tipped his chin at something over Rachel’s shoulder. “I’m going to guess this pile of bar food is ours?”