Chapter 31

Part 3: Valentine's Heart

"No way in hell am I signing up for an internet dating service."
Famous last words.
Val Holiday looked at the email on his oversized, flat-screen monitor and sighed. Which one of his siblings had set him up?
"From: Compu-Cupid
To: Valentine Holiday
Welcome to Compu-Cupid, home of the perfect match. Eros' arrows always aim true. Based on your profile, Eros himself has selected your ideal mate. Expect her to get in touch within the next twenty-four hours. Thank you for choosing Compu-Cupid."
He deleted the email with a growl. It had to be Noel. Ever since his oldest brother and had gotten married last year, he'd been determined to fix up his siblings. The only problem was Val didn't want to be fixed up. He liked being twenty-eight - well, almost twenty-nine - healthy, relatively wealthy and single.
The only way to stop this was to unsubscribe. He hit undelete to retrieve the message and followed the link to the company's website where he ought to be able to remove his profile. Really, they had to let people quit, right?
When Val reached his profile, there was a big red notice stamped across the top. Match determined. Nothing he tried would let him get into the profile to actually delete it. None of his siblings' usual passwords - and as the IT director of the family company where they all worked, Val knew them all - did the trick. It was two a.m., too late to call for information. Huh. He ran through a couple more passwords - his sister-in-law's, even his mom's and his dad's. It was no secret his parents wanted more grandchildren, though with Noel's wife Shelby due to pop in a month or two, they ought to be focusing on her or Star and Theo at the very least.
Not on Val. While he liked the idea of being the cool uncle, he was in no hurry at all to be a parent himself.
Nope. The parental passwords didn't work either. Damn it, what good was being a natural-born hacker if he couldn't get himself off some crappy-assed dating site?
In her cramped excuse for an office, Corazon Lopez stared sleepily at her computer monitor, sipping at her third cup of coffee. How had this dating site crap not gone into her spam filter? Then again, what Cora knew about computers was pretty much how to turn them on, check her email and write reports.
On the other hand, her roommate Marla had been trying to fix her up lately. Maybe this was Marla's idea of a pre-Valentine's practical joke. Cora sighed. Good lord, was she going to have to go through this kind of crap for the next week until the fourteenth?
She definitely needed more coffee.
"From: Compu-Cupid
To: Corazon Lopez
Welcome to Compu-Cupid, home of the perfect match. Eros' arrows always aim true. Based on your profile, Eros himself has selected your ideal mate. Expect him to get in touch within the next twenty-four hours. Thank you for choosing Compu-Cupid."
Funny, she'd never heard of Compu-Cupid, not even on late-night radio ads. Where the hell had Marla dug this one up?
Well, right now, Cora didn't have time to deal with it. She had a couple scheduled in five minutes to talk about what little help could be provided now that both of them were out of work. Feeding the kids was the easy part. Getting them breakfast and lunch at school was just a matter of filling out the right paperwork, and Cora could swing food stamps. But trying to help them keep a roof over their heads - that was going to take some work.
Cora yawned and chugged the rest of her coffee. Last night, she'd been called in by the cops after a domestic violence incident, which meant she'd gotten about three hours of sleep. Sometimes she felt as if she were tilting at windmills 24/7. At just thirty-two, she felt more like eighty.
And Marla thought she had time to date?
Sheesh.
"I swear, bro, I had nothing to do with it." Noel held up his hands and spun on his drafting stool away from his drawing table. "Hell, with Shelby tossing and turning all night, I'm barely conscious enough to draw - pranks are way too much work for me right now." Noel was the art director for the Holiday Greeting Card Company, ultimately in charge of every image that went out on the cards. Some he drew, some were photos, others he had his team create, but yeah, Val knew his big brother's job was as busy as his own, and dealing with a pregnant wife had to be a hassle, even if it was a good one in its own weird way.
"Must have been Star then." With a brotherly punch to the shoulder, Val left Noel's office and headed next door to Star's. The next youngest to Val, who was the baby of the family, Star was the head writer for the greeting card line, so she worked hand in hand with Noel on a daily basis.
When Val asked her though, Star shrugged. "Why the hell would I do that? Sounds like Sam's idea of a joke to me. Maybe something he and Theo came up with over beer the other night when Summer and I went shopping for Shelby's baby shower." Theo, Star's veterinarian husband, had been roommates with Sam, the second-eldest Holiday, in college, and the two were still close.
Sam, however, vehemently denied any knowledge of the incident. As the designer in charge of the company's holiday décor division, he was another of the artistic talents in the family. "Dude, why would I do that to you? Right now, having three of us single is dispersing the heat. If you or Summer hook up, that just puts more pressure on me. No thanks."
That left Summer, who shook her head. "Please. You have to be kidding me. Why would I waste my time trying to fix up someone who doesn't want to be fixed?" Summer, the middle child, was usually the last one to dream up a prank. A tactical genius and head of sales and marketing, she was generally the most logical and down-to-earth of the bunch.
Finally, Val gave up and went back to work. He'd just ignore it.