Free A Perfectly Imperfect Match (Matchmaking Mamas) by Marie Ferrarella Page A

most marriages today never saw the light of their fifth anniversary, much less their thirty-fifth. His parents had a marriage that was damn near close to perfect. If he couldn’t have that—and odds in today’s world were pretty great that he couldn’t—he didn’t want any marriage at all.
    “That part I just assumed,” he told Elizabeth. “I meant playing. As in how long have you been playing the violin?”
    “Almost as long as I’ve been eating,” Elizabeth answered.
    She saw the slight dubious look that came into Jared’s eyes. She didn’t want him thinking that she was telling him she’d been a child prodigy, because she wasn’t. She’d just been a little girl who was trying to make contact with a mother who was gone.
    “I feel like it’s in my blood,” she explained. “My parents met at a concert during college. She was playing, he was listening.” Those were her mother’s exact words, she recalled fondly. “Dad told me that the first time he heard her play, he felt as if he were in the presence of an angel.”
    Jared saw a sad expression play across her face as she went on talking.
    “When my mother died, he told me that God wanted to have nothing but beautiful music around Him, so He took her to heaven.” She looked at Jared and wondered if he thought she was being rather simple-minded. “When you’re five, you believe everything your father tells you.” A rueful smile curved her lips. “I was really angry at God for about a year.”
    “At that age, I would have been, too,” Jared agreed gently.
    He was humoring her, she thought, but it was still rather nice of him. She flashed him a quick, grateful smile.
    “Anyway, holding her violin made me feel closer to her, as if a part of her were still there somehow, so I asked my father if I could have lessons. He made the arrangements, even got me the same instructor who initially taught my mother,” she confided. “The woman couldn’t get over how much I looked like my mother. By the end of the year, Ms. Jablonsky said I played the violin just like my mother, too.
    “I don’t think I ever received a better compliment—unless it was seeing the tears in my dad’s eyes when I played in my very first recital. He said it was like being at that concert when he met my mother all over again. He told me that my mother would have been proud of me.”
    Elizabeth realized that, just for a moment, she’d let her guard down and gotten misty. Clearing her throat, she pushed back the feelings that were welling up inside her, and blinked her eyes, determined to keep her tears from falling.
    “Anyway, I found that I loved playing, just for its own sake,” she concluded.
    The pizza arrived and the discussion was temporarily tabled as they both made small talk, commenting on how good the pizza smelled, etc. Jared confessed that he hadn’t realized just how hungry he actually was until the aroma had hit him.
    “I tend to forget to eat when I get busy or distracted,” he confided.
    Did she come under the heading of being a distraction? Elizabeth wondered. Or was he saying that he’d considered coming to hear her play on the soundstage as “being busy”?
    She realized that, given a choice, she would have preferred having the good-looking man think of her as a distraction. The implications of that were far more promising.
    You’re letting your imagination get the better of you. That’s what you get for listening to Amanda.
    Amanda was one of the other violinists. They’d initially met in high school, had wound up going to the same college and had gradually become best friends. Amanda was the one who kept telling her that she needed to get “really emotionally, soulfully involved” with someone in order to bring a deeper meaning to her music. Her friend’s theory was that until she experienced falling in love, and then losing that love, she couldn’t truly make her violin weep.
    Her answer to Amanda was that she was willing to settle on having