Chapter 15

Wyatt

She fell asleep wrapped up in my arms, and the thought crossed my mind that I was the luckiest man in the world. I couldn’t remember a time when I had a woman wrapped up with me in bed, and I wasn’t thinking about how to get away from her. Not necessarily physically away from the woman, but emotionally how I could cut things off before they grew.

I had zero of those thoughts as we lay there in Dakota’s bed. It was strange and totally unusual for me, but I wasn’t uncomfortable with the feelings. Instead, I pulled her naked body even closer to mine as I fell asleep there in her apartment. A feeling of contentment washed over me as I realized I had found a woman who electrified every area of my being.

The morning came quicker than I had hoped for, and I considered hopping into her shower before taking off for the day. As I placed my feet on the ground, I saw a message come through on her phone as it sat on the night stand next to the bed. It was from Emma, and what it said put a chill through me that I couldn’t ignore.

---Did he fall for it? Did you seduce him with your lies? lol.---

My heart throbbed at the words I had just read. Nothing could have prepared me. I had let my guard down and believed that this woman and I weren’t meant to be, but it was clearly some sort of game on her part.

I grabbed my things, threw my clothes back on and let myself out of the apartment without a single word to her. There was no explanation needed. Emma’s text had been more than enough to tip me off about the games these two women were playing. I tried to call Merrick as I left the apartment, but he didn’t answer. I had to warn him that Emma and Dakota were just scam artists and had been playing a game with us all along. It was going to piss Merrick off, but it was better that we found out this early on than it would have been to actually develop feelings for these women.

For the rest of the day, I tried to call Merrick a few times, and the phone always went to voicemail. I wasn’t about to leave a message with everything I needed to tell him, so I waited until he was finished with his day and tried one last time before I crawled into bed.

It was the first Saturday night in a very long time that I hadn’t been out, but there wasn’t enough energy in me to try to find a woman that night. All I wanted to do was talk with Merrick and warn him about what these women were trying to do.

Luckily, Dakota didn’t have my phone number, so I didn’t have to worry about her calling me and trying to pretend like nothing had happened. During our date we had laughed about her losing the business card I gave her; the story had seemed so sincere, but now I suspected it was just part of her larger plan, and that she hadn’t really lost it at all. I expected her to call at any moment and was actually surprised that she hadn’t. Sure she said she didn’t have my phone number, but I just couldn’t believe anything she had to say.

Women had tried to play games with me before, but I had never fully believed them. I was skeptical and hadn’t fallen for them like I felt I had fallen for Dakota. She genuinely seemed like a good woman to me, and it still baffled me that I didn’t see any of this coming at all. I trusted her. I liked her. I felt like we had a connection like something I had never felt before, but she clearly had some sort of ulterior motives, and I wasn’t going to waste my time playing any of those sorts of gamesWhen Merrick finally called me back at almost midnight, I was totally and emotionally drained from the day. I could hear a woman in the background laughing, though and wondered if he had just spent the day wrapped up in the lies of Emma. I still wasn’t sure I was ready to believe it though, something was off, something didn’t feel right.

“Hey man, is someone there?”

“Don’t you wish you knew,” he joked.

“I’ve got some news about Dakota and Emma I need to tell you. Can you talk?” I asked as I tried to be as vague as possible.

“Man, I’m busy tonight. Let’s talk at the investment club tomorrow. I’ll be there; I promise,” Merrick said as he hung up the phone.

I didn’t sleep that night. My brain kept seeing Dakota’s face and how sweet her smile was. She didn’t look like a con artist to me, not that I was one hundred percent sure what a con artist should look like. But she certainly didn’t look like what I thought one would appear to be.

She was sweet and seemed so genuine. My internal gut was normally right about people much more than it was wrong, and I couldn’t reconcile the text message I had seen with the feelings I had when I was around her.

My mind didn’t rest at all that night, and I was tired and agitated by the whole situation by the time morning came. How dare Dakota and her friend try to scam us! Sure, we were wealthy, and we were men, but we hadn’t done a thing to them at all to deserve such a heartless scam.

As I prepared to go to the investment club, I tried to calm my agitation and anger, but my efforts were fruitless. I just needed to talk with Merrick and warn him of what I had seen. He had to know that he was also a target, and we couldn’t just sit back and let these women manipulate.

I also really wanted to talk with Ren about his app. It was obviously corrupted if Dakota and her friend had figured it out, but as the thought entered my head, I realized that Dakota could have set herself up as my perfect match. Perhaps Ren’s algorithms weren’t wrong, and the one hundred percent match wasn’t some weird fluke. If a scam artist wanted to match up, she wasn’t going to risk a less than perfect match.

“Ren, I’ve got to talk to you,” I said urgently as I arrived for our investment club before everyone else.

“Sure, how’d your date go?”

“It was a mess. I think she rigged the system to be my match.”

Ren laughed at first. I could tell he was thinking that I was joking or something like that, but I definitely wasn’t joking.

“No one’s been in the coding. I would know since I’ve been messing with it trying to fix the errors.”

“Seriously Ren, she didn’t match with me. I saw a text from her friend asking if I fell for it; if she had seduced me with her lies. She’s gaming your game, Ren. You’ve got to look into it.

“It’s not really a program like that Wyatt. Even someone who knows programming in and out can’t tell this app what to do. It’s artificial intelligence, remember. The game is analyzing dating and making its own decisions.”

I had to reassess. If Dakota were messing with me, then she would have had to get information about my answers and pick hers to match. Maybe she hadn’t been after me, specifically. Maybe any chump that she matched with would have been good enough for her. I had no idea.

“What’s up; what’s up,” Dean and Luke said as they walked into the room full of energy.

Their energy quickly dissipated as they realized Ren and I were in the midst of a deep conversation. We both glanced at the men somberly as we all sat down for the meeting.

“What the hell is wrong with you two?” Luke asked in his usual upbeat tone.

“Nothing, let’s just get started,” I said in defeat.

I couldn’t figure out the whole Dakota mess at that moment. Instead, I decided we should just continue our meeting and finish up the decisions we had to make on our investments so I could get back to figuring out my own life.

“Aren’t you going to wait for me?” Merrick said loudly as he and Emma walked into the meeting. “Hey guys, this is my lady friend Emma. She’s going to hang out for a minute while we do our meeting.”

“Hi guys,” Emma said, smiling.

She didn’t look like a cold-hearted scam artist, but then again neither did Dakota. That was probably why they were so damn good at what they did.

“Merrick, I need to talk to you,” I demanded.

He saw the serious look in my eye and whispered something to Emma before following me into the other room. I didn’t know where to start or what to say next, but I knew he was my friend, and I needed to get him away from this woman who was scamming him.

“She’s a scam artist,” I said as I pointed to Emma in the other room. “She and her friend Dakota have been lying and setting this whole thing up.”

He didn’t respond like I had thought he would. I expected he would be angry or concerned at least, but instead, he just looked out into the other room and smiled at Emma.

“She’s not a scam artist. I know that for a fact.”

“How do you know? You can’t know that for a fact. We hardly know them at all. I saw a text from Emma to Dakota that asked if I had fallen for it and if she had seduced me with her lies. They are scammers, Merrick.”

I expected an argument. Some sort of fight from Merrick, but he just walked out of the room. I watched as he gently grabbed Emma by the hand and brought her into the room to talk to me.

“Tell him about the text,” he said with a smile.

She looked confused and then laughed a little. Merrick was right; she didn’t seem like a scam artist at all.

“I was telling Merrick about how nervous Dakota was to meet you and have our date. I had told her she needed to lie to herself and pretend she was seductive. If she believed she was sexy, you would. So this morning, Merrick and I typed a message to her to tease her about it. It wasn’t about lying to you. It was about her and her own insecurities.”

“You knew about this?” I asked Merrick.

“It was my idea to see how you two had gotten along.”

“Why didn’t you answer my calls all day or tell me this last night?” I asked angrily.

“Emma’s phone died, and I decided to turn mine off too so we could enjoy the day together. We were getting to know one another, and I didn’t want to take away from that. I didn’t think there was anything wrong, but clearly you’re worked up about all this.”

“Yeah, he’s taking it worse than Dakota.” Emma laughed.

“What did Dakota say?” I asked.

“Oh, this morning she said something about you were a lying jerk and exactly why she didn’t trust men.”

Her words hit me hard. Had I really just used my own suspicious nature to turn a sweet girl against me? What about the app and all the meetings? Were they actually set up because we were the perfect match for one another? I felt sick.

“So basically, I just had the best date and evening with a woman and I up and left her lying there this morning without a word.”

“Sounds like you’ve made yourself quite the mess.” Merrick gave a laugh.

“She’s visiting her grandma in New Jersey, and I think she’s going to be there all day. Do you want to go talk to her?” Emma asked.

“I better. Where’s grandma at? St. Mary’s?”

“Yeah, how’d you know?”

“I’ve volunteered helping with investments and such out there. Great place; I’ll head right out. Should I call her first?” I asked.

“No use. Just go talk to her. It will be best.”

“I’ll go after the investment club.”

“No, you’ll go now. I can handle this,” Dean said as he butted in. “You need a little love in your life.”

“Thanks, man,” I said as I turned to leave. “I’m sorry I thought you were a scam artist, Emma. You’re a nice girl.”

“Oh, I’m not a nice girl.” She laughed as she reached over and grabbed Merrick’s cock.

The surprised look on his face was priceless.

On my way to New Jersey, I tried to think about how on earth I could apologize for the level of jerk I had been. I felt justified in my feelings after I had read that text message and really couldn’t imagine any logical reason for Emma to have said what she did; right up until Emma explained the situation.

My willingness to jump to conclusions wasn’t my best quality; that was for sure. The whole dating app was a disaster, and I still didn’t know if it had really been what brought us together or if we had brought ourselves together through fate, but I knew I had to apologize for what I had done.

\

I walked into the nursing home and didn’t see Dakota at all. There were dozens of men and women sitting at tables throughout the main room, but I couldn’t see Dakota anywhere. I did see my good friend Luanne who I had helped with her investments the previous fall. So I sat down to talk to her for a minute while I waited to see if Dakota showed up.

“Grandma Lou, how are you?” I said as I hugged her.

She wouldn’t accept any other greeting than a giant hug. It wasn’t normally how I greeted people, but she was a kind woman, and I was happy to oblige her request.

“I’m doing wonderfully. Your investment advice helped me a lot you know. I’m almost a rich woman.”

We both laughed. Luanne wasn’t rich by any means, but I hoped that my investment help had stabilized her retirement. Her goal was to earn enough interest to pay for her day to day living and have a little bit of a return that could be compounded for her family. We were able to accomplish that, and she had been very happy with the changes we made.

“Pretty soon I’ll be coming to you for investment advice,” I teased.

“I know a little building downtown that needs a new buyer. You should buy it and make it into something fabulous.”

“Sounds like a good option. Where’s it at?”

“What are you doing here!” I heard a woman say.

Slowly I turned around and it took me a moment to realize that it was Dakota standing over Luanne.

“Hi, Dakota,” I managed to say.

“Grandma Lou, do you know him?”

“Yes dear, this is my friend, Wyatt Edwards from Stanley and Associates. He’s been helping me with my investments,” Luanne said with a big smile. “He’s making me rich so I can give you all my money when I die.”

“I don’t know what’s going on here, but you need to leave,” Dakota said as tears started to well up. “This is my grandma; don’t play games with her. She’s all I have.”

I saw the emotion in her eyes, and I wanted to push her to listen to me, but I also didn’t want to hurt her. I had clearly already done enough to hurt Dakota, and the last thing I wanted was to make it worse.

“I’ll leave,” I said as I hugged Luanne and stood up to leave.