After they had both sighed over the delicious frozen concoction, Linda leaned back in her chair, looking content. “You’re not going to want to leave, are you? Really?”

“Ocky is counting on me and eventually, I have to pay my way, so a job helps.”

“It’s not a job—you’re one of the owners.”

“True.” Marissa sipped from her drink again, enjoying the sharp chill as she swallowed. “Even more reason to go home. I’ve a lot invested in Finders Keepers.” Most of the money she’d inherited from her grandmother, as a matter of fact.

“How exactly does a dating service work? I mean, I guess you use a questionnaire.”

“It’s nearly seven hundred questions in fifteen categories. Every year we go through it and fine tune, add more, look at the failures and decide which questions aren’t giving us the data we need.”

“Wow.” Linda stirred her drink. “And how successful are the matches you come up with?”

Marissa knew she was flushed with pride. “Nearly all our matches are still dating after three months and of those that date for a year, better than seventy percent are still together two years later. Since the divorce rate is half . . .”

“The idea of finding the perfect mate through a computer is just not something I thought would work. I prefer the old-fashioned method: search, trap and carry back to my cave. What’s the secret?”

The brown eyes were dancing with laughter and Marissa realized she would not mind in the least being Linda’s prey. She shook herself out of an NC-17 reverie and decided that Linda’s smirk meant she could read Marissa’s mind.

Fighting a blush, she said, “That’s where my stat analysis came in. It’s obvious that staying together is the outcome of the right energy and a lot of positive factors. But relationships don’t end usually because two people with positive feelings toward each other simply no longer want to be together. They end because two people want to be apart.”

“Like my parents? They lived in separate states until my father died six years ago.”

“Sounds like mine were equally happy. The divorce was bitter and unhappy.” Marissa shrugged. “The biggest reason couples break up is contempt of one person for the other, or mutual contempt. They could be perfectly matched in every other way but if there are traits that would lead to contempt, they won’t stay together.”

“You lost me.” Linda licked a dollop of banana from the end of her straw. “Like what?”

Dragging her gaze from the tip of Linda’s tongue, Marissa took refuge in familiar patter about her work. “Say one person has a very high standard for honesty and can’t abide even the smallest bending of the truth. And the other person thinks social white lies and the occasional fib to get out of a sticky situation is okay. They could be perfect for each other and yet eventually, the highly truthful person is likely to develop contempt for the other person’s ethics, especially if a situation comes along where their different styles come into conflict.”