The next morning, Arielle slithered into another of the tourniquet-tight dresses the spa had picked out and tailored for her. This one had black and red color-blocked panels, and the black band around her waist drew it in further in an optical illusion.
She hoped that she got to keep the clothes when this fake relationship was over. Rich-people clothes looked and felt entirely different than her regular clothes.
When she went to the lobby at the appointed time for the car and found the driver, it seemed that she’d beaten Mitchell downstairs, but the driver told her that Mr. Saltonstall left the hotel hours before to oversee the construction of their booth at the convention hall.
So Arielle rode to the convention center alone, looking out over the less populated, dusty streets of Las Vegas on an early Saturday morning.
Match Play’s booth had doubled since she’d last seen it in Los Angeles, but this convention hall was ten times the trade show's size in California.
Again, Mitchell had staked out prime real estate at the end of the row, visible every time the convention goers would make a turn into the next row of booths.
Not that anyone could miss their booth. The large TV at the back of the stall had morphed into a thirty-foot Jumbotron nailed to the wall above their area, where even more attractive and diverse couples swooned over meeting each other and playing golf together.
Arielle walked under the ivy arch and into the booth.
Mitchell was talking to one of the technicians, showing her his phone and then pointing to the QR code on the banner. The tech pointed to his phone and then held up her own to take a picture of the banner, then showed him. Mitchell shrugged.
Arielle waved at them.
Mitchell noticed her and then blinked and seemed to mouth, “Wow.” He hurried over, holding his arms out for a hug and saying, “Arielle, light of my life, how are you today?”
His lips brushed Arielle’s cheek, and her whole body vibrated from the impact.
Okay, this seemed overly familiar for a business working relationship, but she flopped her arms around him, clapping at his back. “Fine, snookums. How was Connecticut last week?”
He whispered in her ear, “The reporters are already in attendance. An ardent handshake would look suspicious.”
“Oh. Okay.” Yes, people who were together hugged when they saw each other. Yeah, okay.
Over Mitchell’s shoulder, Arielle saw the all-business reporter, Monica Matthews, walk into the Carsten Ping booth beside theirs.
Mitchell untangled his arms from around her and began to straighten.
Arielle let him go and perused the booth and convention hall. “The Match Play booth is bigger than last week.”
“In-person sign-ups went spectacularly well in LA. The ROI was double any of our other advertising. Even if our rate dropped to only fifty percent as effective as last week, the in-person booth is still the best promo we have.”
Hawking the app still felt sleazy to Arielle. “If it’s such a good product, we shouldn’t have to work so hard to get people to sign up.”
“The Match Play dating app isn’t a magic baseball diamond constructed in an Iowa cornfield. Just because you build it doesn’t mean they’ll come.”
“But this kind of hard sell seems weird.” By weird, she meant icky, squicky, and downright sleazy. And dishonest.
“Oh, this isn’t a hard sell,” Mitchell said, laughing. “A hard sell is when you tell a car dealer that you need a car to drive to work the next day or you’ll be fired, and the salesman tells you he’ll call all the other car dealerships in town and tell them not to sell you a car if you don’t buy his at the inflated price he’s offering.”
Arielle turned back to him. “What? That can’t be legal.”
Mitchell shrugged. “The police wouldn’t prosecute it because it would be your word against his, and that’s pretty much the definition of what’s legal.”
That was so slimy, so dishonest, that Arielle’s stomach clenched. “Is that what a company of yours does?”
Mitchell’s upper lip wrinkled. “God, no. It was happening in a string of dealerships outside of Phoenix that Last Chance, my venture cap firm, had purchased. We saw it on the video feed from the salespeople’s rooms. We were trying to figure out why one salesman had higher sales but horrendous after-sale stats, including that people never returned to the dealership for service or their next vehicle. Returning and repeat customers are nothing but profit, so he was selling high but destroying the dealership in the long run.”
Revulsion shuddered through her. “That’s terrible.”
Mitchell nodded. “We fired him the next day, and I called the other dealerships in town and informed them of the ring they had been operating that was destroying their reputations and businesses. It took a month to weed them out and two years to begin to recover their reputations.”
“That is absolutely disgusting,” she said.
“It was, but that’s not what we’re doing here. Match Play is a good app. There are many single people out there who want to find someone, but everyone they meet doesn’t jibe with them because they have different lifestyles. That’s why there are dating apps like Christian Mingle or Only Farmers, because people want to winnow down the people they’re looking at to someone who understands them. Golf isn’t just a sport, you know. It’s a way of life. It’s practically a cult. Golfers have their own clubs, stores, and lingo. Finding someone who understands that is hard, and we’re just trying to make it easier for golfers to meet and fall in love.”
Arielle paused, then said, “That seems logical.”
“We’re not promising miracles,” Mitchell said. “We’re providing a service, a good one, one that will help them and that they’ve been looking for, even if they don’t know it yet. Haven’t you ever been walking through Target and found a thing, maybe a kitchen thing, that you didn’t know you needed but you’d been waiting for your whole life?”
She nodded. “Air fryer.”
“Right? And your life is so much better since you found it. That’s what we’re doing here, showing people a good thing that might be something they want, and they’re deciding whether or not they want it. Really, that’s what all advertising is. It’s having a good thing and telling people about it because they need it, whether they know about the thing or not.”
“But my dad never advertised Match Play when it was just a tee-times app,” she said.
He shrugged. “Okay, well, in the two weeks since the new Match Play has been out of beta testing, we’ve already surpassed the highest number of subscribers that Match Play had when it was a tee-times app.”
Zings of anger tremored through her. “Are you saying that’s what my dad did wrong with Match Play? That he should have hawked it at trade shows and on TV like counterfeit purses?”
Mitchell’s face went stone still. “I did not mention your father. It was merely a comparison of the number of memberships and the effect of advertising. I’m telling you about how business works, all business, not just this app or this company. If you can’t advertise your product, you can’t grow.”
“Okay.” Arielle cast around her brain for a different topic, any other damn topic. “Anyway, the booth is sure bigger than last week. It will certainly draw attention.”
Mitchell nodded tightly. “Big day, today. This conference is one of the biggest ones of the year. Our new sign-up goal is five times last week’s, but we’ll probably have ten times the foot traffic. We should be all right if we stick to the scripts and the game plan.”
She glanced over the convention center’s enormous space, several football fields’ worth of area, filled with hundreds of booths and display areas, and the couple of hundred people strolling in the aisles.
That wasn’t enough people. “It doesn’t look very crowded.”
Mitchell’s shoulders relaxed, and he chuckled. “Only vendors, press, and VIPs are allowed before the official opening time. The doors should open right about—”
Slams of metal on drywall echoed from the walls to the steel-webbed ceiling far above, and screams echoed as thousands of people firehosed through the doors and into the space, flooding the aisles between the booths.
“—now,” Mitchell chuckled.
The swell of golfers splashed through the convention and rolled up to the Match Play booth.
“Oh, wow,” Arielle said.
Mitchell nodded. “We have twenty sign-up kiosks, and I’ve brought twice as many techs as last week. Just pass them through the pipeline. We’re on.”
They were indeed on.
Wave after wave of golfers washed into the booth, and Arielle found herself in the center of rings of people, all of them listening to what she had to say about the app and asking her about her relationship with Mitchell Saltonstall.
That was the part of the dishonesty that really bothered Arielle. They hadn’t met in the beta test of Match Play. They’d met because he’d been lying about not being single when he was trying to advertise Match Play at that press conference. Their advertising was deceitful because it had been based on something that had never happened.
And her job was to attest that it had.
Arielle was cagey to the best of her ability, so her answers sounded stilted.
She smiled at the women who asked about them. “Oh, yes, there are many golfers like Mitchell Saltonstall on the Match Play app.” Meaning people who golfed.
Although, there were scads of college-age to thirtysomething guys at this particular convention, and half the guys in their booth seemed to have a lot of hair and the lean physique of athletic youth.
“When I met Mitchell, he swept me off my feet,” Arielle told another woman. Nearly literally, because her feet had slid out from underneath her when he’d bent her backward and kissed her because the carpeting at the office was grungy.
She answered questions. “My handicap? Probably the waggle at the top of my backswing.” That always got a laugh. “It’s around fifteen. I really don’t keep track that much because I don’t play tournaments.” That was relatively true. Her father had taught her to golf when she was a teenager, although she didn’t do it much.
And she answered questions from the guys. “Lots of women are on the app. I’ve personally signed up hundreds just last weekend and this weekend.” That was the truth, and about a third of the people in their booth appeared female.
By the time the afternoon rolled around, Arielle had recited every version of sales pitches on those note cards she’d memorized the week before, and she and Mitchell were back in their rhythm of pinch-hitting prospects back and forth whenever someone seemed balky.
Lines formed behind sign-up kiosks, and people crowded around the hanging banners with the QR codes so they could sign up directly from their phones. The tech-help girls retreated behind their desks because they were being swarmed by Luddite golfers wanting to know if they were signing up correctly.
Arielle had greatly underestimated the number of lonely golfers out there who might be interested in a golf-specific dating app, but it seemed like Mitchell hadn’t.
At the three o’clock press conference, the two reporters who seemed to be following them from press conference to trade show to the convention had again placed themselves directly in front of the podium.
Arielle stood half a step behind Mitchell, her hands clasped and smiling at him as if she didn’t want a shower to wash the slime off herself after a full day of slinging the app. Her body vibrated with emotional exhaustion from swimming upstream against her need to be honest so hard and for so long.
The businesslike reporter stood and lasered a stare at the two of them. “Monica Matthews of Golfers Digest. Mitchell, your story of how you met Arielle during the beta test seems to be part of the mythology of Match Play. Are your clients finding love at the same rate?”
Jeez, Louise, how the hell was Mitchell going to answer that? As far as she knew, Match Play wasn’t even tracking the outcomes of their “matches.” They analyzed sign-ups and money, not whether the app made people’s lives better.
Another thing that was patently dishonest. Huh.
Mitchell grinned at the reporter as Arielle looked up at him. He said, “The beta test ran for five weeks, while the open enrollment has only been available for less than two. At this point, we are not collecting data on long-term relationships because all the relationships we’ve matched are less than two weeks old.”
Laughter ran through the crowd.
The other reporter stood. Her blond ringlets were bound in a ponytail that day. “But you and Arielle Carter are still together, right? The whole golf world is rooting for you.”
The metaphorical slime on Arielle’s skin thickened. Pretending to be in a relationship for the cameras was not the same thing as advertising. It was dishonest. It was crass.
It was going to fund her parents’ retirement.
Still, rivulets of disgust trickled over her scalp and down her back under the skin-tight dress Mitchell had bought for her when he’d turned her into someone he might date.
Even her clothes and makeup weren’t who she was.
Mitchell held out his hand to Arielle, and she grabbed it. His fingers curled around hers. “Of course! We’re as happy as two niblicks in a Sunday bag.”
The reporters laughed more loudly at the silly golf reference, and Mitchell dropped Ariel’s hand and gathered her against his side.
Arielle placed her hand on his shoulder because she couldn’t figure out where else to put it. Leaving her arm dangling in front of her would’ve been worse.
The blond reporter lifted her camera and trained the lens on them, smiling and bobbing her head as if anticipating something really good to take a picture of.
The Golfers Digest reporter also raised her camera, but her smile lifted one side of her mouth more than the other, and her squint suggested sarcasm.
Oh, the reporters wanted them to kiss.
Mitchell turned and ducked his head, tilting to the right side this time, and Arielle raised up on her toes to kiss him.
The kiss wasn’t as soul-shattering as when he’d shoved her up against the wall in her hotel room the week before, but damn, it was a nice kiss. A great kiss, even. His lips were soft against her mouth, caressing her lips as if he were teasing a reaction out of her, and her body responded.
Arielle wasn’t sure when she decided to run her hand up his muscular shoulder to the side of his neck, but it was when the reporters’ cameras were clicking away wildly that she decided to grab his butt.
The tiny puff of air against her lips as he inhaled in surprise made it all worth it.