Love, Your Secret Admirer

Emily groaned. “I’m doomed!”

“Not really. Not if we think of something to distract him before he starts hooking you up with his senior VPs, or if we come up with a way that makes it impossible for him to play matchmaker.”

“We could just marry off everybody who’s single before my dad gets to them,” Emily said flippantly.

Carmella laughed. “Now, that would be something,” she said, but she paused. “Actually, that would be something.”

“Oh, no!” Emily said. “Don’t you start! This isn’t like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers!”

“You’re right. I don’t think we have that many matches to make.” Carmella rushed around Emily’s desk and reached into the top desk drawer for a copy of the organizational chart. The first block listed Emily’s dad, Lloyd Winters, as CEO and President of Wintersoft, Inc. Nine lines led from that box to the next row of blocks holding the names of the senior vice presidents. Listed below each of them were the names of their staff members.

For the present, Carmella concentrated on the senior vice presidents themselves. “Alan Richards and Chad Evers are already married.”

Carmella watched Emily’s eyes widen as she apparently considered being paired up with either of the fortyish, balding dads, and she laughed. “Dodged a bullet on those two, didn’t you?”

“Very funny.”

“Okay,” Carmella continued, once again pointing to the chart. “Melinda McIntosh, Senior Vice President of Human Resources, is female. So she, Chad and Alan are out. That leaves these five. Matt Burke, Grant Lawson, Brett Hamilton, Nate Leeman, and Jack Devon.” She pointed to one more block. “Reed Connors is only a vice president, but I’m pretty sure he’s about to be promoted to senior vice president, and he’s single. So I don’t think we should leave him out.”

Emily stared at the chart. “I can see why my dad’s striking now. The iron is definitely hot. Except for Jack Devon who’s so elusive even I wouldn’t know where to start with him, any one of these other guys is ripe for the picking.”

“Which means we have our work cut out for us.”

Emily peered at Carmella. “I can’t see how our marrying off six unsuspecting men is any different than my dad marrying me off.”

“It’s very different,” Carmella assured her. “Because we would be smart and careful. We wouldn’t just pair these men up with women willy-nilly. We would approach it like a business problem.”

Thinking that through, Emily sat back in her seat. “Okay. If we handled this the same way we would any business undertaking, we would have to work in earnest to find the right mates for these guys.”

Carmella smiled. “Yes, we would.”

“We would have to be fair, and look out for the best interests of all parties involved.”

“There’s no other way to do this.”

Emily tapped her pencil on her desk blotter. “The only problem is, a plan like this would take lots of time and we might not have lots of time.”

“We can buy a few weeks by having you pretend to be dating someone.”

“If I could just pick a boyfriend off a boyfriend tree, I wouldn’t be in this predicament right now.”

“You could ask Steven Hansen to help us out.”

“Steven? But he’s…”

“From New York City,” Carmella said, stopping Emily before she said what she was about to say because in this case it was irrelevant. Getting them back to the real matter at hand, she added, “I can find most of the background on our guys on the Internet, so we wouldn’t even have to leave the building to do what we need to do.”

Carmella paused and frowned thoughtfully before adding, “But convincing your dad you’re dating Steven probably won’t last beyond the charity ball at the end of the month, so I suggest we go for the obvious one first.” She pointed at a name on the organizational chart.

Emily smiled broadly. “Oh, my gosh! That’s perfect.”

Chapter One

Timing is everything.

Sarah Morris, the executive assistant to the Senior Vice President of Accounting for Wintersoft, looked up from her work when Penny Rutledge, Wintersoft’s petite blond receptionist, set a huge crystal vase containing one dozen long-stemmed white roses on her desk.

“Oh, my! They’re beautiful!”

“Open the card,” Penny said shifting from foot to foot, dancing with excitement.

Sarah pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose, then fingered the practical braid she’d woven her waist-length red hair into as she peered down at her ordinary gray suit. “They’re for me?”

“Of course they’re for you, silly! Open the card.”

The scent of roses filled the air as Sarah fumbled with the envelope. The seal finally gave and she pulled out the brightly colored rectangle and read out loud, “Your Secret Admirer.”

Penny all but swooned. “Ohh!”

“I have a secret admirer?” Sarah said, her voice confused and uncertain. She had moved from North Dakota to Boston a year ago, but didn’t get out much. The only man she knew more than casually was…

An amazing thought occurred to her and she glanced over her shoulder to the office behind her. Her boss, Matt Burke, sat at his desk, making his to-do list for the next workday because that’s what he did every day at five minutes till five. Fridays were no exception.

He diligently scribbled in his calendar, oblivious to her scrutiny, but Sarah drank in every detail of his short, spiky brown hair and handsome face. Because he was writing, she couldn’t see his eyes but knew they were a soft blue, trimmed with unusually long black lashes. More than once she had dreamily gazed into them when he was focused on something else.

It couldn’t be…

Matt wouldn’t…

“So who do you think it is?” Penny asked as she happily rearranged the flowers to make the bouquet perfect.

“I don’t know,” Sarah said, trying not to look behind her again. Working one-on-one the way she and Matt did, they knew enough intimate details of each other’s lives to throw them into the category of friends. But Matt had never shown one ounce of interest in her as a woman.

“No idea at all?” Penny said, smiling as she leaned a hip against Sarah’s desk and got comfortable. “No guy you met at a bar or museum or church on Sunday morning?”

“I don’t go to bars. People don’t usually strike up conversations with me at museums and they are even quieter in church.” Which made it highly unlikely that she would have a secret admirer. And that took her back to Matt. He was the only man who could have sent her these flowers. The question was…why?

“I heard you got roses!” Carmella Lopez said as she walked down the open corridor to Sarah’s workstation. Lloyd Winters’ executive assistant was a beautiful Hispanic woman with short, graying black hair and warm brown eyes. A fifty-something widow with no children, Carmella was also a sweet and sincere office mother hen who read romance novels. It didn’t surprise Sarah that she would be one of the first people in the office to congratulate a woman who got flowers. “Who are they from?”

Sarah glanced at Carmella. “A secret admirer.”

Matt stepped out of his office, and, as always, Sarah’s attention was immediately consumed by him. Tall and broad-shouldered, ruggedly attractive even in his dress shirt and tie, he looked more like one of the employees on Sarah’s dad’s ranch than a quiet, focused senior vice president for a software company. Sarah suspected that was why she had such a crush on him. In her mind, he combined the best of both worlds. He had the masculinity of a cowboy and the brains and conceptualizing ability of a Forbes, Ford or Gates.

His gaze flitted to the roses then swung to hers. “Well, look at this,” he said, his voice filled with that odd tone men used when they tried to be happy about something girlie, but didn’t quite know how to pull it off. Or, when they were in some way faking their response. “Somebody sent you flowers.”

It was him! Sarah thought, tamping down the unrealistic hope that he’d sent her flowers because he was interested in her. The tone of his voice was too patronizing and too brotherly. If he’d sent them, it was to cheer her up. Or—she squeezed her eyes shut then quickly opened them again before anyone noticed—because he felt sorry for her. He knew she didn’t go out on weekends. He knew she hadn’t had a date since she’d arrived in Boston.

“Yes, and aren’t they beautiful?” Carmella fingered a pristine petal. “White is for what?”