“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?”
“Purity,” Sarah replied, her eyes narrowing. Purity? Purity!
“So some man thinks you’re very sweet,” Matt said, smiling his warm, wonderful, I’m-a-friendly-guy smile and Sarah wanted to deck him. The man she was crazy about thought she was pure. While she daydreamed about his kisses, he saw her as someone inexperienced and naive.
For fifty cents she’d take him to her dad’s ranch where she played poker with the hands and held her own during cattle drives when the cursing was thick and biting. She would show him firsthand that she wasn’t naive, she wasn’t inexperienced and she sure as hell wasn’t pure.
“Well, you can’t leave them here,” Carmella was saying as Sarah forced herself out of her reverie. “They’ll die over the weekend.” She smiled at Sarah. “Besides don’t you want to enjoy them?”
“No,” Sarah said, surprising herself as much as everybody else around her. “I don’t want to enjoy them, because I don’t want them at all. Penny, you can have them.”
“No!”
“No!”
“No!”
Matt, Penny and Carmella said the word simultaneously. Penny said it like a woman who didn’t want the flowers of another woman, no matter how lovely.
Carmella sounded shocked that Sarah would give away such beauty. Matt said it as if she had suggested prematurely withdrawing money from her IRA.
The red numbers on Sarah’s digital clock blinked and 4:59 became 5:00. Sarah opened her bottom desk drawer, withdrew her backpack and rose from her seat. “Then leave them for the cleaning people,” she said as she left her office.
Tears stung her eyes. Her gray skirt shifted across her calves. Her fat braid bounced along her back. Damn it! She was pure. Well, not exactly pure, more like conservative. Well, not even conservative, more like comfortable. She had thick unruly hair that fell to the bottom of her back, so it wasn’t just convenient to wear it in a braid. It was comfortable. Her glasses were less effort than her contacts. And long skirts were all-covering, easy to match and the most logical thing