Not at all willing to hand over this Sarah to another man, Matt said, “Yeah, like flowered dresses, little white purses and lace-trimmed gloves.”
“I’m sure there are proper ladies in the South who would agree with you.” She took a step closer and smiled the smile that made Matt’s knees weak. “But I’m not like one of those ladies and I believe my secret admirer needs to see the real me.”
“And this is the real you?”
Holding his gaze, she nodded.
Matt stifled the urge to tug at his shirt collar because with her standing about a foot in front of him, smiling her confident, positive, sexy smile, the room was suddenly very warm. “You’re sure?”
She nodded again. “Carmella says it’s all about confidence and this is the most confident I’ve felt in years. If I were in a dainty dress with little white gloves I would feel like a fake.”
She shifted away from Matt so she could hit the switch to turn on her computer monitor and Matt took the opportunity to loosen his collar so he could catch his breath.
“But the plain suits weren’t me, either,” she continued. “So we experimented with a few looks until we got to this one and, voilà,” she said, facing him again. “Suddenly I felt like me.”
“Holy cow!” Sunny Robbins, paralegal to Grant Lawson, Wintersoft’s in-house counsel entered the office. Her chin-length sun-kissed brown hair had been tossed about by the September breeze and her black pantsuit was rain-splattered.
Matt quickly glanced back at Sarah. She hadn’t worn a coat or a rain hat. Yet her suit was dry and her hair was perfect.
Sunny stopped beside Sarah and ran her gaze from the top of her head to the tips of her perfectly dry, brown, high-heeled sandals.
“Holy cow!”
Sarah laughed. “Thanks. I think.”
“Oh, my ‘holy cow’ definitely deserved a thanks,” Sunny said as she rounded Sarah’s desk and tossed her purse onto her chair. “You look great.”
“I feel great! I feel terrific!”
Sunny laughed. “I would feel terrific, too, if I looked like that! What brought this on?”
Matt glanced at dry, perfectly coifed Sarah again. Something was wrong here. There was no way she got from the bus to this building without getting wet. She must have stopped somewhere and fixed herself up before stepping into the office. If he didn’t know better, Matt might think she had actually made an entrance.
His voice slow and cautious, Matt said, “Sarah has a secret admirer.”
Both of Sunny’s eyebrows rose. “Really?”
“Yeah, he sent me flowers late Friday afternoon,” Sarah said. Hearing the odd tone in Matt’s voice, she glanced at him, saw the confused expression on his face and decided that look was the final nail in the coffin. From the second she’d arrived, he’d been sputtering and arguing with her choices. Now his quiet voice and unhappy expression confirmed what she’d guessed all along. He didn’t like her new look.
The thought made her stomach churn and her knees shake like two leaves in the wind. Worse, her breath wanted to come out in quick panting gasps, but just as Carmella had taught her over the weekend, Sarah controlled all that. Because, deep down inside, she genuinely believed what she had told Matt. This was the real Sarah Morris. If Matt didn’t like the real her then she had to move on, find a guy who would like her, exactly as she was. No matter how much it hurt that it wasn’t Matt.
“I left the flowers here, Matt brought them to my apartment and we got to talking about why someone would send me flowers anonymously,” Sarah said, watching as Matt disappeared into his office. “Matt guessed that the guy wanted some kind of signal from me that I was interested in dating, and this is what Carmella, Emily and I came up with.”
Sunny shot her a skeptical look. “Matt told you that changing your look would signal the secret admirer to ask you out?”
“Yeah.”
Sunny laughed. “Just goes to show what he knows! The truth is, Sarah, secret admirers are usually friends trying to cheer you up.”
Sarah frowned. She had thought exactly that. Right from the beginning she’d decided that if Matt had sent her those flowers it was to boost her morale.
“But in your case, I think Matt took advantage of the flowers to go one step further.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” she said, pointing at Sarah. “Look at you. You look wonderful. One of your friends might have sent you the flowers, but Matt used them to get you to come out of your shell. Lots of guys are going to ask you out. He did you a huge favor.”
With every sentence Sunny spoke, tears pricked Sarah’s eyes. She finally understood. She still believed Matt had sent her the flowers, but she now knew he hadn’t done it so she would bring out her feminine side for him. It was of no consequence whether or not he liked her new look. He’d encouraged her makeover so she’d find another man.
She’d thought she and Matt were using the secret flower sender facade to protect Matt, but the truth was he might have created the secure forum of a secret admirer for her. That anonymity was the only thing keeping her from dying of embarrassment right now.
But it wasn’t doing a darned thing to protect her bruised heart. He’d never wanted her. He probably hadn’t even considered wanting her.
Matt drove to his father’s house that evening feeling as if someone had punched him. He’d spent the day watching out his office door as every woman and probably fifty percent of the men employed by Wintersoft had trickled into Sarah’s office to see her new “look.” All the women had gasped with envy. All the guys had gasped in awe. The single men had asked her out. And Matt’s teeth were now ground down to about half their size.
He pulled his SUV into his dad’s driveway and climbed out, not sure it was a good idea to keep his long-standing every-other-night dinner date with his dad. He knew he wasn’t going to be good company. Worse, he knew his dad would demand to know why.
He didn’t even get the whole way up the walk before his dad, Wayne Burke, also a CPA and probably the picture of what Matt would look like at age fifty-five, with his short brown hair, broad shoulders and blue eyes, opened the door.
“Somebody stole your fire truck,” he said, referring to the fact that when Matt was seven a neighbor kid had run off with his toy and wouldn’t return it until Matt’s dad had interfered.
“No,” Matt said, as he stepped inside the neat-as-apin foyer of the Cape Cod house, not in the mood to play this silly game with his dad.
“Just give me the name and I’ll go talk to his father, get it back for you.”
“This isn’t funny tonight, Dad.”
“I think it is. I think it’s hysterical,” Wayne said and laughed heartily to prove it. “I love it when you’re in a bad mood. Gives me a reason to poke into your personal life since you’re usually not too free with information. Here, give me your raincoat.”
Though he tried to smile and look like his usual happy-go-lucky self, the raincoat reminded Matt of seeing bone-dry Sarah walk into the office and sent his blood pressure soaring again. He could only figure that Sarah had made an entrance this morning. Given that he and Grant Lawson, Wintersoft’s legal counsel, were the only two men in that section of the office, that had to mean Sarah believed Grant had sent her those flowers, and she wanted to look picture-perfect the first time he saw her new look.
But the more Matt thought about it, the more he decided that Sarah would have to know that men like tall, handsome, suave Grant didn’t need to send women flowers anonymously.