by Maisey Yates
But then, she also didn’t enforce one. Didn’t take one. She supposed she couldn’t really blame the small-town location when the likely culprit of the entire situation was her.
“Place whatever ad you need to,” he said, his tone abrupt. “When you meet the right woman, you’ll know.”
“I’ll know,” she echoed lamely.
“Yes. Nobody knows me better than you do, Poppy. I have faith that you’ll pick the right wife for me.”
With those awful words still ringing in the room, Isaiah left her there, sitting at her desk, feeling numb and ill used.
The fact of the matter was, she probably could pick him a perfect wife. Someone who would facilitate his life, and give him space when he needed it. Someone who was beautiful and fabulous in bed.
Yes, she knew exactly what Isaiah Grayson would think made a woman the perfect wife for him.
The sad thing was, Poppy didn’t possess very many of those qualities herself.
And what she so desperately wanted was for Isaiah’s perfect wife to be her.
But dreams were for other women. They always had been. Which meant some other woman was going to end up with Poppy’s dream.
While she played matchmaker to the whole affair.
Two
“I put an ad in the paper.”
“For?” Isaiah’s brother Joshua looked up from his computer and stared at him like he was waiting to hear the answers to the mystery of the universe.
Joshua, Isaiah and their younger sister, Faith, were sitting in the waiting area of their office, enjoying their early-morning coffee. Or maybe enjoying was overstating it. The three of them were trying to find a state of consciousness.
“A wife.”
Faith spat her coffee back into her cup. “What?”
“I placed an ad in the paper to help me find a wife,” he repeated.
Honestly, he couldn’t understand why she was having such a large reaction to the news. After all, that was how Joshua had found his wife, Danielle.
“You can’t be serious,” Joshua said.
“I expected you of all people to be supportive.”
“Why me?”
“Because that’s how you met Danielle. Or you have you forgotten?”
“I have not forgotten how I met my wife. However, I didn’t put an ad out there seriously thinking I was going to find someone to marry. I was trying to prove to dad that his ad was a stupid idea.”
“But it turned out it wasn’t a stupid idea,” Isaiah said. “I want to get married. I figured this was a hassle-free way of finding a wife.”
Faith stared at him, dumbfounded. “You can’t be serious.”
“I’m serious.”
The door to the office opened, and Poppy walked in wearing a cheerful, polka-dotted dress, her dark hair swept back into a bun, a few curls around her face.
“Please tell me my brother is joking,” Faith said. “And that he didn’t actually put an ad in the paper to find a wife.”
Poppy looked from him back to Faith. “He doesn’t joke, you know that.”
“And you know that he put an ad in the paper for a wife?” Joshua asked.
“Of course I know,” Poppy responded. “Who do you think is doing the interviews?”
That earned him two slack-jawed looks.
“Who else is going to do it?” Isaiah asked.
“You’re not even doing the interview for your own wife?” Faith asked.
“I trust Poppy implicitly. If I didn’t, she wouldn’t be my assistant.”
“Of all the... You are insane.” Faith stormed out of the room. Joshua continued to sit and sip his coffee.
“No comment?” Isaiah asked.
“Oh, I have plenty. But I know you well enough to know that making them won’t change a damn thing. So I’m keeping my thoughts to myself. However,” he said, collecting his computer and his coffee, “I do have to go to work now.”
That left both Isaiah and Poppy standing in the room by themselves. She wasn’t looking at him; she was staring off down the hall, her expression unreadable. She had a delicate profile, dark, sweeping eyelashes and a fascinating curve to her lips. Her neck was long and elegant, and the way her dress shaped around her full breasts was definitely a pleasing sight.
He clenched his teeth. He didn’t make a habit of looking at Poppy that way. But she was pretty. He had always thought so.
Even back when he’d been with Rosalind he’d thought there was something...indefinable about Poppy. Special.
She made him feel... He didn’t know. A little more grounded. Or maybe it was just because she treated him differently than most people did.
Either way, she was irreplaceable to him. In the running of his business, Poppy was his barometer. The way he got the best read on a situation. She did his detail work flawlessly. Handled everything he didn’t like so he could focus on what he was good at.
She was absolutely, 100 percent, the most important asset to him at the company.
He would have to tell her that sometime. Maybe buy her another pearl necklace. Though, last time he’d done that she had gotten angry at him. But she wore it. She was wearing it today, in fact.
“They’re right,” she said finally.
“About?”
“The fact that you’re insane.”
“I think I’m sane enough.”
“Of course you do. Actually—” she let out a long, slow breath “—I don’t think you’re insane. But, I don’t think this is a good idea.”
“Why?”
“This is really how you want to find a wife? In a way that’s this...impersonal?”
“What are my other options? I have to meet someone new, go through the process of dating... She’ll expect a courtship of some kind. We’ll have to figure out what we have in common, what we don’t have in common. This way, it’s all out in the open. That’s more straightforward.”
“Maybe you deserve better than that,” she said, her tone uncharacteristically gentle.
“Maybe this is better for me.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know about that.”
“When it comes to matters of business, there’s no one I trust more than you. But you’re going to have to trust that I know what will work best in my own life.”
“It’s not what I want for you.”
A strange current arced between them when she spoke those words, a spark in her brown eyes catching on something inside him.
“I appreciate your concern.”
“Yes,” she echoed. “My concern.”
“We have work to do. And you have wife applications to sort through.”
“Right,” she said.
“Preference will be given to blondes,” he said.
Poppy blinked and then reached up slowly, touching her own dark hair. “Of course.”
And then she turned and walked out of the room.
* * *
Isaiah hadn’t expected to receive quite so many responses to his ad. Perhaps, in the end, Poppy had been right about her particular tactic with the wording. It had certainly netted what felt to him to be a record number of responses.
Though he didn’t actually know how many women had responded to his brother’s personal ad.
He felt only slightly competitive about it, seeing as it would be almost impossible to do a direct comparison between his and Joshua’s efforts. Their father had placed an ad first, making Joshua sound undoubtedly even nicer than Poppy had made Isaiah sound.
Thereafter, Joshua had placed his own ad, which had offered a fake marriage and hefty compensation.
Isaiah imagined that a great many more women would respond to that.
But he didn’t need quantity. He just needed quality.
And he believed that existed.
It had occurred to him at Joshua and Danielle’s wedding that there was no reason a match couldn’t be like math. He believed in marriage; it was romance he had gone off of.
Or rather, the kind of romance he had experience with.
Obviously, he couldn’t dispute the existence of love. His parents were in love, after all. Forty years of marriage hadn’t seemed to do anything to dampen that. But then, he was not like his mother. And he wasn’t like his father. Both of them were warm people. Compassionate. And those things seemed to come easily to them.
Isaiah was a black-and-white man living in a world filled with shades of gray. He didn’t care for those shades, and he didn’t like to acknowledge them.
But he wasn’t an irrational man. Not at all.
Yet he’d been irrational once. Five years with Rosalind and they had been the best of his life. At least, he had thought so at the time.
Then she had betrayed him, and nearly destroyed everything.
Or rather, he had.
Which was all he had needed to learn about what happened to him and his instincts under the influence of love.
He’d been in his twenties then, and it had been easy to ignore the idea that his particular set of practices when it came to relationships meant he would be spending his life without a partner. But now he was in his thirties, and that reality was much more difficult to ignore. When he’d had to think about the future, he hadn’t liked the idea of what he was signing himself up for.
So, he had decided to change it. That was the logical thing to do when you found yourself unhappy with where you were, after all. A change of circumstances was not beyond his reach. And so, he was reaching out to grab it.
Which was why Poppy was currently on interview number three with one of the respondents to his ad. Isaiah had insisted that anyone responding to the ad come directly to Copper Ridge to be interviewed. Anyone who didn’t take the ad seriously enough to put in a personal appearance was not worthy of consideration, in his opinion.
He leaned back in his chair, looking at the neat expanse of desk in front of him. Everything was in its place in his office, as it always was. As it should be. And soon, everything in his personal life would be in place too.
Across the hall, the door to Poppy’s office opened and a tall, willowy blonde walked out. She was definitely his type in the physical sense, and the physical mattered quite a bit. Emotionally, he might be a bit detached, but physically, everything was functioning. Quite well, thank you.
In his marriage-math equation, sex was an important factor.
He intended to be faithful to his wife. There was really no point in making a lifelong commitment without fidelity.
Because of that, it stood to reason that he should make sure he chose in accordance with his typical physical type.
By the time he finished that thought process the woman was gone, and Poppy appeared a moment later. She was glaring down the hall, looking both disheveled and generally irritated. He had learned to recognize her moods with unerring accuracy. Mostly because it was often a matter of survival. Poppy was one of the few people on earth who wasn’t intimidated by him. He should be annoyed by that. She was his employee, and ought to be a bit more deferential than she was.
He didn’t want her to be, though. He liked Poppy. And that was a rarity in his world. He didn’t like very many people. Because most people were idiots.
But not her.
Though, she looked a little bit like she wanted to kill him at the moment. When her stormy, dark eyes connected with his across the space, he had the fleeting thought that a lesser man would jump up and run away, leaving his boots behind.
Isaiah was not that man.
He was happy to meet her. Steel-capped toe to pointy-toed stiletto.
“She was stupid,” Poppy pronounced.
He lifted a brow. “Did you give her an IQ test?”
“I’m not talking about her intelligence,” Poppy said, looking fierce. “Though, the argument could be made that any woman responding to this ad...”
“Are you about to cast aspersions on my desirability?”
“No,” she said. “I cast those last week, if you recall. It would just be tiresome to cast them again.”
“Why is she stupid?” he pressed.
“Because she has no real concept of what you need. You’re a busy man, and you live in a rural...area. You’re not going to be taking her out to galas every night. And I know she thought that because you’re a rich man galas were going to be part of the deal. But I explained to her that you only go to a certain number of business-oriented events a year, and that you do so grudgingly. That anyone hanging on your arm at such a thing would need to be polished, smiling, and, in general, making up for you.”
He spent a moment deciding if he should be offended by that or not. He decided not to be. Because she was right. He knew his strengths and his limitations.
“She didn’t seem very happy about those details. And that is why I’m saying she’s stupid. She wants to take this...job, essentially. A job that is a life sentence. And she wants it to be about her.”
He frowned. “Obviously, this marriage is not going to be completely about me. I am talking about a marriage and not a position at the company.” Though, he supposed he could see why she would be thinking in those terms. He had placed an ad with strict requirements. And he supposed, as a starting point, it was about him.
“Is that true, Isaiah? Because I kind of doubt it. You don’t want a woman who’s going to inconvenience you.”
“I’m not buying a car,” he said.
“Aren’t you?” She narrowed her eyes, her expression mean.
“No. I realize that.”
“You’re basically making an arranged marriage for yourself.”
“Consider it advanced online dating,” he said. “With a more direct goal.”
“You’re having your assistant choose a wife for you.” She enunciated each word as if he didn’t understand what he’d asked of her.
Her delicate brows locked together, and her mouth pulled into a pout. Though, she would undoubtedly punch him if he called it a pout.
In a physical sense, Poppy was not his type at all. She was not tall, or particularly leggy, though she did often wear high heels with her 1950s housewife dresses. She was petite, but still curvy, her hair dark and curly, and usually pulled back in a loose, artfully pinned bun that allowed tendrils to slowly make their escape over the course of the day.
She was pretty, in spite of the fact that she wasn’t the type of woman he would normally gravitate toward.
He wasn’t sure why he was just now noticing that. Perhaps it was the way the light was filtering through the window now. Falling across her delicately curved face. Her mahogany skin with a bit of rose color bleeding across her cheeks. In this instance, he had a feeling the color was because she was angry. But, it was lovely nonetheless.
Her lips were full—pouty or not—and the same rose color as her cheeks.
“I don’t understand your point,” he said, stopping his visual perusal of her.
“I’m just saying you’re taking about as much of a personal interest in finding a wife as someone who was buying a car.”
He did not point out that if he were buying a car, he would take it for a test drive, and that he had not suggested doing anything half so crass with any of the women who’d come to be interviewed.
“How many more women are you seeing today?” he asked, deciding to bypass her little show of indignation.
“Three more,” she said.
There was something in the set of her jaw, in the rather stubborn, mulish look on her face that almost made him want to ask a question about what was bothering her.
But only almost.
“Has my sister sent through cost estimates for her latest design?” he asked.
> Poppy blinked. “What?”
“Faith. Has she sent through her cost estimates? I’m going to end up correcting them anyway, but I like to see what she starts with.”
“I’m well aware of the process, Isaiah,” Poppy said. “I’m just surprised that you moved on from wife interviews to your sister’s next design.”
“Why would you be surprised by that? The designs are important. They are, in fact, why I am a billionaire.”
“Yes. I know,” Poppy said. “Faith’s talent is a big reason why we’re all doing well. Believe me, I respect the work. However, the subject change seems a bit abrupt.”
“It is a workday.”
Deep brown eyes narrowed in his direction. “You’re really something else, do you know that?”
He did. He always had. The fact that she felt the need to question him on it didn’t make much sense to him.
“Yes,” he responded.
Poppy stamped.
She stamped her high-heel-clad foot like they were in a black-and-white movie.
“No, she hasn’t sent it through,” Poppy said.
“You just stomped your foot at me.”
She flung her arms wide. “Because you were just being an idiot at me.”
“I don’t understand you,” he said.
“I don’t need you to understand me.” Her brow furrowed.
“But you do need me to sign your paychecks,” he pointed out. “I’m your boss.”
Then, all the color drained from her cheeks. “Right. Of course. I do need that. Because you’re my boss.”
“I am.”
“Just my boss.”
“I’ve been your boss for the past decade,” he pointed out, not quite sure why she was being so spiky.
“Yes,” she said. “You have been my boss for the past decade.”
Then, she turned on her heel and walked back into her office, shutting the door firmly behind her.
