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
