your biological clock ticking?” she asked drily.
“In a way,” he said. “Again, it all comes back to logic. I’m close to my family, to my brothers. They’ll have children sooner rather than later. Joshua and Danielle already have a son. Cousins should be close in age. It just makes sense.”
She bit the inside of her cheek. “So you...just think you can decide it’s time and then make it happen?”
“Yes. And I think Joshua’s experience proves you can make anything work as long as you have a common goal. It can be like math.”
She graduated from biting her cheek to her tongue. Isaiah was a numbers guy unto his soul. “Uh-huh.”
She refused to offer even a pat agreement because she just thought he was wrong. Not that she knew much of anything about relationships of...any kind really.
She’d been shuffled around so many foster homes as a child, and it wasn’t until she was in high school that she’d had a couple years of stability with one family. Which was where she’d met Rosalind, the one foster sibling Poppy was still in touch with. They’d shared a room and talked about a future where they were more than wards of the state.
In the years since, Poppy felt like she’d carved out a decent life for herself. But still, it wasn’t like she’d ever had any romantic relationships to speak of.
Pining after your boss didn’t count.
“The only aspect of going out and hooking up I like is the hooking up,” he said.
She wanted to punch him for that unnecessary addition to the conversation. She sucked her cheek in and bit the inside of it too. “Great.”
“When you think about it, making a relationship a transaction is smart. Marriage is a legal agreement. But you don’t just get sex. You get the benefit of having your household kept, children...”
“Right. Children.” She’d ignored his first mention of them, but... She pressed her hands to her stomach unconsciously. Then, she dropped them quickly.
She should not be thinking about Isaiah and children or the fact that he intended to have them with another woman.
Confused feelings was a cop-out. And it was hard to deny the truth when she was steeped in this kind of reaction to him, to his presence, to his plan, to his talk about children.
The fact of the matter was, she was tragically in love with him. And he’d never once seen her the way she saw him.
She’d met him through Rosalind. When Poppy had turned eighteen, she’d found herself released from her foster home with nowhere to go. Everything she owned was in an old canvas tote that a foster mom had given her years ago.
Rosalind had been the only person Poppy could think to call. The foster sister she’d bonded with in her last few years in care. She’d always kept in touch with Rosalind, even when Rosalind had moved to Seattle and got work.
Even when she’d started dating a wonderful man she couldn’t say enough good things about.
She was the only lifeline Poppy had, and she’d reached for her. And Rosalind had come through. She’d had Poppy come to Rosalind’s apartment, and then she’d arranged for a job interview with her boyfriend, who needed an assistant for a construction firm he was with.
In one afternoon, Poppy had found a place to live, gotten a job and lost her heart.
Of course, she had lost it, immediately and—in the fullness of time it had become clear—irrevocably, to the one man who was off-limits.
Her boss. Her foster sister’s boyfriend. Isaiah Grayson.
Though his status as her boss had lasted longer than his status as Rosalind’s boyfriend. He’d become her fiancé. And then after, her ex.
Poppy had lived with a divided heart for so long. Even after Isaiah and Rosalind’s split, Poppy was able to care for them both. Though she never, ever spoke to Rosalind in Isaiah’s presence, or even mentioned her.
Rosalind didn’t have the same embargo on mentions of Isaiah. But in fairness, Rosalind was the one who had cheated on him, cost him a major business deal and nearly ruined his start-up company and—by extension—nearly ruined his relationship with his business partner, who was also his brother.
So.
Poppy had loved him while he’d dated another woman. Loved him while he nursed a broken heart because of said other woman. Loved him when he disavowed love completely. And now she would have to love him while she interviewed potential candidates to be his wife.
She was wretched.
He had said the word sex in front of her like it wouldn’t do anything to her body. Had talked about children like it wouldn’t make her...yearn.
Men were idiots. But this one might well be their king.
“Put the unrevised ad in the paper.”
She shook her head. “I’m not doing that.”
“I could fire you.” He leaned in closer and her breath caught. “For insubordination.”
Her heart tumbled around erratically, and she wished she could blame it on anger. Annoyance. But she knew that wasn’t it.
She forced herself to rally. “If you haven’t fired me yet, you’re never going to. And anyway,” she said, narrowing her tone so that the words would hit him with a point, “I’m the one who has to interview your prospective brides. Which makes this my endeavor in many ways. I’m the one who’s going to have to weed through your choices. So I would like the ad to go out that I think has the best chance of giving me less crap to sort through.”
He looked up at her, and much to her surprise seemed to be considering what she said. “That is true. You will be doing the interviews.”
She felt like she’d been stabbed. She was going to be interviewing Isaiah’s potential wife. The man she had been in love with since she was a teenage idiot, and was still in love with now that she was an idiot in her late twenties.
There were a whole host of reasons she’d never, ever let on about her feelings for him, Rosalind and his feelings on love aside.
She loved her job. She loved Isaiah’s family, who she’d gotten to know well over the past decade, and who were the closest thing she had to a family of her own.
Plus, loving him was just...easy to dismiss. She wasn’t the type of girl who could have something like that. Not Poppy Sinclair whose mother had disappeared when she was two years old and left her with a father who forgot to feed her.
Her life was changing though, slowly.
She was living well beyond what she had ever imagined would be possible for her. Gray Bear Construction was thriving; the merger between Jonathan Bear and the Graysons’ company a couple of years ago was more successful than they’d imagined it could be.
And every employee on every level had reaped the benefits.
She was also living in the small town of Copper Ridge, Oregon, which was a bit strange for a girl from Seattle, but she did like it. It had a different pace. But that meant there was less opportunity for a social life. There were fewer people to interact with. By default she, and the other folks in town, ended up spending a lot of their free time with the people they worked with every day. There was nothing wrong with that. She loved Faith, and she had begun getting close to Joshua’s wife recently. But it was just... Mostly there wasn’t enough of a break from Isaiah on any given day.
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