She can’t fall for a guy like him...
With kick-ass-and-take-names flair, hardworking Lena Reyes has everything a successful woman could want. Well...almost. She’s still single, which means her family is practically auditioning guys for Hispanic Bachelor. But none of these guys compare to her newest client: a sexy trust-fund artist who’s making Lena crazy in every way possible.
Born into wealth and privilege, Charles “Matt” Beaumont Matthews V is everything Lena isn’t. So why does she find him so deliciously irresistible? Now their attraction is breaking all kinds of rules. Worse still, Lena’s falling for Matt—hard. He’s either the perfect mistake...or her perfect match.
“Why do you do that?” Lena asked.
“Do what?”
“Every time you get real with me, let me see behind the smart-ass persona, you have to ruin it by being all annoying.”
Matt shifted closer and ran a finger along her jawline. She jerked away. “Lena. Look at me.”
She reluctantly turned to look. He was too close. Too everything. Those eyes. How could such icy blue be so hot?
“This,” he said as he took her hand. “This feeling right here is why you put up with me.”
He traced his fingers lightly across her palm. The sensation bypassed her brain, going straight to the very core of her.
She started to say he was crazy. She started to tell him to get out. But his lips were on hers and her hands were in his hair and oh dear God the man could kiss. He pulled her even closer, deepening the kiss. She kissed him back, ignoring the alarms from some distant rational part of herself.
Right now, she cared about nothing except for how good this felt.
Dear Reader,
Welcome back to beautiful Charleston, SC! I was very excited to have the opportunity to tell Lena’s story. It was also fun to bring Lena and Sadie back together.
For Lena, family is everything. Even when they are driving her crazy. She’s dedicated her life to lifting her family out of poverty, but now that the dream has been realized, she is left wondering, “What next?”
“What” did not include the impossibly annoying and sexy artist Charles Beaumont Matthews the Fifth. Or Matt, as he prefers.
For Matt, family is a touchy subject. A troubled youth led to estrangement and very hard feelings. While he is working to repair the damage, he struggles to accept that to fully live the life he wants, he may have to walk away from his family.
Family, by blood or by choice, is a central theme in my writing. The contrast between Lena’s family, who had been poor in money but rich in love and support, and Matt’s wealthy family, to whom obedience to family tradition is more important than personal fulfillment, is rather stark.
It is somewhere between those two extremes that Lena and Matt will find their HEA.
I hope you enjoy their journey.
Janet
JANET LEE
NYE
Boss Meets Her Match
Janet Lee Nye is a writer by day and a neonatal nurse by night. She loves a good pinot grigio and a well-placed “f-bomb.” She wants to be Helen Mirren when she grows up. She lives in Charleston, SC, with her fella and her felines and spends too much time on Twitter and not enough doing adult things like making doctor’s appointments and dusting.
Books by Janet Lee Nye
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My love, my strength, my wailing wall, the occasional boot in my rear, my partner in everything: Jason Zwiker. Love you, baby!
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
EXCERPT FROM THE BABY ARRANGEMENT BY LISA DYSON
CHAPTER ONE
THAT IS THE ugliest thing I have ever seen. Lena leaned forward and squinted at the tiny white sticker in the corner of the painting. Five thousand dollars? Tie a paintbrush to my cat’s tail and she’d do a better job. She shifted on the bench. The sounds of the party echoed loudly from the floor below. Sipping her wine, she wrinkled her nose. Cheap chardonnay.
She didn’t want to be here, which was why she was hiding out on the second floor of the City Gallery. She wanted to go home. Take her shoes off and put pajamas on. Drink some wine that didn’t taste like battery acid. She straightened with a sigh. Might as well get it over with. Dr. Eliot Rutledge, famed neurosurgeon, very old money Charleston—and her first of many clients—was waiting for her.
Footsteps on the hardwood floor caught her attention. A man ambled slowly around the corner, looking at the art exhibited on the walls. Lena cut a glance in his direction. He didn’t fit with the suit-and-cocktail-dress crowd downstairs. His beige linen pants were slightly wrinkled—and that shabby white dress shirt. No. Just no. His dark blond hair was long and tied in a ponytail with a length of leather. A neat beard covered his face. He leaned down, looked at a price tag and whistled. Lena smiled.
“Pretty pricey, huh?” he asked, sliding down on the bench beside her.
She looked directly at him. Damn. That is a fine-looking man. The hair and beard couldn’t hide his high cheekbones and eyes so blue they almost didn’t look real. White teeth appeared as he grinned at her. Her stomach went quivery under that bad boy grin. She looked away and sipped more wine. She didn’t do bad boys anymore.
He gestured at the painting in front of them. It was an abstract, not quite as dense as a Pollock but not as minimalist as Munch. Slashes of red and blue, smears of purple and yellow. “What do you think of this one?”
She shrugged. “Not my style, to be honest.”
“Ah, man. I saw you sitting up here instead of being downstairs with all the mingling and small talk and I thought to myself, now, there’s a woman who doesn’t go for polite society bullshit. Thought you were up here seriously contemplating the meaning of art.”
She tried her perfect one-eyebrow-arch-and-glare trick. “Did you, now?”
All that got her was another of those inappropriate thought-provoking grins. “Indeed I did.”
“I think it’s ugly,” she said, taking another drink. “I think my friend’s nine-year-old could do better.”
His laugh echoed off the narrow corridor. “But one of those people downstairs will buy it.”
“Probably.” She stood. “Excuse me, but I have to find someone.�
�
“Ah,” Eliot Rutledge said, as he walked around the corner. “You’ve met. Wonderful.”
Lena looked from Dr. Rutledge to the man smiling up at her from the bench. “No,” she said, ice cubes practically dropping from the word. “We have not met.”
“Lena, this is our artist.”
A hot spark of anger flared in her chest and spread to her cheeks. The man stood, still smiling, and held out a hand. “Matt. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Lena.”
“Did you know who I was when you approached me?”
“Nope. Just a happy accident.”
She stared at him until the smile melted from his face. A long string of profanities pushed against her pressed lips. Breathe. Just breathe.
“Matt asked for a recommendation. Told him I wouldn’t have anyone else in the city watch after my portfolio.”
“Thank you,” she said automatically. She turned back to Matt. Gave him her iciest smile. “I’d be happy to discuss this with you. In my office. During business hours. Call my secretary and make an appointment.” She turned to Dr. Rutledge. “Eliot, it was good to see you.”
As she rounded the corner to the stairs, she heard Dr. Rutledge’s voice. “Did you make her angry? I’d recommend not doing that anymore.”
Smiling as she pushed through the doors out into the perfection that was Charleston in October, she nodded. That’s right. Don’t piss me off. Her condominium was a short walk away along Waterfront Park. She ambled past tourists and college kids. There was still light in the sky and it was a perfect sixty-five degrees. Maybe she’d go for a run. Or maybe she’d collapse on the couch, order some Vietnamese and binge-watch something. Her phone vibrated in her purse. She fished it out. Sadie. Her best friend. The woman she called sister. Her finger hovered over the screen. Completely tired of talking to people for the day, she was sorely tempted to dismiss the call.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“Your mother is what’s up.”
Lena smiled. At least she wasn’t the only one being tortured by her mother. “What’s she done now?”
“We went to look at dresses. I swear to God, Lena. I’m going to get married in jeans and a T-shirt just to spite her. You should have seen the dresses she begged me to try on ‘just to see.’ I looked like Scarlett O’Hara’s cousin from the trailer park. A full veil. To the knees!”
“Sounds perfectly lovely. At least she’s off your case about getting married in a church.”
“For now,” Sadie replied grumpily. “What are you doing this weekend? I need a rational human being for dress shopping.”
Lena reached her condo door and leaned against it. She could hear her cat meowing indignantly from the other side. Supper was an hour late. “We can do that. But don’t invite my mother. I’m trying to stay off her radar right now.”
“Yeah, by throwing me at her.”
“You’re the blushing bride. Much more fun than the dried-up old maid.”
“Is she still on that?”
“She’s backed down a bit. I think my aunts are planning something. Every time I see one of them, I feel like I’m being interrogated. Look, I gotta go. I just got home and la gata has complaints.”
“Okay, grumpy. Bye.”
* * *
“KEEP YOUR FUR ON,” she said as she entered her condo and kicked her shoes off. Sass, the cat, did not keep her fur on. Winding her way around and between Lena’s ankles, she complained bitterly of the near-death experience of having supper one hour late.
An hour later, she’d been forgiven by Sass, her business suit had been replaced with pajamas and Bon Banh Mi had delivered dinner. Wallowing happily on the couch, she scooped salad into her face and resumed binge-watching Supernatural. Her phone buzzed and Sass smacked at it. “Sthop,” she said around a chunk of lettuce. Estrella Acosta. Shit. What now?
“Hola, Tia. Qué pasa?”
“Are you coming to church on Sunday?”
Okay. Getting straight to the point. That’s new. “I hadn’t planned on it.”
“Contestame, will you come to church on Sunday?”
Lena made a face at the phone. “I haven’t been to confession.”
“You don’t have to go to confession to go to church, Miss Smarty Pants.”
“Which mass?”
That was important because no way she was getting up at four in the morning on a Sunday to drive an hour for a sunrise mass.
“Ten.” Lena grinned at the clipped tone in her aunt’s voice. “You haven’t been to church since Luis died. It would mean a lot to your mother.”
That melted the smile off her face. She slumped into the couch. “Okay. Yes. I will come to the 10:00 a.m. mass this Sunday.”
“And to the house for lunch too?”
“Yes.”
Sass swatted at her hair hanging over the arm of the couch. “This is why I should have got a dog instead of you, Sass. I’d have to walk a dog. Take it out to pee and stuff. Perfect excuse to stay home. But no. I got a cat.”
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to see her family. It was that ever since Sadie got engaged, everyone was starting to look at Lena like she was supposed to just pick out a man and start popping out babies. Her mother was calling Sadie’s soon-to-be stepdaughter nieta and dropping grandbaby hints like it was her job. Problem was Lena had spectacularly rotten luck with men.
CHAPTER TWO
MATT PLANTED HIS hands on the balcony railing and looked down at the crowd below. He was bone tired and the voices below were echoing off the high ceiling, making his head hurt. The only thing keeping the smile on his face was the memory of Lena Reyes’s departure. Her long black hair swinging side to side as she strode away. He smiled again. She didn’t look like any financial expert he’d ever met. He hadn’t missed the heat in those nearly black eyes either. When he’d sat beside her and she looked at him. There was nothing professional in her eyes at that moment.
A hand patted his shoulder. “Very good turnout, don’t you think?” Dr. Rutledge asked.
“Great turnout. Thank you again for putting it together.”
“I’m seeing a great many sold tags going up. You’re going to be the next big thing.”
“For now. Problem with being the next is there always someone behind you, ready to be the next next.”
Dr. Rutledge laughed. “Very true, but what’s that old cliché? Make hay while the sun shines? Keep this going for as long as you can, give the money to Lena. I don’t know how she does it, but she has the magic touch.”
“If she’ll even take me as a client now.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Dr. Rutledge said. “She’ll get over it. If you’re lucky.”
“I hope so. I really need her help.”
“What you really need is to get back downstairs and charm wallets out of purses.”
“If I must.”
Dr. Rutledge’s rich laughter echoed in the open area. “Just smile at the ladies and remember what this is all for.”
“I never forget that. I will also never forget all your help.”
“You’re welcome, son. But I’m doing it for selfish reasons.”
“I wouldn’t call helping sick kids selfish.”
“No. I’m doing it because of that look I saw in Clarissa’s eyes when she was painting with you. That joy? All her pain forgotten? I want to see that for a very, very long time.”
Matt followed the older man down the stairs and into the crowd. He hadn’t known who the man was who’d come into the playroom at the Children’s Hospital and interrupted his therapy session with several kids in for cancer treatment. The little redheaded girl’s grandfather, he’d surmised by their greetings. He didn’t know then that Eliot Rutledge was a world-famous neurosurgeon who felt helpless as his beloved granddaug
hter battled leukemia. Matt didn’t know then that his world was about to change. His dream was suddenly much closer.
But it was going to come with a price. He had to go back into that upper-crust society that he’d rejected when he left Maryland. He smiled and nodded and shook hands. It all came back so easily. Too easily. He gave his patented, panty-melting bad boy grin to the little old ladies and was perfectly polite to the single women. Firm handshakes and backslaps to the men. God, get me out of here. His thoughts drifted back to Lena Reyes. She’d stood out. She didn’t even realize how radical an act sitting alone at a function like this was. It intrigued him.
* * *
“I’D LIKE TO know exactly what was wrong with my original plan to get married at the UPS store by a notary.”
Lena stared openmouthed at Sadie, lowering the bridal gown she was holding. “What were those words that just came out of your face?”
Sadie pouted, flipping quickly through the gowns. “No. No. God, no. Not in a million years no.”
“Slow down. You aren’t even looking at them.” Sadie didn’t answer. “Sades? What’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
Replacing the gown on the rack, Lena grabbed Sadie’s hand and pulled her to sit on the bench by the dressing room door. “Digame.”
“It’s nothing. I just... I didn’t want all this fuss.”
“Then why are you doing it? Go to the UPS store then.”
Sadie leaned forward, propping her elbows on her thighs, chin in hands and shook her head. “Because Jules wants to be a flower girl.”
“Wait. You are having this lavish wedding just so Jules can throw some flower petals around?”
“It’s not lavish. It’s very small. And simple.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“There’s just so much stuff to do. I don’t like to do stuff.”
“See. That’s where you made your fatal error. You let my mom help you because you were lazy. Next thing you know you’re in a Scarlett O’Hara dress. You better pick out something today before she makes up her mind for you. Just sit here. I’ll pick out some choices.”
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