Matchmaker and the Manhattan Millionaire

by Cara Colter

  This wonderfully complex, smart, sweet, sexy woman who was wearing his ring. On her engagement finger.

  Jonas had to keep the fake part of this exercise in the forefront. But hadn’t it moved out of that territory last night? Hadn’t he just been thinking they could take it beyond the weekend reunion—after he’d won the bet—and see where it went?

  He was never confused! He was not going to let confusion rule now, not this late in his life.

  He was keeping his eyes on the prize! But his eyes moved to Krissy.

  His hand in hers was a mistake. He loved touching her, casually like this, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

  Come to that, it feels like the most natural thing in the world.

  Matchmaker and the Manhattan Millionaire

  Cara Colter

  Cara Colter shares her life in beautiful British Columbia, Canada, with her husband, nine horses and one small Pomeranian with a large attitude. She loves to hear from readers, and you can learn more about her and contact her through Facebook.

  Books by Cara Colter

  Harlequin Romance

  A Fairytale Summer!

  Cinderella’s New York Fling

  Cinderellas in the Palace

  His Convenient Royal Bride

  One Night with Her Brooding Bodyguard

  A Crown by Christmas

  Cinderella’s Prince Under the Mistletoe

  The Vineyards of Calanetti

  Soldier, Hero...Husband?

  Housekeeper Under the Mistletoe

  The Wedding Planner’s Big Day

  Swept into the Tycoon’s World

  Snowbound with the Single Dad

  Tempted by the Single Dad

  Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com for more titles.

  Praise for

  Cara Colter

  “Ms. Colter’s writing style is one you will want to continue to read. Her descriptions place you there.... This...story does have a[n] HEA but leaves you wanting more.”

  —Harlequin Junkie on His Convenient Royal Bride

  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

  Epilogue

  Excerpt from Winning Back His Runaway Bride by Jessica Gilmore

  CHAPTER ONE

  THIS WAS WHY, thought Krissy Clark, she had been avoiding Match Made in Heaven. It felt as if there was a possibility her aunt Jane could walk into the cluttered, tiny Queens office at any second. Krissy looked down at the file on the desk in front of her. It had been left open, as if her aunt expected to get right back to it. No doubt she had expected to get right back to it.

  Make the first call, Krissy ordered herself.

  She looked down at the file. It had a picture of a man stapled to an application form. He was on the better side of sixty, bald and bespectacled. His timid smile was so darn hopeful. All she wanted was a name and a phone number, but instead her eyes grazed the first heading.

  What do you do for fun? Nothing naughty, please.

  Krissy snapped the file closed. She did not want to know what—she looked at the name in bold, black Sharpie on the front—what Alexandro Helinski did for fun. This was why she could not take over her aunt’s business. She didn’t have the people skills. The instincts. That almost magical intuition Aunt Jane had possessed.

  It had been three weeks since her sixty-six-year-old aunt had died, killed instantly, struck by a car, just down the street from here.

  Things had to be dealt with, and yet Krissy couldn’t even make a decision about what to do with the ashes.

  Spread them in the place I love most. That was what Aunt Jane’s will had said. But all that came to Krissy was Macy’s!

  On a more practical level, the clients needed to be called just in case they had missed the obituary. There might be refunds owed. The office needed to be cleared, or another month’s rent would come out of the small bank account Krissy found herself in charge of.

  Her aunt had done it for love. If the bank account was any indication, there was no money in the matchmaking business.

  And there it was. The real reason Krissy could not take over this business—aside from the fact she was deliriously happy with her own life—was simple.

  She did not believe in love. Or at least not the happily-ever-after variety her aunt sold.

  Come to think of it, Krissy had not really believed in much that Aunt Jane had believed in: horoscopes, cards, premonitions, reincarnation, life after death. Aunt Jane had claimed she still spoke regularly to Uncle Elias, who had died the year before Krissy was born, which was twenty-three years ago.

  And yet, despite not sharing a belief system, she had loved her aunt madly: admired her ability to be genuinely herself in the world, even when that self was a little left of crazy. Compared to the rest of her family, Jane seemed downright sane.

  Krissy looked at the flashing red lights on the answering machine. Forty-two messages? She, herself, was not sure she got forty-two messages in a year. Still, listening to the messages might be a better place to start than with the files. She had managed to procrastinate so long it was now too late in the evening to be phoning people, anyway.

  Her hand hovered over the play button, then dropped away. She rested her chin on it.

  “Auntie,” she said out loud, “if you can hear me, I need a sign.”

  Of what? That her aunt was, somehow, okay. That death, as her aunt had always believed, was just a transition, not an ending. That the aunt Krissy had always counted on to make her feel safe and loved in the world was still there, in some way, supporting her and guiding her.

  Krissy immediately felt ridiculous. She was a university graduate. Her major had been in science. She loved systems—unlike the one she had grown up in—that had rules and predictable outcomes. Now she was in her second year of teaching. It was kindergarten, a daily hotbed of chaos and emotion, and yet she was proud of how she used her pragmatic nature to be the port of calm in that sea of tiny challenges.

  She was an expert at detaching from emotion and all its foibles. It made her an excellent teacher; it had allowed her to build a perfect life. A few months ago she had bought her own tiny house, and now she had added a dog to the picture she was building.

  Okay, the dog, a rescue, was maybe not quite as imagined, but—

  Rap. Rap. Rap.

  Krissy let out a little squeak of surprise at the firm sound and then laughed at herself, and at how hard her heart was beating.

  For a moment, had she really believed her beloved aunt was knocking?

  “No,” she said out loud.

  Yes, a voice inside her whispered.

  The sound came again, more insistent. Not from heaven, after all, but from the direction of the front door. She squinted in that direction. It was dark out, nearly 10:00 p.m. A shiver ran up and down her spine, and not because a wind, too chilly for the first week in June, chose that moment to rattle the door.

>   There was a man standing out there, his knee-length black coat unbuttoned to reveal long legs in knife-pressed dark slacks, an expensive belt, a tailored shirt, a bold tie. He had dark leather gloves that he was slapping with faint impatience against his wrist, as if he expected her to jump up and open the door, despite the Closed sign, despite the fact it was an unusual hour, despite the fact she was in here alone.

  Krissy regarded him for a moment. She did not go for blond men. Actually, there was quite a long list of the kind of man she did not go for, which explained why she was single.

  And blissfully so.

  Still, she could almost hear Aunt Jane’s voice.

  “Darling, I know I could make you the perfect match if you would just give me the chance.”

  And Jane was nothing if not tenacious. Just before she had died, she had called, breathless with excitement.

  “I found him. I found the one for you.”

  There is no one for me, Krissy had told her aunt, not for the first time. Her aunt, of all people, should understand Krissy’s allergy to relationships.

  But the fact that Krissy had decided against entanglements of the permanent variety didn’t mean she didn’t enjoy the odd outing, a date, a peek. If Krissy was watching a movie, or studying cologne ads on the train, her ideal man was not blond. He was the quintessential tall, dark and handsome.

  The man at the door was tall, and he was handsome. He was broad at the shoulder, narrow at his hips, long in his legs. His face was GQ gorgeous—a wide, intelligent brow; high cheekbones; dark whisker-shadowed jaw; perfect nose; firm lips.

  Under the outside light, his eyes appeared midnight black. The dark whiskers and eyebrows, the dark eyes, made the blond hair a bit of a shock. In fact, he radiated successful—very successful—businessman, but his hair was wheat and platinum, something sun-kissed and surfer-off-the-waves about it that was in sharp and intriguing contrast to the rest of his image.

  He cocked his head at her, and Krissy gave herself a mental shake. She pointed at the Closed sign that hung in the door, and then at her watch.

  Charades: too late to be calling on a closed business. She pretended to dismiss him, by looking down at Alexandro Helinski’s file. She opened it officiously, being careful not to look at that question.

  What do you do for fun?

  That man outside the door looked like he might know a thing or two about having fun... Not that she cared!

  The second question on Match Made in Heaven’s application form.

  What would you describe as your life philosophy?

  Alexandro had answered, in a firm hand,

  Take the high road.

  Something sighed within Krissy.

  Rap. Rap. Rap.

  She deliberately looked at the next question, instead of looking up.

  What do you consider the most important attribute in another human being?

  Alexandro had answered Honor.

  Krissy thought this was a man she would be interested in meeting. If he wasn’t sixty-eight!

  Her visitor at the door was not getting the message. He rapped at the door again. She glanced up, irritated. She was not opening the door to a complete stranger. It was practically the middle of the night.

  When he saw he had her attention, he held something against the door, a small white card. His business card? Why would she open the door for a business card? Any ax murderer could have a card printed!

  Still, from the look on his face, he wasn’t going anywhere, one of those extraordinarily good-looking men far too used to getting his own way. Making it very evident that she was annoyed, Krissy got up from the desk and stomped over to the door.

  She looked at the card being held to the glass.

  It wasn’t a business card, after all. It was an appointment card, for Match Made in Heaven, the blanks filled out in her aunt’s own distinctive handwriting.

  Jonas Boyden had an appointment here. And the date on it was for today. At 10:00 p.m. What was her aunt thinking, conducting business at that time of night in this quiet Queens street?

  Now what? Krissy couldn’t even make phone calls to tell people her aunt had died. It felt even worse to try and shout that horrible announcement through the thick glass of the doorway.

  Besides, one of her aunt’s many strengths had been her tremendous ability to vet people before they ever got through the door. Jane had taken to the internet like the proverbial duck to water. She was proud of announcing that she could find out anything about anyone. She had loved playing online detective. Krissy sometimes felt Jane enjoyed rejecting clients as much as she had enjoyed accepting them.

  Jane claimed her high reject ratio made people want her services even more, had made them feel special to be chosen by her, part of an elite group. Having now seen Match Made in Heaven’s bank numbers, Krissy wondered if Jane might have carried that philosophy a touch too far.

  I always had everything I needed. Open the door.

  Now she was going to talk to the dead? Obviously Krissy should not have come here tonight, even if it had felt pressing. It was too soon. The wound was too fresh. Krissy was not her normal self.

  “Can we speak for a moment?”

  His voice was muffled by the door. Even so, it had a sensual rasp to it. He gave her a small smile, no doubt contrived to make him look harmless, but the smile, revealing beautiful, even, brilliantly white teeth, made him more dangerous than ever.

  Not in the stranger-danger way, but in the way that showed he had extreme confidence in his own ability to charm, and no doubt that confidence was well earned.

  Jonas Boyden was exactly the kind of man who was extremely dangerous to a woman who was deliriously satisfied with her choice of a solitary existence.

  What he definitely was not? Alexandro Helinski. He was not the kind of man who would have needed the kind of services her aunt offered. Ever. He was the kind of man women flung themselves at, and he carried himself with that aggravating self-assurance of a man accustomed to that.

  So who was he? A lawyer? Someone here about bills? A business associate of her aunt’s? Why at this time of night? But if he wasn’t a client, that might mean that he had not been vetted thoroughly. Still, that was her aunt’s handwriting on the card.

  Krissy wished she had the nerve to tell him to come back tomorrow, but wasn’t that what she was doing with all her aunt’s affairs? Trying to put them off until tomorrow? It would just take a few seconds to find out what he wanted, break the bad news to him and send him on his way. It might even be just the impetus she needed to get started on all the things that had to be dealt with.

  She clicked the dead bolt and pushed the door open a miserly crack.

  An alarm began to shriek. It was loud enough to wake the dead, which given her aunt’s current status—and her request to hear from her—was terrifying.

  The sound paralyzed Krissy, her feet felt pinned to the floor by it. She wanted to just cover her ears and shrink away from the appalling noise. Instead, she jumped away from the door and scanned the wall. Sure enough, there was a keypad, flashing the message Enter Code Now.

  Code? She didn’t have a code. She had come through the back door. She hadn’t even been aware there was an alarm system.

  “May I?” Without waiting for her answer, the man opened the door fully and stepped through it. A blast of wind came through with him and lifted some papers off her aunt’s desk and tossed them onto the floor. Really, it was like meeting the hero in a gothic novel!

  He closed the door quickly against the wind, barely spared her a glance, but even so she noted his eyes were dark: not black at all, but a rather astonishing shade of blue—navy, like the deepest part of the ocean.

  His presence, the broadness of his shoulders under that exquisite jacket, made the cramped office seem even smaller. Between an overflowing bookshelf and a file cabinet wi
th open drawers, it felt as if there was no place to go.

  She squeezed back against the wall as he studied the control panel. Even so, his shoulder brushed hers, and a lovely scent wafted off him. It transported Krissy. The wailing of the alarm took a back seat. It was as if the solid strength, the timelessness, of a pine forest had come through the door with him.

  He was that kind of man who made a woman, even one as deliriously independent as her, feel that if they did rely on someone other than themselves every now and then, it wouldn’t be a weakness.

  It would be utterly delicious.

  CHAPTER TWO

  JONAS FELT AS though his eardrums were being ripped out of his head. The woman, obviously wary of strangers, as she should be, was gazing at the control panel with consternation.

  Madame Cosmos—his secret name for Jane Clark—was nowhere to be seen. Was this the woman that she had come up with for him?

  She was definitely not his type. Not a speck of makeup, almost owllike with those huge dark eyes behind large glasses. Masses of luxurious dark hair were pulled into a sloppy bun. She was not very tall and she was not exactly plump, but gave the impression of hiding generous curves under an unflattering outfit.

  Then again, given the task he had given Madame Cosmos, not his type might be exactly what was called for.

  But yoga pants and a mustard-colored, too-large sweater? Sneakers? No one met their match like that. Plus, it was more than evident she had been surprised by his arrival.

  No, she was obviously an office assistant, working late, or maybe she was even the cleaning staff. Madame Cosmos had obviously forgotten him. Was that so surprising, given what had appeared to him to be flakiness at their initial interview? She had asked him, with grave interest, his zodiac sign.

  “What’s the code?” he called over the din.

  The woman covered her ears and glared at him. It was really no time to notice her ears were tiny and sported prim little pearls. Her withering look indicated it was more than obvious she did not have the code. Her eyes sparkled with warning not to mistake her for an idiot.