Love, Your Secret Admirer
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“You said I needed to be more feminine.”
“I said feminine,” Matt argued, not because he didn’t like her look, but because he did. He really did. But he couldn’t have her. Some other guy would be the recipient of all this femininity. “I didn’t say…”
“Sexy?” Sarah said, interrupting him. Her enthusiasm returned and she smiled broadly. “That was my idea.”
“Why?”
Sarah walked around her desk and stood directly in front of him. “Because after talking to Carmella and Emily on Friday night, I realized that feminine for me would be sexy.”
Matt’s brow furrowed. “Carmella Lopez and Emily Winters?”
“Yes. After our discussion about the roses I decided I needed some help with my makeover, I called Carmella and she brought Emily. But we didn’t run to a store the minute they arrived at my apartment. We talked first, and they told me that feminine could mean a lot of things.”
Not at all willing to hand over this Sarah to another man, Matt said, “Yeah, like flowered dresses, little white purses and lace-trimmed gloves.”
“I’m sure there are proper ladies in the South who would agree with you.” She took a step closer and smiled the smile that made Matt’s knees weak. “But I’m not like one of those ladies and I believe my secret admirer needs to see the real me.”
“And this is the real you?”
Holding his gaze, she nodded.
Matt stifled the urge to tug at his shirt collar because with her standing about a foot in front of him, smiling her confident, positive, sexy smile, the room was suddenly very warm. “You’re sure?”
She nodded again. “Carmella says it’s all about confidence and this is the most confident I’ve felt in years. If I were in a dainty dress with little white gloves I would feel like a fake.”
She shifted away from Matt so she could hit the switch to turn on her computer monitor and Matt took the opportunity to loosen his collar so he could catch his breath.
“But the plain suits weren’t me, either,” she continued. “So we experimented with a few looks until we got to this one and, voil`a,” she said, facing him again. “Suddenly I felt like me.”
“Holy cow!” Sunny Robbins, paralegal to Grant Lawson, Wintersoft’s in-house counsel entered the office. Her chin-length sun-kissed brown hair had been tossed about by the September breeze and her black pantsuit was rain-splattered.
Matt quickly glanced back at Sarah. She hadn’t worn a coat or a rain hat. Yet her suit was dry and her hair was perfect.
Sunny stopped beside Sarah and ran her gaze from the top of her head to the tips of her perfectly dry, brown, high-heeled sandals.
“Holy cow!”
Sarah laughed. “Thanks. I think.”
“Oh, my ‘holy cow’ definitely deserved a thanks,” Sunny said as she rounded Sarah’s desk and tossed her purse onto her chair. “You look great.”
“I feel great! I feel terrific!”
Sunny laughed. “I would feel terrific, too, if I looked like that! What brought this on?”
Matt glanced at dry, perfectly coifed Sarah again. Something was wrong here. There was no way she got from the bus to this building without getting wet. She must have stopped somewhere and fixed herself up before stepping into the office. If he didn’t know better, Matt might think she had actually made an entrance.
His voice slow and cautious, Matt said, “Sarah has a secret admirer.”
Both of Sunny’s eyebrows rose. “Really?”
“Yeah, he sent me flowers late Friday afternoon,” Sarah said. Hearing the odd tone in Matt’s voice, she glanced at him, saw the confused expression on his face and decided that look was the final nail in the coffin. From the second she’d arrived, he’d been sputtering and arguing with her choices. Now his quiet voice and unhappy expression confirmed what she’d guessed all along. He didn’t like her new look.
The thought made her stomach churn and her knees shake like two leaves in the wind. Worse, her breath wanted to come out in quick panting gasps, but just as Carmella had taught her over the weekend, Sarah controlled all that. Because, deep down inside, she genuinely believed what she had told Matt. This was the real Sarah Morris. If Matt didn’t like the real her then she had to move on, find a guy who would like her, exactly as she was. No matter how much it hurt that it wasn’t Matt.
“I left the flowers here, Matt brought them to my apartment and we got to talking about why someone would send me flowers anonymously,” Sarah said, watching as Matt disappeared into his office. “Matt guessed that the guy wanted some kind of signal from me that I was interested in dating, and this is what Carmella, Emily and I came up with.”
Sunny shot her a skeptical look. “Matt told you that changing your look would signal the secret admirer to ask you out?”
“Yeah.”
Sunny laughed. “Just goes to show what he knows! The truth is, Sarah, secret admirers are usually friends trying to cheer you up.”
Sarah frowned. She had thought exactly that. Right from the beginning she’d decided that if Matt had sent her those flowers it was to boost her morale.
“But in your case, I think Matt took advantage of the flowers to go one step further.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” she said, pointing at Sarah. “Look at you. You look wonderful. One of your friends might have sent you the flowers, but Matt used them to get you to come out of your shell. Lots of guys are going to ask you out. He did you a huge favor.”
With every sentence Sunny spoke, tears pricked Sarah’s eyes. She finally understood. She still believed Matt had sent her the flowers, but she now knew he hadn’t done it so she would bring out her feminine side for him. It was of no consequence whether or not he liked her new look. He’d encouraged her makeover so she’d find another man.