CHAPTER ONE

      KAYLA JONES HOP-RUSHED from the computer lab toward Andreas’s office, buckling her denim wedge sandal as she went. She’d stripped out of her clean-room bunny suit in less than a minute, but re-dressing took longer.

      Late for a high-priority meeting with the type A, ultra-alpha president of KJ Software was nothing Kayla wanted to be.

      Even if he was her business partner. Technically.

      He’d been weird lately. Cranky. Even more exacting than usual.

      Andreas’s twentysomething, superefficient male admin made a stopping motion with his hand. Kayla stopped but let her own widened eyes let him know how little she wanted to.

      I know, he mouthed, sympathy imbuing his expression as some complicated sign language finally clued Kayla in to the fact that her peach cardigan knit jacket was on inside out.

      She flipped it with rushed, jerky movements and then Bradley waved Kayla through with a significant nod toward her waistband. She looked down and realized the button at the top of the zipper on her peach damask-on-denim skirt was undone.

      With a harried smile of thanks, she quickly fastened it as she opened the door to the big man’s office. “Sorry I’m late, Andreas, I was supervising tests on Dolphin.” She preferred to name all their projects after marine life, and Andreas indulged her whimsy.

      Kayla stopped abruptly as she realized her boss wasn’t in his usual spot behind his big chrome-and-glass desk, but sitting at one end of the eight-person smoky-glass-topped meeting table.

      A woman was with him. Blond hair piled in a sleek, professional updo and wearing a stylish white suit, she gave Kayla an assessing look.

      “This is your business partner?” she asked Andreas, her tone tinged with disbelief.

      “Yes.” Andreas frowned at Kayla. “I told you this meeting was high priority.”

      “Technically, my smartphone told me. You flagged it.” Who was this woman and what kind of meeting were they having?

      Andreas gave her that look, the one that said Kayla was being a tad too literal again. She stifled the urge to apologize. She’d been working on that.

      Not apologizing for being herself.

      “Well, she’s here now,” the woman pointed out. “I presume we can get started now?” Her words were take-charge, but her expression toward Andreas was nothing but deferential.

      “Get started on what?” Kayla asked as she settled into one of the leather high-backed chairs on Andreas’s left, across from the stranger.

      Apparently, he wasn’t done glowering about Kayla’s tardiness, because he did not answer.

      Kayla rolled her eyes, absolutely refusing to utter the “I’m sorry” on the tip of her tongue. While he had marked the meeting as a priority, he’d had Bradley insert it into Kayla’s schedule when she’d already blocked off the time prior for the Dolphin tests. She could wait out Andreas’s snit. She’d done it before.

      With a sound of impatience, the woman spoke. “We are here to discuss how Andreas’s search for a wife will impact his business.”

      Everything around Kayla came into sharp focus. The sound each of them made as they breathed in the quiet of the room. The floral musk of the other woman’s perfume that smelled out of place. The fingerprint smudges on the glass in front of the blonde that indicated she’d pressed her hands on the table for some reason. Kayla wanted to wipe them away, erase the evidence of the woman’s presence, even as she sat there.

      Kayla shook her head. Denial a scream inside her. That could not be right.

      Andreas was no help. He still sat there with his stony “you were late” expression on his handsome, angular face, his green eyes snapping with disapproval.

      “Search for a wife?” Kayla’s breath ran out on the final word, her entire body going cold and then hot with the implications.

      Andreas finally deigned to nod, not one strand of his dark hair going out of place with the short movement. “It’s time.”

      “It is?” Kayla hadn’t noticed Andreas being any less focused on business. Any more open to interpersonal relationships.

      She would have noticed. She’d been watching for just such a change in him for the past six years.

      In fact,