Free Zinnia by Jayne Castle Page A

days of sensationalistic journalism, it turned out, was long enough to cost Zinnia much of the design business that she had labored so hard to build after the fall of Spring Industries.
    Three days had also been long enough to shred her own personal reputation. When she had finally accepted that she could not outrun the label of the “Scarlet Lady,” she had defiantly adopted the color as her business trademark.
    To her family’s horror and chagrin, she now had a closet full of red. Coats, suits, pants, jackets, skirts, dresses, the garments spanned the red spectrum from bright vermilion to deep dark cherry-berry. There were some obvious limitations, Zinnia conceded, but on the positive side, accessorizing was a snap.
    She had lost her shot at the exclusive high-end market after the scandal, but during the past eighteen months she had slowly begun to attract the attention of the up-and-coming entrepreneurial crowd. She was determined to hang on to her new market niche.
    “Aunt Willy and cousin Maribeth are frothing at the mouth,” Leo said. “I think their biggest fear is that Luttrell will cancel his next date with you.”
    “Between you and me, it wouldn’t break my heart. Duncan’s a nice man and I enjoy his company but that’s about as far as it goes.”
    “You’re forgetting the very high F factor here, Zin.”
    “F factor?”
    “Family factor,” Leo explained. “Duncan Luttrell doubled his net worth overnight when he pulled off the recent expansion of his company. When he re leases his new generation of software, he’ll probably triple his bottom line. I have a feeling that Aunt Willy, Uncle Stanley, and the others will soon start hinting that it’s as easy to fall in love with a wealthy man as it is a poor one.”
    “So what?” Zinnia flipped through some bills and a couple of catalogs. “If they get pushy, I’ll play my ace card.”
    “Yeah, yeah, I know.” Leo’s voice took on a comically pathetic, melodramatic whine. “You would never dream of contracting an unmatched marriage and the best agency in town, Synergistic Connections, declared you to be unmatchable.”
    “You got it,” she retorted cheerfully. “Statistically improbable, but it does happen. Hey, what can you do?”
    “Take it from me, Zin, your unmatchable status won’t stop Aunt Willy and the gang.”
    “How could the members of my very own family even dream of asking me to risk an unmatched marriage?” Zinnia smiled to herself as she reached for the letter opener. “Besides, what decent, sensible man would want to marry a woman who has been declared unmatchable?”
    “You know what I think?” Leo retorted. “I think you secretly like the fact that the agency said it couldn’t find you a match.”
    “How can you possibly suggest such a thing?” Zinnia slit open an envelope and found another bill inside. “Being declared unmatchable is a fate worse than death. Everyone knows that.”
    “Except you, apparently.”
    Zinnia smiled to herself. Four years earlier, shortly before her parents had been lost at sea, she had thought she might be falling in love. His name had been Sterling Dean. He had been a handsome vice-president at Spring Industries and it had seemed to Zinnia that they had a lot in common. They had both registered at Synergistic Connections to confirm that their mutual choice was a good one.
    To everyone’s amazement and the acute dismay of the syn-psych counselor, Zinnia had emerged from the testing process with the dubious distinction of being one of an extremely small number of people declared to be unmatchable. Something to do with her paranormal psychological profile, the experts said. She was different in some subtle ways that made it impossible to successfully match her with Sterling Dean or anyone else who was listed on the registry at that time.
    Zinnia had not even begun to adjust to the shock of being told that she might never marry when the news of her parents’ deaths had arrived. After