Free An Unexpected Love by Claire Matthews

Chapter One
    It was 9:30 pm when I shut down my computer and grabbed my purse from the bottom drawer of my desk. I was so tired I wanted to curl up and die, or at least collapse in the corner and suck my thumb. Thirteen hours of editing reports, and re-editing reports, and getting frantic calls asking why the second set of edits made it to legal before the first set, and I was done. Done.
    I kicked the bottom desk drawer closed for good measure, which startled my boss, Dan, who was buried even deeper in reports and frantic calls than I was. He looked at me like he didn’t know who I was for a second.
    “Dan, I’m leaving. I haven’t eaten since noon. I haven’t peed since before then. I’ve already missed my date—if I end up an old maid, it’s on you, my friend.” He ignored me. He was used to my exhausted, melodramatic rants, but that didn’t mean he knew how to respond to them. “Can your conscience handle it, Bossman? Me, all alone, watching the shopping channel with my forty cats in a shack by the railroad?”
    “Go home, Lexi.”
    “Yeah, home to my empty apartment. I could’ve had dinner at Brioche with Tyler. Now I’ll have Beefaroni in front of the TV. Thanks for caring.”
    Dan glanced up from the papers flooding his desk. He looked stressed, and tired. His dark hair curled over his eyebrows, which meant he hadn’t even taken the time to get a haircut. It was sad, really, because he was only thirty-two, just three years older than me—he should be missing dates and ranting about it too, but he never did. His dark brown eyes, always unreadable, focused on me.
    “Did you really miss a date?”
    I tried to remember if he’d ever asked me such a personal question. The closest I could recall was the time he’d asked if I knew of a good plumber.
    “Nah, it was a tentative offer at best. Plus, Tyler’s got these thin lips…they kind of look like a big scar under his nose. I don’t think I can get past them.”
    “You’re very discerning.”
    I rolled my eyes. “Goodnight, Dan.”
    I made my way to the elevators, nodding at the cleaning lady emptying the trashcan in the 38 th -floor corridor. Titus and Goldblum might have made its money off the backs of low-level grunts like myself, but they gave us a beautiful building in which to work ourselves to death. The plants, the modern furniture, the fountains… Not only did they set the proper tone for the headquarters of a multi-billion-dollar investment banking firm, but they also told us little people, “You’re special… We care about your work environment… We’ll spend more on a piece of abstract art than on the yearly salaries of half-a-dozen executive assistants.”
    By the time I got to the first floor, I was feeling woozy from lack of basic sustenance. I crossed the main lobby and stepped into McAllister’s, the restaurant/pub where we usually went to lunch, when lunch was not a luxury. I sat numbly at the bar and gave a little wave to Valerie the bartender.
    “Hey, Miss Lexi.”
    “Hey, Valerie. Can I get a chicken club and a huge glass of water?”
    “Sure thing, hon.”
    I wasn’t until I reached to drape my coat over the back of the barstool that I saw Jack Brogan at the far corner of the bar, by himself.
    Omigod.
    If there was such a thing as a Big Man on Campus at an investment banking firm, Jack Brogan was it. Beautiful, rich, charming, his name rang off the tongues of the firm’s professional gossips with regularity. He looked like a movie star, his dark blond hair cut close, his blue, piercing eyes framed by dark, thick lashes. His manner matched his looks—he made friends and charmed women without any discernible effort. But even with his looks and charm, the level of interest in his life was surprising, not only in its intensity but in its banality. I’d once walked in on a heated debate over the type of oil he used in his Porsche Boxster.
    Of course, all Brogan-related gossip for the last six months had focused on his