“Fine,” she snipped, conceding but not without a huff. “You’re the boss.”

“I am the boss. And you’ll do best to remember that.” He waved her over to his desk, as if she were a pet. “Let’s start, shall we? Come have a seat and I’ll give you a history of myself.”

“Fine.” She was saying that word an awful lot. Ironically she felt far from it. “Just let me grab another cup of coffee from the lounge and I’ll join you.”

*   *   *

Blake watched Drea’s hips swing as she walked out of the office. Stomped out was more like it. He couldn’t really blame her. He was shocked at the way he was acting himself. Normally he was rigid and on-task, never deterring from a preset plan. Today he was changing things on a whim.

The desk for Drea? He’d come up with that at seven that morning. Before that, he’d planned to set her up in a cubicle somewhere. After several phone calls and a hefty sum of come-in-early-bribes, he located an extra desk in payroll and was able to get the janitor to move it in his office pronto.

Now, why on earth had he done that?

He also hadn’t originally intended his matchmaker to be in the office on specific days. He expected that the job would require networking on and off the computer, and he certainly didn’t need to be present for either. But the moment Drea suggested she wouldn’t be in the office at all, he panicked.

Oh, and that remark he’d made about warming her up—whatever had made him say something as arousing as that? Thank God he’d recovered.

He had to stop going off book. Yes, the woman had the cutest little dimple when she scowled and her lips were so damn kissable that he couldn’t stop staring at them, but she was obstinate and ballsy—both major turnoffs. The semi he’d been sporting since she pressed against him in the elevator was merely a standard male response. That it had only seemed to grow more uncomfortable when she got feisty meant nothing, either.

This was about taking back control. She would do what he told her to. He, Blake Donovan, was the boss. He needed to behave like one. Even if it meant behaving like kind of an ass. He squared his shoulders as she reentered.

“Here’s a pen and paper,” he said, handing her his desk pen and a pad of legal paper. “You’ll want to take notes.”

He watched as Drea sat and adjusted her short skirt. She certainly had delightful legs. Long and lean, her calves shapely. How had he not noticed this before?

“I’m ready,” she said when he hadn’t spoken.

He blinked, looking up to find her poised and ready to write. “Yes.” He cleared his throat. Stop doing that. “Very well.”

Blake settled into his leather chair, the new position making it harder to see Drea’s gams, and thus easier to concentrate. “I was born, thirty-five years ago, to Ralph and Sylvia Donovan in Fall River. My mother passed away when I was three. My father and I moved to Boston when I was seven. He remarried when I was eight. They both passed in a car accident when I was seventeen, leaving me nothing but a handful of debts and a beat-up Chevy. Not the one they wrecked, obviously. Fortunately, I earned a scholarship to MIT or I wouldn’t have been able to afford school. I got my bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science and followed that with a master’s in business from Boston University.”

Blake continued to recite the details of his life, highlighting the building of his company and his rise to the top of the IT industry. While telling her about the Hyland industry award he’d won three years running, he noticed she’d stopped writing in her notebook. He halted midsentence. “Drea, you aren’t taking notes.”

She took a deep breath as if she might be counting to three before speaking. “I don’t need to write this down, Blake.”

He tried not to bristle. “This is my life story. It’s relevant. Are you planning on memorizing it?”

She shrugged. “I could regurgitate any of it if I needed to. But I don’t need to. You’re giving me a résumé. I can find most of it online. The rest is superfluous. And it’s boring.”

“I beg your pardon?” And he’d let her use his prized Montblanc. The nerve!

“I didn’t say you were boring. Necessarily.” Her addendum drew a frown to his face. “But this information is definitely boring.”

He didn’t like that. Didn’t like that at all. “It’s not intended to inspire you. It’s intended to attract a potential wife.”

“But this”—she pointed to the few notes she’d taken—“doesn’t attract anyone. Except maybe the author of Who’s Who in America.”

Blake pursed his lips and leaned forward, his eye threatening to tic. “You need to get to know me, Drea. Did you think that you’d simply sit at your desk and learn about me through osmosis?”

“Kinda, yeah.” She shifted in her seat, her skirt riding up a centimeter—yes, he noticed. “How about we try something else? Let me ask some questions for a while, will you?”

“Uh … sure.” He didn’t know why the idea of her questioning him made him uneasy. What could she possibly ask that was so difficult to answer? “Go ahead.”

“Okay, we’ll start easy. What kind of music do you listen to?”

This was why he was uneasy. There was no way he could answer this question truthfully. He swallowed, as he straightened a pile of papers for the second time that morning.

“Music?” He was stalling for time, trying to come up with an artist that wasn’t as embarrassing as the Whitesnake CD he currently had loaded in his player. A slew of other favorite bands ran through his mind: Def Leppard, Poison, Guns N’ Roses—each was as humiliating as the last.

“Yes, music. You know that sound coming from my sister at the bar the other night? That’s called music.”

He narrowed his eyes but didn’t verbally acknowledge Drea’s sassy statement. He was too busy focusing on the thickening of his tongue and the sudden dryness of his throat. And was it hot in here? He adjusted his collar and tried to swallow back the panic.

Why was he panicking anyway? It wasn’t as if he were attached to a lie detector machine. He could tell her whatever he wanted. He could lie. Maybe he could say he listened to jazz. But with his luck, Drea would be a fan of the style and would want to compare favorite artists.

Finally, he said, “I don’t listen to music.” That was a good answer. “I listen to NPR. And the BBC. Sometimes I’ll put on the classical station.” Yes, that was very good indeed. No potential match was going to take him seriously otherwise.

Drea frowned. “Okay. How about movies? What kind of movies do you like?”

Another question he didn’t want to answer. He’d never admitted to anyone his love of sweeping historical dramas. He’d snuck into the last one he’d seen, Anna Karenina, hiding in the back row in case anyone he knew was in the theater.

Drea was waiting for his answer.

“Documentaries,” he lied. “And before you ask, I don’t watch television. Ever.” That should keep her from discovering his addiction to Downton Abbey. God, he’d never paused to consider how much potential humiliation resided in his personal life.

Again, Drea scowled. “There has to be something interesting about you,” she muttered. “Do you read? Besides the Wall Street Journal and the Boston Herald, I mean.”

“Of course, I read. Biographies, mostly.” Which was true. He read those as well as other things. But he wasn’t about to tell her about the stack of old detective books he had next to his bed.

“Biographies?” Her dull tone said that she was unimpressed.

“Yes. Understanding the great businessmen of our time is very beneficial to my job.”

“Of course.” She let out a slow breath of air, but wrote down his answer. “Do you have any pets?”

“No.” Blake shuddered at the thought.

She looked up from her pad of paper. “Why? Are you allergic?”

“Not that I’m aware.” He’d wanted a pet once. A rabbit he’d seen at the local pet store. He still remembered the extreme softness of its fur and its adorable nose that constantly sniffed and wiggled. His stepmother had put her foot down at the request. It was her words he spouted to Drea now. “Pets are nasty creatures. They’re time-consuming and expensive.”