"Bye, Harper," Ryan said softly.
She walked away down the street, and he leaned out the door to keep her in view a beat longer than made sense.
"Ryan," Emmy said.
He snapped back to attention, looking guilty. "Yes, Ms. Woodhouse?"
“Are you okay?”
He swallowed. “Miss Harper—is she a client?"
"Oh! No." Emmy smiled. "Just a friend I'm helping out. Between us." She adjusted her bag. "She's wonderful, isn't she? Smart, kind, great sense of humor."
Ryan's entire face lit up. "She seems amazing."
Emmy nodded, already thinking about which profiles to show Harper later. "She is. Have a good day, Ryan."
She shook her head as she walked toward the elevator. It was messy. It was illogical. It obeyed none of her principles. Emmy the matchmaker should have been appalled.
She was charmed beyond repair.
She pulled out her phone as the elevator doors slid shut. One new notification.
Grant Knight
Flying back after the game. Do I have plans this week or do I get to sleep?
Her stomach flipped. Then the warmth of the morning—Harper's laugh, the autumn light, the ridiculous meet-cute still tingling at the edges—rearranged itself, making room for the familiar, high-wire tension of managing Grant Knight.
She stared at the screen, biting her lip.
Juliana had been a mulligan. A swing and a miss. On paper, the compatibility was there, but in practice? Emmy pictured Juliana at Woodhouse Thanksgiving, pulling out a pocket scale to weigh her turkey while West tried to hide the extra gravy boat and her father diagnosed himself with a new allergy.
She shuddered. That was on her. She'd swung too hard for "discipline" and hit "joyless." She shouldn't have set Grant up with a woman she wouldn't want to sit next to at dinner herself. And the faint, treasonous relief she'd felt listening to the fish papers saga—that wasn't data she was prepared to look at right now.
Grant didn't need a drill sergeant; he needed a peer. Someone interesting. Someone who would see past the public version to the man who showed up with pizza at eleven o'clock because he knew where he was comfortable.
She pulled up Thea's profile.
Thea wasn't a reaction to Juliana; she was a course correction. Juliana deserved someone who appreciated her dedication—someone who meal-prepped and tracked macros with the same intensity. Emmy made a mental note to revisit her profile later. There was a triathlete in the database who would probably love discussing hatchery sourcing over dinner.
But for Grant, Thea was different. A linguistics professor at Berkeley who spent her summers documenting dying dialects in Peru. Brilliant, witty, and—most importantly—she didn't care about football. She had a thousand other things she was passionate about.
Emmy liked her. She would grab a drink with Thea. And if Thea ended up at Thanksgiving, the conversation would be significantly better than fish documentation policy.
She typed back quickly.
Emmy
Her name is Thea. You're going to like her.
She hit send, stepped out of the elevator, and walked into the shark tank.
CHAPTER FIVE
October in Boston was usually a show-off, all burning reds and shocking oranges, but today the wind whipping down Tremont Street was just cold. It rattled the glass of Emmy's office, a gray reminder that winter was coming and she was currently behind on her quarterly goals.
Emmy turned her back on the dreary view, pacing the length of her office. She needed to focus, because the man on the other end of the line was currently charming her into a corner.
