Cara Colter - Wedding Vows - With This Ring - Rescued in a Wedding Dress / Bridesmaid Says, 'I Do!' / The Doctor's Surprise Bride

And he needed to take away that feeling he’d been seen. Being despised for his severity felt a whole lot safer than that look she’d just given him.

He was laying down the law. If she didn’t like it, too bad. It was his job to see if she was capable of doing what needed to be done. Miss Viv wanted to hand this place over to her. There was absolutely no point doing any of this if six months later soft hearts had just run it back into the ground.

“Prom Dreams is gone,” he said coolly. “It’s up to you to get rid of it.”

She bit her lip. She looked at her shoes. She glanced back at him, and tears were stinging her eyes.

There was no room for crying at work!

And absolutely no room for the way it made him feel: as if he wanted to fix it. For Pete’s sake, he was the one who’d created it!

“I can see we are going to have a problem,” he said. “You are a romantic. And I am a realist.”

For a moment she studied him. For a moment he thought she would not be deflected by Prom Dreams, by his harshness, that despite it she would pursue what he had accidentally shown her.

But she didn’t.

“I am not a romantic!” she protested.

“Anyone who shows up for work in a wedding gown is a romantic,” he said, pleased with how well his deflection had worked. It was about her now, not about him, not about what experiences he did or didn’t know.

“I didn’t arrive in it,” she said, embarrassed and faintly defensive, again. “It was a donation. It had been put on my desk.”

“So naturally you had no alternative but to try it on.”

“Exactly. I was just checking it for damage.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, not even trying to hide his skepticism. “Anyone who wants to buy dresses instead of feeding people is a romantic.”

“It’s not that black and white!”

“Everything is black and white to a realist. Rose-colored to a romantic.”

“I might have been a romantic once,” she said, her chin tilted proudly, “but I’m not anymore.”

Ah, the cad. He shoved his hands under his desk when they insisted on forming fists.

“Good,” he said, as if he were the most reasonable of men. “Then you should have no problem getting on board for the kind of pragmatic changes that need to be made around here.”

He knew she was kidding herself about not being a romantic. Despite the recent heartbreak Miss Viv had told him about, it seemed that Molly had hopes and dreams written all over her. Could she tame that enough to do the job Second Chances needed her to do?

“Couldn’t we look at ways to increase funding, rather than cutting programs?”

Ah, that’s what he wanted to hear. Realistic ideas for dealing with problems, creative approaches to solutions, coming at challenges from different directions, experimenting with angles.

For the first time, he thought maybe. Maybe Molly Michaels had the potential to run the show. But he let nothing of that optimism into his voice. It was just too early to tell. Because it couldn’t work if she was so attached to things that she could not let go of the ones that were dragging the organization down.

“Believe me, I’m looking at everything. That’s my job. But I still want every single thing Second Chances funds to have merit, to be able to undergo the scrutiny of the people I will be approaching for funding, and to pass with flying colors.”

“I think,” she said, slowly, “our different styles might work together, not against each other, if we gave them a chance.”

He frowned at that. He wasn’t looking for a partnership. He wasn’t looking to see if they could work together. He wanted to evaluate whether she could work alone. He wasn’t looking for anything to complicate what needed to be done here. It already was way too complicated.

Memories. Unexpected emotion.

Annoyed with himself, he put Houston Whitford, CEO of Precision Solutions, solidly back in the driver’s seat.

“What needs to be done is pretty cut-and-dried,” Houston said. “I’ve figured it out on paper, run numbers, done my homework. A team of experts is coming in here tomorrow to implement changes. Second Chances needs computer experts, business analysts, accounting wizards. It needs an image face-lift. It needs to be run like a corporation, stream-lined, professional.”

“A corporation?” she said, horrified. “This is a family!”

“And like most families, it’s dysfunctional.” That was the Houston Whitford he knew and loved.

“What a terribly cynical thing to say!”

Precisely. And every bit of that cynicism had been earned in the school of hard knocks. “If you want Walt Disney, you go to the theater or rent Old Yeller from the video store. I deal in reality.”

“You don’t think the love and support of a family is possible in the business environment?”

The brief hope he’d felt about Molly’s suitability to have Miss Viv turn over the reins to her was waning.

“That would assume that the love and support of family is a reality, not a myth. Miss Michaels, there is no place for sentiment in the corporate world.”

“You’re missing all that is important about Second Chances!”

“Maybe, for the first time, someone is seeing exactly what is important about Second Chances. Survival. That would speak to the bottom line. Which at the moment is a most unbecoming shade of red.”

She eyed him, and for a moment anger and that other thing—that soft knowing —warred in her beautiful face. He pleaded with the anger to win. Naturally, the way his day was going, it didn’t.

“Let me show you my Second Chances before you make any decisions about the programs,” she implored. “You’ve seen them in black and white, on paper, but there’s more to it than that. I want to show you the soul of this organization.”

He sighed. “The soul of it? And you’re not romantic? Organizations don’t have souls.”

“The best ones do. Second Chances does,” she said with determination. “And you need to see that.”

Don’t do it, he ordered himself.

But suddenly it seemed like a life where a man was offered a glimpse at soul and refused it was a bereft place, indeed. Not that he was convinced she could produce such a glimpse. Romantics had a tendency to see things that weren’t there. But realists didn’t. Why not give her a chance to defend her vision? Really, could there be a better way to see if she had what it took to run Second Chances?

Still, he would have to spend time with her. More time than he had expected. And he didn’t want to. And yet he did.

But if he did go along with her, once he had seen she was wrong, he could move forward, guilt-free. Make his recommendations about her future leadership, begin the job of cutting what needed to be cut. Possibly he wouldn’t even feel like a cad when he axed Prom Dreams.

Besides, if there was one lesson he had carried forward when he’d left his old life behind him, it was to never show fear. Or uncertainty. The mean streets fed on fear.

No, you set your shoulders and walked straight toward what you feared, unflinching, ready to battle it.

He feared the knowing that had flashed in her eyes, the place that had called to him like a cool, green pond to a man who had unknowingly been living on the searing hot sands of the desert. If he went there could he ever go back to where—to what—he had been before?

That was his fear and he walked toward it.

He shrugged, not an ounce of his struggle in his controlled voice. He said, “Okay. I’ll give you a day to convince me.”

“Two.”

He leaned back in his chair, studied her, thought it was probably very unwise to push this thing by spending two days in close proximity to her. And he realized, with sudden unease, the kind of neighborhoods her projects would be in. He’d rather hoped never to return to them.