Liquid Silver Books, $4.75, ISBN 978-1-59578-358-5
Contemporary Romance, 2007
Winifred Lange has just been promoted from middle management to somewhere a little bit higher when she receives a rather… unusual, let’s just say, invitation to dinner by a fellow who works at the same floor in the office block right across from the one where she is currently working in. The fact that she has to pick up a pair of binoculars to take a look at this guy gives me the creeps, because this can only mean that the fellow, who knows her name and office phone number when she doesn’t even know that he exists until that point, must have been peeking at her for some time using his own pair of binoculars. That or he is some kind of superhero with above average eyesight, but that’s not the case here.
Alex Bradley is an attorney – he’s the Bradley in the firm of Bradley and Whitehall – who admits to Win that he’s been spying on her on top of telling Win this on their first date:
“Do you have any idea how sexy you are when you are working? Just being yourself in the office, studying some piece of insignificant paperwork on your desk, or chatting with a coworker? It is one of the sexiest things I have ever seen when you are concentrating on work, unaware that you are being watched. A strand of hair falling onto your cheek, a pencil stuck behind an ear… I have been keeping an eye on you — so to speak — for several months,” he said with a grin, “and I even debated whether I should try to contact you. You have been a guilty fantasy for me for a while, and I have imagined how fantastic it would be to walk right into your office, sweep all your papers onto the floor, and make mad, crazy love to you right on your desk.”
If I were Win, I will be running away from this guy as fast as possible, directly to his biggest competitor to get a restraining order slapped on his Peeping Tom face, but Win decides that she has to have him. At that moment. Woosh! In the lobby of her workplace. Perhaps Alex feels that it isn’t time yet to show her the shrine he has set up for her which he has made from body parts of the cats and dogs he dismembered in his free time.
She Wins Some – nice play of words in the title, I must say – brings up a dilemma for Win. She and Alex decide that they are madly in love. I agree about the “madly” part. Anyway, just as they have just started on this supposedly grand romance of theirs, Win learns that she is going to be sent to London to step in for a recently retired branch manager. But this story is too short to be some grand tale of a woman trying to break the glass ceiling in the corporate world, however, so the end result is a vaguely unsatisfying story where Win’s problem is solved due to Alex having some convenient contacts that will help pull some strings to let Win get her way at the end of the day. In the end, I suppose one can say it does boil down to who you are sleeping with when it comes to business.
