Page 1 of Love Unexpected
Chapter One
Rosie
Isaac Bishop was not your typical man.
He was more like the kind of man you read about in romance novels and thought:men like this do not exist in real actual life.
First of all, he was incredibly nice. His entire brandwas built around kindness and paying it forward, but with Isaac, it wasn’tjust an act. He was a natural. He had a knack for making people feel good.
But somehow, healsohad this incredible sexiness and charm.
It shouldn’t be fair. For someone who was genuinely a good person to also look like they just stepped off the set of a body wash commercial. You know the ones. Where a man gets all sudsy in the middle of a forest with a waterfall cascading down his back.
Isaac was totally that guy. With the slightly messy dark brown hair and the bright blue eyes and the jawline that just wouldn’t quit. And did I mention his biceps? He had some. He was not an overly muscled dude. But the biceps showed up to work every single morning.
See what I mean? The whole package.
And America loved him for it.
Okay. Maybe notallof America. But a very large contingency somewhere in the ballpark of ten million YouTube subscribers loved him. Like me, they started watching his channel,Random I,years ago, and they stayed with him as he grew and built his business into a multimillion-dollar operation that employed seventy-five people and released new content daily.
Fun fact. I was one of those seventy-five employees.
When I first took the job? I was grossly overqualified to be a web designer handling the merchandising arm of Isaac’s website. My previous work had included fifteen-thousand-dollar custom website builds from the ground up. And now I was updating sweatshirt descriptions. But I had my reasons for taking the job.
Charleston was a reason. It had sounded new and different and ...not like Kansas, where I was from. I’d needed a change. Why not a warm, coastal city full of fresh seafood, sandy beaches, and centuries-old history?
I hovered my mouse over the product description for the latestRandom Ihoodie to show up on my desk. Too many adjectives. The hoodiewasthe softest sweatshirt I’d ever put on my body, but was it cloud-soft? Soft as down? Pillow-soft? Clouds weren’t evensoft.Not technically, anyway.
I sighed and leaned back into my chair, pressing my fingers against my temples. I was a web designer. I could make thingslookpretty all day. But making them sound pretty? I was in way over my head.
“Another product description?” Greta, my first Charleston friend, slid her rolling chair over and leaned into my shoulder, her eyes trained on my screen.
“Wow,” she finally said. “That’s... original.”
“This isn’t even supposed to be my job,” I argued. “I don’t write copy. I’m not a writer.”
“You’re making it too complicated,” Greta said, her hand moving to my keyboard. She highlighted and deleted a few words from my description, then swapped a semi-colon for a comma. “But if you must know,” she said while she worked, “Isaac did approve hiring a copy writer at this morning’s leader meeting. Writing merch descriptions is a part of the job description.”
“Seriously?” As team leader, Greta was technically my boss. But it was hard to feel like anyone was much of a boss atRandom I.Isaac made sure everyone felt like we were all a part of the same team. He shied away from terms like boss and manager and CEO. Even the vast warehouse that housed allRandom Ioperations was designed to promote teamwork and connectedness. The actual recording studio whereRandom Ivideos were shot was downstairs, and the chop shop where the editors and techie people edited and finalized the show had their own space, and Isaac, of course, had his own office, though it was walled in glass, so he hardly felt separate from the rest of us. But otherwise, we were all in one giant room. From the show writers to the web designers to the accounting people. There were no corner offices. No divided floors. It was different from anywhere I had ever worked before.
Greta leaned back, a satisfied look on her face. “Of course I’m serious. I know how much you hate writing these things. And there’s more than enough content going up on the website to justify hiring a writer.” She motioned with her head toward my screen. “See how that sounds. And next time, just pull one of the old descriptions for a product we aren’t selling anymore. It’s always easier to tweak something that’s already written than to write something from scratch. At least until we can hire someone.”
“You’re good to me,” I said as I read over her description. “How did you do this? It’s so much better.”
She grinned and wheeled back to her own desk. “I deleted five adjectives.”
“Five? For real? There are still three in here.”
“Yeah,” she said, her tone dry. “I know.”
“Hey, hey!” Isaac’s voice boomed from the elevator doors behind me. “Are we making people happy today?” Isaac generally didn’t show up until an hour or two after everyone else was at their desks. A perk of having your name—or at least your initial—on the company logo. Not that I faulted him for it. He worked harder than anyone I knew. And he never cared if his employees needed to arrive late or leave early...not as long as they were getting their work done.
I kept my eyes glued to my computer screen as he walked across the warehouse space to his office, his business manager and brother-in-law, Alex, close behind him. I didn’t have to watch to know he would high five or fist bump every employee he passed. That he would stop and pick up the beat sheet for that day’s episode, that he would ask about someone’s new baby or someone else’s sick mom.
The man handled people with a grace and skill I couldn’t help but admire.
“Greta!” Isaac said, stopping in front of her desk. “How goes it? Where are we with the new hoodies? I was hoping to talk about them on the show today. Are we good for that?”
