Clara Whitfield has built her career on other people's love stories. As the agency's top matchmaker, she can spot a soulmate from a first-date questionnaire — she just can't seem to do a thing about the fact that she's been quietly in love with her best friend for the better part of a decade.

That would be manageable, if said best friend weren't Julian Hart: billionaire, incorrigible bachelor, and the one client Clara swore she'd never take.

Then his family stages an intervention. Julian, under pressure to finally "settle down," walks into Clara's office and hires her — professionally, on the record, no take-backs — to find him a wife. Clara says yes, because saying no would mean admitting why she can't stomach the idea. Now she's building him a shortlist of perfectly lovely women who are not her, smiling through it, and slowly losing her mind.

The agency's marquee retreat is supposed to settle things: three finalists, one remote lakeside cabin, one weekend to see who fits. Instead, a storm rolls in, the retreat falls apart, and Clara ends up alone with Julian in a cabin with one working fireplace and about a decade of things neither of them has ever said out loud.

By the time the power comes back on, so has everything else.

*The Matchmaker's Mistake* is the first standalone-but-connected novel in the Hearts, Inc. series — a sensual, slow-burn friends-to-lovers romance about the risk of finally telling the truth, and the terrifying relief of being loved back.