A Match Worth Making

Vera Shields doesn't need a matchmaker. She needs a better calendar app.

At thirty-four, she's built the career most people only daydream about. She closes deals that make the business pages, commands every room she walks into, and comes home each night to a high-rise apartment with a view that could sell itself. Her life is perfectly optimized. Perfectly scheduled. Perfectly quiet.

Then her younger sister's wedding invitation arrives, and the silence gets a little harder to ignore.

One sleepless night and an ill-advised internet search later, Vera finds herself sitting across from Dahlia Harris, a widowed matchmaker with a therapist's instincts and a gift for asking the questions people spend years avoiding. Dahlia doesn't do dating apps or personality quizzes. She does something far more dangerous: she pays attention.

And Dahlia sees something in Vera that Vera has spent her whole career making sure nobody sees.

When Dahlia pairs her with a man who is nothing like anyone Vera would have chosen for herself, what surprises her isn't that it doesn't work. What surprises her is that it does. He's honest in a way that disarms her. He listens in a way that undoes her. And he's carrying something of his own that makes the ground between them both tender and real.

But Vera didn't get to the top by letting people in. She got there by keeping them out. And when the feelings get bigger than she can manage, she does what she's always done: she walks away.

The only question is whether she'll figure out what she lost before it's too late to get it back.

A Match Worth Making is the first book in a new series from Bella Valdez, featuring a matchmaker who believes the right love is worth waiting for, couples who have to earn their happy endings, and the kind of wit and warmth that Jane Austen might have brought to a California coffee shop. For readers who want romance with heart, humor, and the courage to be honest about what we're really afraid of.