Love Changes (1983)

Barbara Bretton's Harlequin American Romance, published in 1983, is set around Montauk Point on Long Island, where Stacey Andersen runs the data-processing firm Andersen-Bradley in a new brick building and drives a black Corvette. When her partner John Bradley, who lost his wife and daughter in a plane crash, dies too, Franco Borelli, an Italian-American with Florentine summers behind him, proposes renting computer time from her; the publisher's note says the author shares her heroine's tawny hair and background in computer science. (Open Library)

Watches

Baume & Mercier watch: Across Stacey's desk, having just agreed a time-sharing deal for her Compu-500 from seven to eleven each evening, Franco sits back in a navy blazer with brass buttons, gray flannels and a white silk shirt with French cuffs and gold cuff links, and on his right wrist wears a thin gold watch she instantly recognises as one of the pricey Baume & Mercier models she has coveted; her eyes stray to his left hand to find no wedding ring. The text names the maker only.

Source text: On his right wrist he wore a thin gold watch that she instantly recognized as one of those pricey Baume & Mercier models she had coveted. (Barbara Bretton, Love Changes, scan cataloged as Harlequin American Romance, 1983, p. 87; his full name is on p. 88 and hers on p. 7; Internet Archive scan OCR)