“The meetings took longer than I expected,” she said as she crossed into her office, carrying her purse and a few file folders.
“Finley,” Kat called, “today Luke used ‘Good day to you’ and ‘Best wishes’ as social media captions.”
Finley reappeared in her doorway, this time without the folders and purse.
“I tried to tell him that’s not the Furry Tails way,” Kat said.
Finley looked at him warmly. “I’m fine with it.”
“Excuse me?”
“Luke’s doing such a great job overall—”
“I beg to differ,” Kat said.
“—that I’ll let the less-than-cheery social media captions slide just this once.”
Kat sniffed. “It’s never a good idea to lower standards.”
If Finley wanted to be with him, she was lowering her standards.
“Luke, can I borrow you for a bit?” Finley asked. “I’d like to inventory the supply room and could use an extra set of hands.”
“Sure.” He followed her into the hallway.
“In case it wasn’t obvious,” she whispered when they were a few doors down, “inventorying the supply room is a ruse. I made it up because it feels like a week since we’ve seen each other even though it hasn’t been two days. I want time alone with you.”
Thank God.
She wrapped a hand around his forearm and pulled him inside the small room. Right away, he pressed her against the back of the door.
“Hello,” she breathed, smiling as her hands snaked behind hiswaist. “I just showed you blatant favoritism despite shoddy social media captions. I was in the same room with you, so I was too blissed-out to care.”
His mouth was on hers, insistent and demanding.
“Don’t expect to get away with shoddy social media captions in the future,” she murmured between kisses, their lips millimeters apart. She was already breathing hard.
“I don’t.”
“It’s not the Furry Tails way.”
They were kissing again. Desire turned every molecule of him liquid, greedy. They’d picked up right where they’d left off Saturday night and he’d never been so relieved.
“How come you waited so long to inventory the supply room?” he asked.
“There was no waiting involved. There was only me, rushing through my meetings this morning as quickly as humanly possible.”
For Finley, a wonderful Monday gave way to greater and greater happiness as the workweek unfolded. She and Luke ate take-out at his apartment for dinner. The next morning, they met for breakfast before work. The following day, she convinced him to ride bikes. They shared dinner at an outdoor restaurant next to the river. They bathed Sally, which devolved into a war of suds, which morphed into a storm of emotions when he took her in his arms.
When he wasn’t nearby, which wasn’t often, shemissedhim.
He was the first person she sought out every morning when she arrived at work. She made up reasons to talk to him throughout the day about the treasure hunt or the animals. Every time she tackled a Furry Tails task that called for two people, she chose him as her second.
Only one dark cloud hovered over her perfect week: Luke’s unfailing productivity.
Now that he’d completed the initial tech to-do list she’d given him, she struggled to keep him occupied. She pretended to be passionate about pursuing better search engine optimization and adding more social media platforms to their portfolio. She claimed she wanted him to grow their email subscription numbers. She declared that she needed him to run more ads.
During his after-work hours, he combed images of North Georgia with the fervor of Sherlock Holmes, searching for landmarks that matched her dad’s map. Worse, he expected her to do the same. He’d divvied up Georgia and asked her to search the northwest corner. He’d taken the northeast corner. Each evening when they returned to their respective homes, they studied the terrain, working their way toward the middle of the state.
