“What? Why?”
“Because he’s hot and you’re down bad for him. It doesn’t take a psychic to predict that future.”
I shook my head. “I need to know this is real before I—you know.”
“Before you ride him like a bicycle down a bumpy road?”
“Yeah, exactly.”
“That’s actually very mature of you.” Abby looked impressed. “I’m proud. I’ve never met a real country girl. Are you all that wholesome?”
I laughed. “Definitely not and I’m not claiming to be wholesome but I’m just not the type to bang my boss and then go back to work like nothing happened.”
We finished the brownies and Abby put on a movie, some action thing she’d been wanting to watch. I tried to focus on it, but my mind kept drifting back to Dane’s office.
I really wanted to text him.
I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t sorry about what happened and that I’d do it again in a heartbeat.
Did that make me desperate? I was pretty sure he was used to women throwing themselves at him. I didn’t want to just be another woman. I wanted to believe I knew the man no one else got to know.
But it wasn’t enough. He wasn’t going to change who he was at his core just because he wanted to get in my pants. And I was absolutely desperate to have him in my pants, but I wouldn’t be satisfied with just a one-time thing. Or even two times.
Something told me if I crossed that line, I was going to end up with a broken heart. The kind of broken that never truly healed.
If I was ever going to find my true love, I needed my heart intact.
CHAPTER 22
DANE
Ihadn’t sat at my desk for more than five consecutive minutes in three days.
Monday had been a hurricane of board meetings. Tuesday had been Norma ambushing me approximately every hour on the hour to discuss hiring ten new matchmakers to handle the surge in applications. The app was being overwhelmed. Our current team was drowning, and we needed to get some help quickly before our customers decided it wasn’t worth the wait.
Wednesday had brought IT fires. App crashes from the overload, servers that couldn’t handle the traffic, emergency calls with our infrastructure team at two in the morning because apparently success meant everything breaking at once.
I was told overwhelmed servers were a good thing. Lucas always found the silver lining even in the middle of a shitstorm.
Fucker.
And today, I spent the morning in yet another board meeting, this time with the full executive team. I was determined to open Cupid’s Arrow to users who didn’t meet our minimum salary requirements. The salary requirement was fine when I was trying to get established and it did set our service above the rest, but now it was time to let everyone in on the fun.
By the end of February, Cupid’s Arrow would be available to everyone, not just the wealthy elite.
It felt right. Like the company was finally becoming what it should have been all along. But it also meant more work, more planning, more everything.
Which is why, at four in the afternoon on Thursday, I was finally making my way back to my actual office to sit down for the first time in days when I was intercepted again.
“Dane! Got a minute?”
I closed my eyes and counted to three before turning to face Lucas, who was standing in the doorway of his office with an expression that told me this was not, in fact, going to take just a minute.
I was fried. I hadn’t seen Ina since the kiss. Well, I’d seen her but we were both pretending the other didn’t exist, which made everything a million times worse. It was an absolute shitshow and I didn’t know how to make any of it better.
“Is this urgent?” I asked.
Ten minutes. That was all I wanted. Ten minutes at my desk with the damn door closed.
