“Goddamn, this cookie’s amazing. Wow. Okay. Sorry. Your new office is right over there.” She points across the wide, airy lobby, which is currently filling up with staff, excitedly greeting one another as they move down a long hall toward what I’m guessing is the conference room. “Meeting first, though. I want to get you and Grant all set up together.”
“Actually, do you think I could have a moment before we’re all—?”
She hugs someone hello and then turns back to me as if I haven’t spoken. “Oh! You wouldn’t happen to have brought an extra butt pillow, would you? I forgot the old one at home, and my tailbone’s already acting—”
“Sure.” I balance the rest of the cookies on Samantha’s desk, slap her hand as she reaches for one, and rummage in the box of survival supplies I prepped over the weekend. “One memory foam desk chair pillow.” Special ordered last week, along with three backups.
“Ooooooh.”Dorothy side hugs me. “You are a gem, Rae. An absolute gem.”
“So, could we just chat before the team gets—?”
Not hearing me—or pretending not to?—she calls out, “Treats this way, kiddos!” and absconds down the hall with the entire plate of gluten-free cookies. The quiet swoosh of her vegan-leather, Moroccan-style slippers is drowned out by the clank of dozens of metal bracelets and the pitter-patter of a full team of hungry developers, all following the Pied Piper scent of what might very well be the world’s best cookies. Truly. It took me three years, and I literally cried when I finally got the recipe right.So did Samantha, who declared them almost as good as watermelon Blow Pops.
“Here, let me help.” Samantha grabs the next plate from the pile. “We’ll be in the conference room. Better hurry.” She tilts her head toward me and whispers, “Work Dad’s in there. And did I mention he’s really, really nice to look at?”
Crap.
Work Dad. How does he already have a nickname? And what an innocuous title for a man whose presence is a sign that things are not nearly as hunky-dory as Dorothy likes to pretend.
The opening strains to “Something Bad Is Happening” fromFalsettosautomatically kick up in the back of my mind.
If only Dorothy would talk to me instead of this avoidance thing.
I zoom into my new office to dump my stuff and lock up the payroll and personnel files, and—
Come to a screeching halt.
Two desks face each other, one already showing signs of occupation. This can’t be my office.
“Um, Samantha. Someone’s already moved in here. Where’s my…?”
I turn. The reception area’s empty. From crowded thoroughfare to tumbleweed wasteland in the blink of an eye. That’s the power of cookies, I guess.
“Get your ass in here, Rae!” Jamie-Lynn Jones—who once conducted an entire Zoom meeting from the Mechanicsville County Fair Ferris wheel—yells from down the hall. “Oops! Sorry! Meant to saybehind. Get your lovely little… I mean your… Just… come on.”
Armed with the full-gluten, -fat, and -dairy version of my cookies, I grab my things and race down the hall at a fast clip,almost miss the conference room door, spin to make up the difference, bag, coffee, plates and all, and plow into a brick wall.
A living brick wall. A wide, warm, solid brick wall with big hands that steady me.
An alarm bell goes off inside my head, faint but really, really shrill.
“You’re late,” says the wall in a voice that’s deep and rich, though it’s got some grit to it. Just a hint, like the finest sandpaper.
Uh-oh. I know this voice. I’ve felt it against my ear, my nape, and that sensitive place where my neck meets my shoulder.
No. Uh-uh. Nope.
I tighten my hold on the myriad things I should have just left on the desk in the other room and look up in the kind of dumbstruck slow motion that nightmares are made of.
No way. It can’t behim,him. Not the one-and-done dream Dom I decided I’d never be seeing again, despite having literally touched myself all weekend thinking about him.
There’s a moment of relief when I see his jawline. It’s square, like the General’s, but clean-shaven. Not a hint of that raspy five-o’clock shadow.
My heart sinks as soon as I take in the deeply cut cheekbones, the pissed-off brown eyes, and those hands like live wires on my skin…
Please, no. Please.
“Sir?” I whisper aloud, in front of the entire freaking staff, all of whom, for once, have gone eerily quiet.
