“Or the car was stolen.” I thumbed through the other keys. “You think one of these is for the apartment upstairs?”
“He’s not going to let us up there to find out,” Grant said, taking his own keys out of his pocket. The sound of his car unlocking reminded me that we had to go back to work. I studied the small key.
“This is a key for a cabinet or drawer or something,” I said as we walked toward Grant’s car.
Grant’s smirk returned. “Then let’s see what it opens—back at the office.”
I held the keys proudly, wondering what we might find.
CHAPTER THREE
When we walked back into the office, I felt uneasy. Or rather, self-conscious. People were looking at us.
No, they were looking atme.
Kaitlyn Lafferty was on our floor and looked me up and down in a more snake-like way than usual. I looked over at Grant, who avoided eye contact with me and walked straight ahead with his hands in his pockets.
I took the first detour into the bathroom. As I rounded the corner, the mirror revealed that not only had my shirt become untucked from my bending down in Maggie’s parking garage, but I also must have acquired a pair of brown leaves in my hair when I’d reached down for the keys. The left side of my hair had them tangled in, and it took several minutes to clear them out as they crumbled between my fingers into smaller pieces.
To think that Grant saw me, sat next to me in the car for several minutes without saying anything, and then let me walk into the building looking like that in front of our coworkers!
Oh. My. God. It looked like I’d been ravished behind a dumpster.
I closed my eyes, taking a few deep breaths until the rage passed.
Fucking Grant.
He was seated and waiting for me with a self-assured grin back in our office corner. I forced my lips to widen into a smile, opened my top desk drawer, dropped Maggie’s keys inside, and slammed the drawer. I vowed to ignore him for the rest of the day.
Ten minutes later, Grant asked, “Hey, why don’t we go give those keys a try in her office?”
I ignored him.What if someone important had seen me like that?
Half an hour later he said, “You know, K, giving me the silent treatment isn’t serving you. You’re dying to find out what’s in there just as much as I am.”
An hour later, I was deep into a problem for a client when I heard, “I’m going into her office.” He began pulling at drawers in Maggie’s office, but I tried to focus on my work.
He came back out, stood next to me, and said, “There’s a drawer in her desk that should open with a little key exactly like the one you’re keeping from me.”
I paid him no mind and stared straight at the numbers on my screen, though they weren’t making sense right at that moment. I moved the mouse in circles.
“Come on,” he said. “I didn’t do anything.”
“That’s right!” I hissed, finally turning to him. “You didn’t tell me I looked like a mess. You let everyone think you and I had a romp in the hay!”
He snorted. “What hay?”
I rolled my eyes. “You know what I mean.”
“Itwasfunny. You’re always so put together and uptight. It was nice to see you look a little less than perfect.”
I was speechless. I looked “put together,” “uptight,” and “perfect”? There was a strange contrast between his words andhow I thought of myself. I wasn’t sure if he was giving me some sort of backhanded compliment.
I blinked a few times and said, “Why didn’t you warn me before we walked in? You could have laughed at me in that garage and gotten your kicks in private, but you wanted people to think that we’d hooked up.”
He shrugged. “I could only be so lucky.”
His eyes sparkled, and I knew I would get nowhere with him. He had not only gotten me to abandon ignoring him, he’d also managed to get me so frustrated that I was ready to give him the keys to shut him up. I held them tighter in defiance, stood up, and walked past him, my shoulder crashing into his.
