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And I had a meeting in fifteen minutes.
Pushing my chair back from my desk with a sigh, I stood and tried to stretch some of the kinks out of my back. I’d been hunched over my computer, so fixated on redlining this damn contract, I’d barely moved in the last three hours. I seriously needed to make time for the gym tonight, or my back and shoulders were going to lock up on me completely. I’d wake up tomorrow morning creaking like the Tin Man and begging for a squirt of oil to loosen my rusty joints.
I walked across my office and opened the door. “Debra?”
My secretary swiveled her chair around and wordlessly held up a protein bar.
“How do you do that?” I asked, gratefully accepting her offering.
She shrugged as she spun her chair back around. “You skipped lunch.”
Debra was a godsend. She’d been my legal secretary for the last ten years, and I pretty much worshipped the ground she walked on. The woman singlehandedly kept my life from collapsing around me like a Jenga tower. If she retired before me, I’d be lost.
I unwrapped the protein bar and gnawed off a bite. It tasted like ground-up shoe leather that had been dipped in the abstract idea of chocolate. Whatever. As long as it kept my stomach from growling. “Are the packets for the Fulton meeting ready?”
The phone on Debra’s desk rang, and she held up a finger for me to hold my horses while she answered it. “Donal Larkin’s office.”
I chewed off another bite of protein bar while Debra listened to whoever was on the other end of the line. Cradling the phone between her ear and shoulder, she pulled the packets I needed out of a stack on her desk.
Thank you, I mouthed, taking them from her and heading back into my office.
“Hold on,” she said to the person on the phone. “I’ll ask him.”
I halted and turned on my heel, eyebrows raised.
“It’s the lobby receptionist,” she said. “Someone’s downstairs asking for you.”
That was unusual enough to get my attention. We didn’t get walk-ins at a firm like this. “Who?” I asked around a mouthful of protein bar.
“She says she’s a friend of yours. Tess McGregor?”
I let out a groan and scrubbed my palm over my face. “Jesus, really?”
Tess had emailed me twice in the last week, asking if we could talk, and I hadn’t gotten around to answering her yet. I assumed it was more trivial bullshit to do with our upcoming high school reunion that I neither had the time for nor gave a damn about. Unbelievable that she’d actually showed up at my fucking office over alumni association drama.
“Want me to take care of it?” Debra offered, her expression brightening at the prospect of going to battle on my behalf.
I looked at my watch and shook my head. “No, I’ll go down and see her.” Might as well deal with Tess now that she was here. The meeting I had in a few minutes would save me from having to talk to her for too long.
“He’s on his way down,” Debra said into the phone.
I handed the packets back to her. “Can you make sure these get to the conference room for the meeting?”
Shoving the last of the protein bar in my mouth, I sent up a prayer for strength and forbearance before I headed downstairs to deal with Tess fucking McGregor, who was apparently never going to stop making my life miserable.
I saw her as soon as I stepped off the elevator. Standing by the reception desk in a tailored red coat and tall black boots, not a hair out of place despite the windy April weather outside. Even though she had her back turned, my eyes zeroed in on her as if pulled by a magnet. Same upright posture, same proud tilt of her head, same athletic frame. Same Tess.
She turned around, and a band pulled tight around my chest as our eyes met.
Interacting with Tess always brought up a lot of complicated, messy, unpleasant emotions that I’d tried hard to repress. We’d been friends growing up, but our senior year of high school we’d hooked up for a while and…let’s just say it had ended badly.
Extremelybadly.
Although we still corresponded about alumni stuff occasionally via email and social media, I’d managed to avoid seeing her in person since our last high school reunion ten years ago.
She looked good, dammit. Gorgeous, in fact. The observation caused an unsettling sensation in the pit of my stomach.
Or maybe I was still hungry. Hopefully, that was all it was.
