AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Am I the only one who thought this was a dinner party?” a voice whispered way too close to her ear. So close, she could feel warm breath on her neck, and goosebumps immediately jumped out to join the party. And how had he gotten over here so quickly?
“Nope,” she answered as she turned to face Ben. His broad body was even more captivating up close.
“Mia,” he said, tipping his head down a couple of inches to meet her eyes. “What do you think?”
Holy cannoli! Was he asking about his body? Had he caught her staring? Or felt her eyes glued to his pecs? And not with that runny glue they used in elementary school. No, this was like a super-glue-level fixation.
“Would you like to grab something to eat after this?”
Was he serious? Had she passed out and hit her head? Or she’d fallen asleep. Yes—in the middle of the restaurant during Mrs. Durris’s retirement party. Unlikely, but still more probable than Ben asking her to share another meal with him. In public. He barely ever talked to her at work. But he was talking to her now … as her boss. Nothing more, despite what the swirling in her stomach was working overtime to get her to believe. She needed to remind herself about the way he ghosted her years ago. It still stung, even though it shouldn’t have.
“Uh, I mean, what—"
He chuckled as he ran his hand through his hair, breaking up the gel he’d applied. It flopped in waves of chocolate brown, and Mia wondered why he’d never worn it like that before. “If you don’t want to, I totally understand.” He rounded his shoulders as he tucked his hands in the pockets of his dress pants, an act that should have endeared her to him. But all it did was showcase the fact that he’d rolled his dress shirt sleeves up to display the loveliest set of forearms Mia had ever seen. Not that she went around rating forearms. But if she had, he would have won the grand prize. Whatever that was worth.
A nervous smile played on his face, throwing her as much as the fabulous forearms, because this wasn’t like him. The Ben she knew was a driven workaholic who never saw the light of day—only the fluorescent light of the office. She looked at his pore-less face. Maybe that was the secret to his perfect complexion. He couldn’t get any sun damage if he never saw daylight.
“I—” she began when Darren’s narrow, squinted glare met her eyes. Was he mad? His moods changed a dozen times an hour, so who could keep up? Did someone snatch the last of the salami on the charcuterie board? When his eyes trailed up and down her body, she was not only relieved she’d worn pants today, but she also wanted to get the heck out of the restaurant. By any means necessary. When her stomach roared like Chewbacca in distress, she knew her answer.
“Grabbing a bite sounds great. But where?”
“I know a really good pizza place …”
Did Mia mind eating pizza two nights in a row? No, she did not. Like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, she could and would subsist on pizza for the remainder of her days.
After they’d eaten their bodyweights in pizza, they walked out of the restaurant, the steady hum of traffic filling the silence that fell over them. Mia breathed in the cool breeze.
When they stopped at a traffic light two blocks from the pizzeria, the air got heavy.
Staring at the building, its large windows giving a clear view of the open space inside despite the darkness of evening, she allowed her mind a second to imagine the possibilities, however unattainable they were.
“Nice place,” Ben said as he stood next to her, peering through the window next to the For Sale sign.
“It really is,” she responded, barely above a whisper.
“So, what’s the story here? Or do you regularly stand in front of old buildings looking like the heart-eyes emoji?”
“No,” she said with a chuckle. She reached up and touched the exterior, her fingers snagging on the rough bricks. “I just enjoy scouting out real estate. Probably because I’m hooked on all those home renovation shows.”
He narrowed his eyes in her direction, like he was sniffing out the lie he knew she’d told. But he’d said earlier he didn’t take risks.
Neither did she.
So she kept the truth tightly inside the rest of the way home.
Chapter Five
Thunder rumbled in the distance as Mia stood on the sidewalk in front of her apartment building. People walked by with their umbrellas as dark clouds floated in the gray sky. A foreshadow of her day ahead? Most likely.
After their enjoyable evening, Ben greeted Mia in the lobby at work the next morning as broody as ever. She didn’t think he’d be all warm and fuzzy at work like he’d been at the pizzeria. He had a job to do and employees to manage. A no-nonsense façade was needed here. But she thought he would have at least been—what? Lukewarm, maybe?
Instead, he was as chilly as the raindrops that now plunked the top of Mia’s head.
She tried not to take it personally. Until she overheard a conversation she probably shouldn’t have. Turned out, Ben had been tapped a couple weeks ago to schmooze with a potential out-of-town client, a trip he was planning to take alone. Until Darren told him that Mia would now be going with him. Maybe he’d seen how well they’d been working on their presentation. Perhaps she was finally getting noticed at the firm.
Her spark of excitement lasted but a second, like a Fourth of July sparkler that met its untimely demise at the hands of a gusty wind. “We shouldn’t go together,” Ben grumbled to his boss when he’d heard the news. “This isn’t a good idea,” another soundbite from the man she foolishly thought she’d reconnected with just twelve hours prior.
“Ready?” a voice griped from the rolled-down window of a black Honda Civic, pulling her into the present. Her legs stiffened in response, her body not wanting to walk to the car. Or to go on this trip. But her brain ultimately won over—she needed this job, and she wasn’t about to let some brooding, fickle man get her fired. And also, the rain was picking up. She so wasn’t one of those people who looked sexy and gorgeous when she got wet. More like scary and rodent-like.
