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She nods. “Sandra thinks she found something.”
That is worthy of a smile. “I thought it was going to take months.”
“Apparently, it’s something pretty big too. I just got the file. It’s in the conference room. You want to have a look with me?”
I’d been dragging, counting down the minutes to quitting time. This changes things. “Absolutely.” Instantly, I spring up and follow her down the hall.
She shows me the files. Apparently, all the way back to when they were first married, there were quite a few personal transactions attributed to the restaurant and a number of huge withdrawals totaling over one million dollars that were moved out of the restaurant and sent overseas. It definitely smacks of something illicit.
“You think he knew he wanted to leave her, and so he was shielding his assets from her? Even years ago?” I ask her.
“That’s what it looks like,” she says with a shrug.
It might be Friday, but this is too good to wait the weekend on. This time when we decide to stay late and work on the case, I’m actually okay with it.
Of course, Tenley is, too. But it’s different. She’s lit up. Excited. Exhilarated. She’s driven, focused, concentrating so hard on the files in front of her, she barely looks at me. She’s also wearing these thick, nerd glasses with round frames.
And it’s as sexy as hell.
She once called me a distraction, but now I’m the distracted one. There’s an electricity in the air, and most of the time, all I can do is sit back and watch her work. Every time she looks up, I expect her to say something snide, like, Are you going to help? Instead, she bites her lower lip, which I think might be the hottest thing I’ve ever seen.
If this were one of my fantasies, she’d get up on the table, rip that clip from her hair and the glasses from her face, and cat-crawl over to me with a wicked look in her eyes.
After a few hours, sometime after midnight, she closes the folder and taps it with her pen. “That’s it. I think we’ve got him.”
I’m not sure. Not because I don’t believe in Tenley; actually, quite the opposite. I’ve just been so mesmerized by her that I couldn’t even tell you what was in those files. “I trust you.”
“You do?”
I shrug. “Sure.”
She pulls her glasses off and sighs, and that fantasy of mine edges a bit into reality. She just needs to take out that clip, shake her hair a bit…
It makes me think of my sweet Stranger. I have to wonder why she thought I would care what she looked like. Does she really think I’m that shallow? Okay, maybe I am—I’m here, gawking at my sexy-librarian coworker. But while I’m a sucker for a pretty face, and I have had long-term relationships before with beautiful women, I’ve never shared as much with another person as I have with my Stranger. It’s only thirty more days until we can see each other, and I don’t even care. I won’t ever connect with anyone like I have with her.
But I am hard up. Really hard up.
Not to mention, hard. And it’s all my ass-kissing co-worker’s fault.
Tenley pushes away from the desk. “Ready to head home?”
She seems perplexed that I’m not doing my usual bit of trying to be the first to leave the office. Instead, I push my chest up against the table and motion to her glasses. “I never knew you wore those.”
She blinks. “Oh. Yeah. My contacts were bothering me.”
I inspect them. They’re thick, which reminds me of my conversation with my Stranger. “Lazy eye?”
“Mmmhmm.” She suddenly looks up at me, and something in her expression changes. The bleary-eyed exhaustion goes out, and she’s left looking… alarmed.
Before I can ask her what the problem is, she says, “It’s you. You’re him.”
She’s playing some sort of game with me. There’s a punch line at the end of this. “I’m who?” I mumble, shifting under the desk to get my cock to behave, because I think she’s on to me.
I expect her to say something like, The pervert who’s hard for me while I’m trying to conduct actual business.
Instead, she says, “You’re Stranger88.”
My mouth opens, but nothing comes out. Nothing can come out. Two worlds I’ve kept perfectly separated are now suddenly thrown together, and the result is a combination that makes no sense whatsoever.
“Stranger7721?” I finally spit out.
She nods slowly.
Holy shit.
“I didn’t want it to be you,” she says, her voice a whisper.
Oh, I can tell that. She looks horrified, now. But I’m too shocked to be insulted. And now that I think about it, it makes perfect sense. Of course she’s my Stranger. I might have tried to keep those two worlds separate, but they always kept colliding. Again and again in unexpected ways. In a lot of ways, it was completely natural, completely meant to happen, like fate.
