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CHAPTER 1
No one should be expected to exhibit self-control before ten in the morning.
Especially when their coworker, a practical photocopy of Chris Hemsworth, was leaning over their shoulder to dig through the dregs of the company candy jar.
The fact that Everly Winters hadn’t audibly inhaled his bonfire-built-of-air-fresheners scent or brushed her knuckles across his stubble should win her some kind of gold medal. She hadn’t even had a sip of her latte yet, for god’s sake.
This was torture.
She contracted her muscles until they were stone and held her breath. Not since her last attempt at yoga had she achieved such levels of stillness. Inside, though, her heart was dancing an uncoordinated rumba.
Get it together,she told herself.This is your workplace, not a meat market.She homed in on her monitor and changed an item in the open spreadsheet, only for it to crash for the third time this morning. “Bastard,” she grumbled.
“Everything okay, V?” James’s words blew warm across her arm, summoning goose bumps to the surface of her skin. He was the first person at Matten-Waverly to give her a nickname, and she loved it, despite the fact that V wasn’t the most logical abbreviation of Everly.
“Will you bail me out of jail if I murder this computer?”
James flicked aside a perfectly good Twix to grab a Snickers like the true monster he was. “Depends on how much.” The right corner of his mouth kicked up in a grin.
“Wow. A fickle friend you are.” Everly swiveled in her chair so he wouldn’t see her gaze raptly at his fingers as they peeled away the candy wrapper.
He circled her desk to put himself right back in her line of sight. “Some crimes need to be punished.”
“This document has crashed multiple times. We’re looking at a clear case of self-defense.” Under her sweater, Everly’s skin had grown warm. Her little exchanges with James rarely went on for this long, and the prolonged attention was inducing hot flashes. Sometimes she wondered how people that attractive managed to exist without combusting.
“You know, the computers in Design are better quality,” James said around a bite of nougat and peanuts. Once he swallowed, he bent over the chest-height counter to plunge into the candy again. He was so close now that the strands of golden hair that had fallen out of his bun brushed against her cheek.
For the second time in ten minutes, Everly performed a reverse Pygmalion: woman transforming into statue.
“I like it over here in Reception. It’s cozy.” And stable. Everly knew exactly what was required of her and could fulfill those tasks with ease. It wasn’t like a creative job, where there were so many opportunities to get it wrong.
Clicking open a browser, she navigated to her email with the precision and focus of a neurosurgeon, trying with all her might to ignore the way James’s biceps strained the sleeves of his button-down shirt.
Too many of her best daydreams starred those muscles, and Everly, clutching them as he saved her from an icy sidewalk, or, in her more daring fantasies, from falling down the second-floor stairwell where they were making out on their lunch break. (Once, there’d been this whole intergalactic motif right after she’d watchedGravity,but it was really hard to make space suits sexy, even in her imagination. Too many clips and gadgets and whatnot.)
In her head, Everly could hear Becca clucking her tongue. As her best friendandsister-in-law, Becca had decided long ago that it was her duty to have an opinion on every part of Everly’s life. And she had a whole host of them about James and his yet-to-be-expressed feelings for Everly.
And maybe Becca was right. Maybe the eye contact they shared every time he crossed from one end of the office suite to the otherwasmeaningful. Maybe the finger guns he seemed to only shoot at her, the nickname only she got, all suggested that he might be interested in being more than work pals.
But if Everly didn’t ask him out, if she didn’t push at this, then there was never the chance that those maybes were nos. The possibility of him… ofthem…persisted into infinity.
He was Schrödinger’s date.
She tilted away from James’s wayward strands of hair and cut her eyes to the computer. She’d barely caught a glimpse of a notification from the forums of her favorite makeover show,On the Plus Side,in her inbox before he rounded her desk.
“If Bob knew how good you were, he’d have transferred you over to us by now.”
Everly shook her head. Her boss had never asked for her portfolio. She was pretty sure he was waiting for her to approach him, but sheappreciated that he didn’t push her. This reception job allowed her paid benefits and a livable paycheck, and being at a marketing firm meant that, if she ever wanted to, she could use her visual arts degree, so college didn’t feel like a waste of time and money. As far as she was concerned, she was exactly where she needed to be.
“I get to dabble a little in everything here. I’ve learned a ton.” As she spoke, Everly tugged on the middle of her buttoned black cardigan to add a tad more room to the waist. Stupidly, she’d put it through the dryer last weekend, and now it hugged her curves more than she’d hoped. But as she fussed with the buttons (her kingdom for some that didn’t gape at her breasts), Jazzy Germaine’s favorite line fromOn the Plus Sideechoed in Everly’s head.
People see you the way you see yourself.
She forced her hands still. If she thought her sweater fit fine, everyone else would, too. Including James, who, after grabbing another piece of candy (a Mounds,gag), kneeled beside her chair.
“Fiiine. I’ll stop trying to recruit you for Design. But can I show you this one thing?”
Everly shrugged because what were words? His proximity erased everything from her brain like her mother claimed magnets used to do to credit cards.
