Page 80 of The Law of Attraction
“Could it be a loose connection?” she asked.
“Maybe.” He grabbed his hard hat on his way to talk to the shift manager. “I’ll go outside and see what’s up.”
It took them two hours to identify the problem. It turned out the new network switch Adam had installed was in direct sunlight in the latter half of the day, causing it to overheat. Which of course he couldn’t have known when he’d installed it under thick cloud cover on Wednesday.
Once he’d relocated it, they were good to go again. A simple fix for a simple problem, but it could have caused major complications if they’d been interfacing with the market and dropped telemetry like that. One tiny error like that could have cost the company millions of dollars in fines, like a butterfly flapping its wings and causing a hurricane.
A disaster had been narrowly averted, and they both knew it.
Adam had pulled a chair up beside Olivia’s desk to watch the sub-second telemetry reporting on her screen. He swiveled to face her, his expression contrite. “You were right about waiting another day.” There was an apology in his voice, if not in his actual words. “We would have been in deep shit if I hadn’t listened to you.”
It was gratifying to hear him commend her for the same caution he’d criticized her for before. But her sense of fair play was too strong to take all the credit for this victory. She wouldn’t have been able to pull this off if it hadn’t been for him. She wouldn’t have even had the courage to try, if not for him pushing her to take a risk and stretch herself.
“Yeah, but you were right that we could do the integration in half as much time as I thought we needed. If it’d been up to me, we would have insisted on a whole extra week, and pissed off the CIO and the board.” She spun her chair a little, so her knee bumped against his leg. “So we were both partially right, and both partially wrong.”
A smile played across his lips. “The truth was halfway in between. You know what that means?”
“What?”
“We make a good team.”
A matched set, her mind whispered.
If only.
It was hard to picture her and Adam ever being as cozy and easy with one another as Penny and Caleb were. But maybe they could make their own kind of cozy.
“We moderate each other’s worst instincts and complement each other’s strengths.” Adam’s leg exerted pressure against hers, though from the waist up his posture was all business. They were back to playing the Quiet Game.
The weekend shift manager wandered out of his office with a coffee cup in his hand, and Olivia’s gaze shifted to her computer screen. Beneath the desk, she laid her hand on her thigh so her fingers would graze Adam’s knee.
Together, they watched the progress bar on their last test tick toward completion, counting down the minutes until they were released from the constraints of professional behavior.
At nine o’clock—three hours ahead of schedule—the newly acquired Walhalla Power Plant officially went online.
They’d run the last of the connectivity tests, verified the data with ERCOT, and texted the all-clear to the trade floor, giving them the go-ahead to start selling power from the plant.
They stuck around for another hour after that, drinking a round of celebratory beers from the minifridge in the shift manager’s office, before heading back to the motel.
Olivia glared up at the security cameras as she and Adam walked across the gravel parking lot. If it weren’t for Big Brother spying on them, she’d push him up against the car and kiss him.
A mile down the road, Adam suddenly pulled off onto the shoulder, hit the hazards, and put the car in park.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, alarmed.
“Nothing,” he said, unclipping his seat belt and turning toward her. “Nothing at all.”
When his hand skimmed her cheek after hours of touch deprivation, it set off pyrotechnics on the surface of her skin. She breathed out in relief at the contact she’d been craving all day.
Then his lips touched hers.
Kissing him felt like falling, only it was the kind of free fall she never wanted to come out of. A feeling of completion shuddered through her like an earthquake. She would still be feeling this kiss days from now. She’d be sitting in a plant ops status meeting next week and her lips would still be tingling with the aftershocks of this kiss.
When they finally came up for air, Adam rested his forehead against hers like he’d spent every last bit of energy kissing her. “I’ve been wanting to do that all day.”
“God, me too.”
They stayed clenched together for a few dreamy seconds, forehead to forehead, eyes closed, his hand curled around the back of her neck as their breath mingled in shaky puffs.
