Page 79 of The Law of Attraction
It was killing her that they couldn’t touch. They hadn’t even been able to kiss when he’d parked the car, because there were security cameras outside, and they didn’t need the weekend shift manager watching them suck face. She was boiling with the need to feel Adam’s touch, and from the look in those eyes of his, he felt exactly the same.
It was torture.
But also sort of fun?
Olivia’s competitive streak had been activated again. As the hours wore on and the sexual tension crackling across the room between them amped up, she’d turned it into a contest.
They were playing an adult version of the Quiet Game that Olivia’s elementary school teachers had inflicted on her and her fellow classmates. In this version of the Quiet Game, they weren’t allowed to do anything to arouse the suspicion of the shift manager or his weekend crew. They could share meaningful looks and flirt with their eyes, but only if they could do it without being noticed.
They could even touch, occasionally, but only in the most innocent and unobtrusive ways. The way two coworkers might accidentally touch in the course of conferring over a laptop or sharing a meal from the vending machine. A casual brush of fingers here, a slight press against the thigh there, but nothing an observer would notice as untoward. Which turned out to be far more erotic and intoxicating than she’d imagined it could be.
She’d never fully appreciated the power of a tease before. How the lightest of touches when there was no possibility of follow-through could set her on fire, burning her from the inside out. And how she could do the same thing to someone else.
She propped her elbow on the desk and rested her chin on her palm, gazing across the room at Adam. Until the next batch of tests finished running, there wasn’t much for her to do.
Adam pretended not to be aware of her staring, but she knew from the way he reached up to run his fingers through his hair that he was very aware indeed. Christ, she loved his hair. It was unfair that he should have such lustrous, silky waves. She couldn’t wait to run her fingers through them tonight.
The weekend shift manager was in his office, eating his lunch. His attention was mostly divided between his club sandwich and his computer screen, but he could look up at any second. He was their ever-present chaperone. The principal standing over the punch bowl, whose presence kept the kids on the dance floor from engaging in too much hanky-panky.
Olivia let out a quiet little sigh of boredom, and Adam’s eyes drifted her way. He reclined in his chair and crossed his arms. His biceps bulged, straining at the fabric of his shirt, and she felt a bit of drool collect at the corner of her mouth.
She squirmed in her seat and crossed her legs. It wasn’t easy to be seductive in clumpy Doc Martens and a baggy plaid shirt.
There was a pencil cup on the desk in front of her, and she chose a long yellow Ticonderoga, spinning it between her fingers like a student waiting to take the SAT. Adam watched her intently, mesmerized.
She held the pencil up in front of her face and stroked it from eraser to tip.
His eyes flashed in response. Somehow he was grinning without moving his face.
She turned the pencil over and stroked it again, running her fingers slowly down its length and back again. Her heart gave a little leap of triumph when the corner of Adam’s mouth twitched.
Invigorated, she gripped the pencil as if she were about to write something, opened her mouth, and touched the tip to her tongue.
It was a powerful high, watching Adam’s eyes go black and wide because of something she’d done. She smiled to herself as she reached for a Post-it and wrote out a question.
He was leaning forward, curious to know what she’d written. She held the note up so he could read it.
You OK over there?
His expression was half amused and half something else that made her stomach flutter and her chest feel hot. The two of them were like Jim and Pam on The Office, sharing a silent in-joke and communicating across the room with heated glances and smirks.
Olivia tore the Post-it off the pad and wadded it up. Adam’s eyes were heavy and watchful as she leaned back in her chair, lifting up her shirt and thrusting her hip forward to tuck the crumpled note into the front pocket of her jeans. His tongue was practically lolling out of his mouth like a salivating Labrador.
That was when she remembered the toy robot she’d gotten in her kids meal at the airport—the one she’d named Tiny Adam. She dug it out of her purse and held it up, smiling. Adam pressed his lips together, barely containing a laugh as she wound the tiny crank with exaggerated movements.
She was enjoying this too much. If she wasn’t careful, she’d get carried away.
As she set the toy robot marching across the desk, Olivia glanced at her computer screen and sat bolt upright. “Come here,” she said, beckoning to Adam with her index finger.
He lifted his eyebrows in inquiry, trying to decipher if this was part of the game.
“I’m seeing a lot of packet loss coming from the number three turbine.”
He pushed himself to his feet, the Quiet Game forgotten as he peered down at her screen. The software was ticking out how many kilowatts were being generated by each turbine, and instead of numbers it was throwing zeros.
“Fuck,” he said.
Fuck was right. It could be anything, including a fire, but since none of the plant’s alarms were going off, chances are it was a problem with their software and not with the turbine itself.
