Page 56 of Dating Mr. Right A Collection
The redhead, oh the glorious, gorgeous redhead Ginny—who’s become a colleague, a teammate, a friend, and a lunch companion, which is thoroughly awesome because lunch is one of my three favorite meals, the others being breakfast and dinner—stares at me curiously, her lips quirking up.
“Are you saying I need to do squats, Noah?”
I gulp. I did not mean to insult her at all. All I want is to shower her with compliments. “No, your legs are—”
“You think I’m not working out enough?”
Abort, abort, abort.
I grab the steering wheel of the plane, and I try to fly it out of the crash landing that I’m about to careen into.
The last thing I want is for the woman I’m totally hot for to think she’s anything less than a ten. No, a one hundred. No, a one thousand on the scale of total freaking gorgeousness, charm, and personality.
She’s the warmest, friendliest gal I’ve ever met and has been since day one. If I could just figure out how to get her to see me in a new way.
I point furiously at the legs in question. “No, God no. Your legs are toned, tanned, and perfect.”
I mentally slap myself upside the head. Am I allowed to say that in the workplace? I have no idea what I’m allowed to do in the workplace anymore.
Julie snickers. “I feel like it might be my cue to go. Seems you two have a lot of multitasking and exercise life hacks to chat about.”
She exits as Ginny arches a brow and says, “I’ll have you know, I do try to do squats, because they are good for your legs.”
“They’re great for your legs. I pray at the altar of squats every single day.”
She taps her chin. “But I did kind of think”—Ginny drops her voice to a naughty whisper—“that squats were good for your butt . . .” She trails off, her eyes drifting as if she’s checking out her own rear end. Oh, I would like to be looking out of her sockets right now and staring at her fine ass. Not that I haven’t checked out her cheeks every single time she strolls down the hall. Yes, I like her personality, but I dig her looks too.
A lot.
I’m confident, though, that I can’t compliment her butt. That’s definitely not cool in the workplace.
“Your legs . . .”
Hold on. I don’t know if I’m even allowed to say her legs are perfect. Is that verboten? What the hell am I allowed to say to a woman I work with anymore? We’re lateral here at Heavenly. It’s not like I’m her boss or vice versa, but I don’t know if I’m allowed to hit on a woman at work.
“My legs are strong,” she says with a smile, finishing my half-said sentence. “I live in a fifth-floor walk-up, so I’ve already managed to combine exercise and transportation. See, that’s the one thing I have mastered multitasking.”
I breathe a sigh of relief. We’re on the same wavelength, so I decide to push a little further past the work zone. “Well, that’s awesome. Also, aren’t electric toothbrushes good for, ya know, other things?”
Her grin is the definition of wicked. “Noah, are you about to say something vastly inappropriate about electric toothbrushes?”
“I don’t know what I possibly could have been saying,” I say, as cheeky and innocent as possible.
She steps closer, her eyes tap-dancing with delight. “Were you going to say that using an electric toothbrush is a euphemism for using something else?”
I part my lips to speak when she flashes me a smile, presses a finger to her lips, and says, “We’ll just pretend neither one of us mentioned battery-operated devices.”
She exits in a cloud of honeysuckle copper hair and an Aussie accent that turns me all the way on. And yes, as she walks down the hall, I watch her walk away.
Someday, someday soon, I’m going to come up with a proper plan for how to woo Ginny Perretti.
2
Ginny
Groan.
Epic groan.
Absolutely epic groan worthy of a meme.
What was I thinking?
It’s a question I write in my idea notebook in big, blocky letters. Then, because I want to make sure I remember it, I do a 3-D outline of the block letters.
What were you thinking, self?
I can’t lead him on. Even though, my God, he is one of the cutest men I have ever seen. Cute as in red-hot, want to jump him, sexy as sin. But he’s a boy, that’s what I have to remind myself.
He’s twenty-freaking-five.
What the hell would I do with a twenty-five-year-old? What would we talk about?
The same things you have been talking about.
I tell that voice to shut up.
Because those arms, that face, that dusting of scruff. The whole picture of Noah Rivera is everything I shouldn’t want.
You don’t need a younger man.
I write it again.
And again.
