“Michaels.”
Her eyes widened. Somewhere in her twenties, she was exactly the kind of woman people assumed were his type. Long, silky brown hair. Big eyes. Great cheekbones. A v-neck top that showed everything but her belly button. If he wanted to, he could take her out for lunch and have a nooner with her in her car. Or a spare office.
Fucking a receptionist, though, wasn’t part of the plan. It also wasn’t part of Dylan’s heart. Dead to the idea, he only had room for Laura right now. The receptionist perked up, tilting her head and brushing her hair forward, over her clavicle. “Oh, yeah, Laura! What beautiful flowers. I’m Debbie.”
He nodded. “Dylan.” Her eyebrows arched as she looked him up and down, appraising him like a piece of meat. Oh, boy. Being hit on like this didn’t surprise him.
Having zero internal response did.
“Yeah, I need to deliver them. You know the drill.” He leaned on the desk, peering into her eyes. Play it up, man, if it could get him what he wanted. “Somebody must really appreciate her.” He eyed the flowers; the spread was gorgeous. The receptionist’s could be, too, and from her body language it was clear he could dabble in it at his discretion. “So, can you tell me where her office is?”
“Oh, oh no, you can just leave those here. She’s...I don’t want to disturb her right now.” A look of fake sympathy washed over her face as she created a reason to wave him closer. He obliged, his nose inches from her as she whispered, “She...she actually...well, I’m kind of glad to see the flowers here because she seemed a little upset this morning and we managed to pry it out of her that she was having some man problems.”
“Oh, gotcha.” He ran a hand through his thick hair, drawing attention to his face, posing just a little. One of his model poses that he knew would show off his biceps. Debbie practically ate him with her eyes. “Oh, man, I hate guys like that.” Dylan shook his head. “Just, you know...it makes me want to be a better man. Flowers don’t solve everything. You can’t be a di**ck and expect a few roses to fix it all.”
Ding. That seemed to get her, and now all he had to do was go in for the kill. “You know, if she’s had that rough a time, I think it would be better if I just brought these in and delivered them myself and that way, you know, give her a little extra perk up to a crappy day.”
He wasn’t even making any sense at this point, but it didn’t matter; he could have been reciting the Pledge of Allegiance for all Debbie the Receptionist seemed to care. She was practically drooling. “Yeah, sure. Room 311,” she said, pointing vaguely down a hallway.
“Thanks so much, Hon,” he answered. Following her directions, knowing that if he turned back around her eyeballs would be glued to his ass, he sought out room 311. Down a corridor, past the coffee machine, past the bathroom, and then...whoa! Some tiny little interior office. Poor Laura didn’t even have a window. Maybe being a business analyst wasn’t as glamorous as he’d thought. He knocked softly.
“Just a minute,” shouted the voice from the other side. Yup, that was her. This was going to be one wild surprise. Steeling himself, he arranged the latte in one hand and the flowers in the other, trying to decide whether to smile or not. Too cheesy? When she opened the door, her expression was not quite what he expected. He thought he might see surprise. He thought he might even see fear.
Disgust had never occurred to him.
“Dylan, what are you doing here?” She glanced around the hallway as if his mere presence were something she wanted to hide from others.
“I’m delivering roses from an admirer,” he said, piling on more charm, hoping this was going to take.
“Really? Aren’t they better suited for your girlfriend?”
Where was that one coming from? “My girlfriend? What girlfriend?” he asked.
Someone at the copier a couple of offices down paused and craned their neck, their ear perked, catching whatever wave of gossip they could grab from the conversation he and Laura were having right here in the hall and he took that as a cue.
Nodding toward the person he said “Do you really want to have this conversation out here?”
Her face changed. She glanced over. “No, I don’t.” Ice Queen voice. If she could be any colder she’d be a glacial shelf in the Arctic. Ouch.
“Please, let me come in and let’s talk, ‘cause I don’t have a girlfriend and I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
She frowned, seeming to consider her options. Finally, she reached for the flowers, grabbed the latte with a yank, turned around and left the door open. He took that as an opportunity, stepped through and closed the door. She set the flowers on a filing cabinet and took a swig of the coffee.
The room was the most boring office he’d seen— and he was a firefighter, so he’d seen his share. At least the fluorescent lights didn’t blink on and off like crazy and trigger eye tics. Everything was beige. The floor was beige. The walls were beige. Nope, change that. Putty, he had recently learned, was the official name of the most boring shade ever. He’d learned that because he’d had to do some requisition forms for some boring filing cabinets. Replacing some pre-World War II office equipment at the firehouse.
None of that mattered. What mattered was that the dozen and a half roses that he bought were by far the only color in the room other than Laura’s perfect lime-green sweater covered by a nice double-breasted suit. She leaned back against the front of her desk, her butt forming beautiful curves against the edge, her arms crossed over her now-swelling breasts. He could tell that she was aroused just by the sight of him, but could also tell that her anger ran deep.
Where on earth had this come from? he wondered. At least he had some explanation for why she’d fled his bed at three in the morning. She thought he had a girlfriend? What the hell had Mike been telling her? Wait, that didn’t make any sense, ‘cause Mike swore up and down he hadn’t said a word about them to her. So...what?
“Why do you think I have a girlfriend?” he asked.
She said, “Well, when your bedroom is plastered with pictures of someone who looks like she was part of the Olympic beach volleyball team, it’s kinda hard to come to any other conclusion.” She gestured down at her belly and hips. “I, obviously, wasn’t picked to play for that team.”
“My bedroom pictures?” Huh? “Oh, my God!” he said, washing his face with his hand, rubbing his eye until he calmed himself down. “Jesus, Laura. That’s not my girlfriend. That’s Jill!”
She snorted. “So who’s Jill? Your wife?”
“Jill is my...man, this is complicated.”
“Yeah...” she replied, drawing out the word. “It’s always complicated. It was complicated with the last guy I dated. Seriously—he turned out to be married, too.”
“Oh, so you think...oh, no, Laura, Laura, no!” Dylan shook his head. “Jill’s dead. Jill’s my...my...former lover.” The words came out like a mouthful of packing peanuts. How could he describe Jill? She was just Jill. Giving her a label reduced her to so much less than she had been.
“Dead?”
“Yeah. She died of cancer eighteen months ago.”
“And so you have pict—oh! Oh, oh, no, Dylan, I’ve made such a big mistake!” she cried. All of the anger drained out of her voice, her hushed tones triggering more hope than mourning in him.
“I didn’t bring it up because it was just our first date, Laura,” Dylan explained. “But no, those are pictures of Jill. We—” watch it, Dylan “I was with Jill for almost 10 years. And, she, well...she died. She has, she had non-Hodgkins lymphoma. And there was nothing the doctors could do after really trying everything. So, that’s...that’s my girlfriend, as you put it.”
He stuffed his hands in his pockets and stared at the industrial carpet for a few seconds, then looked up at her. “Is that why you’ve been putting me off? Is that why you’ve been ignoring all of my messages, my texts, my voice mail—because you got up in the middle of the night and saw some pictures of this...of some woman and jumped to one hell of a conclusion?”
Oh, shit! Laura thought. She could see the anger forming in him and she couldn’t blame him.
So all this time Laura had been blocking him, hiding from him—no, running away from him—and had fled straight into Mike’s arms because she thought he had a wife or girlfriend? Damn it! Leaving Jill’s pictures all over his bedroom had been just part of his life; he’d never even considered taking them down. Hadn’t really noticed them as part of the scenery. They were just there.
It gave him pause now. Was he really over Jill? He knew Mike wasn’t, had never even begun to heal, but Dylan assumed he was past the worst of it, and that Jill would just remain as a lingering “what if.” The three of them had started to talk about having kids the year before she was diagnosed. That potential had been shut down fast by chemotherapy and radiation and just getting through life day by day. Whatever remained of Jill inside him, though, was bigger than he had realized. If a bunch of pictures were that overwhelming and made Laura think he was a two-timer, then it was time to re-evaluate himself.
