Page 5 of Against the Clock

CHAPTER 4

KELSEY

In the cube farm life, time feels more like a construct than ever. I’m at my desk in the station office, working on what feels like a million different things. Time’s passing, yes, but with the glow of the computer screens and the fluorescents overhead, it sure as heck doesn’t feel like it. My stomach grumbles in protest of the early lunch I took—the only sure indicator that I haven’t slipped into some weird vortex where time doesn’t exist.

Yawning, I lean back in my chair, stretching my arms way out behind me.

And brush up against something solid. Someone solid.

“Yeaaack!” I yelp, jumping to my feet. I fling my AirPods out and whip around. They skitter across the desk. My hands go to my chest, my heart racing a mile a minute.

Only to see Daniel Harrison.

He grins at me.

My heart skips a beat.

“We have to stop meeting like this,” he says, tucking his hands in his pants pockets.

A regular suit. A nice one, navy-blue, with the barest hint of pinstripe. It shows off his broad shoulders, his trim waist. A light blue button-down, unbuttoned just enough to show a hint of thickly muscled chest.

“What?” I finally manage. “Meeting like what?”

“I hit you at my place of work, now you hit me at yours. People are going to talk.”

I glance around, because despite the fairly late hour—after six on a Friday—there are plenty of people around. He’s right, too. The people are, in fact, already talking. Leslie whispers behind her hand to Bruce from marketing, who stares at Daniel Harrison like he’s seeing a god in our midst.

“How did you get in here?” I ask, narrowing my eyes at the visitor pass affixed to his jacket.

He points at the pass. “I asked to?”

“Right,” I say. “And because you’re the quarterback for the Beavers you can just get in wherever you want?”

He blinks, as surprised by my acidic tone as I am.

“Sorry,” I sigh, pushing my likely frizzed-out hair out of my face. “It’s been a long day.”

“Well,” he says slowly, that mega-watt smile starting to grow on his face again, the one that sends his fans into overdrive, “to be completely honest with you, Kelsey Cole, I told them I had an invitation.”

“From whom?” I ask, then my jaw drops as I put it together. “From me.”

We have become quite the internet sensation—the feral Beavers fans putting together fan cam recuts of the moment he ran into me over and over again. I’ve been tagged so many times in random TikToks over the past week that I’ve nearly deleted the app four different times.

He tilts his head, a searching expression on his face, like he’s just now realizing this might not be the wonderful gesture he thought it was.

“Listen, if I read this wrong—” His eyes go round. “You’re married,” he says. His gaze dips to my left hand.

“What? No.” I hold up my bare hand, as if expecting to see a ring there.

“Boyfriend,” he says, rapid-fire, his intense blue gaze pinning me in place where I’ve backed up almost into my computer screen on the desk. “You have a boyfriend, and it’s serious.”

“No?” I say, growing more confused by the second.

“Girlfriend?”

“Nope, just me.”

He runs a taped-up index finger around the inside of the collar of his shirt. “Man, you were making me sweat that. So you are good with me taking you to dinner?”

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