Page 15 of A Break in Communications

“And instead of bringing another chair over, you sat on my lap facing me—”

“Lucy,” she blurted, a hand to her face. Sean cleared his throat loudly.

“Well—I just wanted to set expectations with everything. Thank you both again for your help with this project, I’m glad you’re working together so smoothly.”

Anna hung her head, mumbling something inaudible. I stood up, smiling his way. “Thank you, Sean. I promise we won’t get into any inappropriate behavior. Good luck with work today. Anything Anna and I should know before we get in?”

A quick, simple daily briefing helped take the edge off Anna’s mortification at least a little, but she was still hunched into herself when we got out of the office, cheeks still tinged red, and she shot me a look when we shut the door behind us.

“Masters.Why are you tellingeveryonewe’re a couple?”

I blinked innocently her way. “I didn’t say we were a couple.”

“You’re going to be the death of me, Masters,” she groaned, clutching her forehead. I suppressed a smile as best I could.

“Fighting the rumor is only going to give it more traction, darling dearest. Let’s just go along, deprive it of oxygen, and if it helps win Gould over in the process, all the better.”

She glared at me. “What exactly is your game plan here, Masters? How doesthisplay into your promotion?”

Promotion? Oh… right. Aiming for the executive role. I didn’t feel like trying to explain that was the furthest thing from my mind right now, so I just winked at her instead, and I said, “A magician never reveals her secrets, Preston.”

“Fuck off. Go get some work done. Or don’t. Fuck it all up, see if I care. Done with seeing your stupid face today, Masters.” She stormed off, shoulders hunched, and I watched her walk away thinking how pretty her face was in profile, too. She really was divinity. Too sinfully beautiful for heaven and too divinely radiant for hell, left to grace the earth with every celestial footstep.

I guess I needed to get some work done today.

Chapter 5

Anna

I screwed up.

Distracted with Lucy showing up and sitting down on my desk, picking through my files, eavesdropping on what was going on with Sean, that I’d forgotten something deeply, devastatingly important, and that was getting the notice along to Daniel about Kelcey’s mishap to have it sorted, which meant I found myself at the end of the workday standing in the event space with my soul leaving my body at finding six hundred boxes’ worth of lights strung up over every surface.

Kelcey scratched her head next to me, where she’d come in just after me and also stopped to take it all in, and she said, “Yeesh. Good thing we pared the order down. I can’t imagine what even more would have been like.”

“Uh… huh. Probably a lot… a lot of lights.”

The event space was—well, nice, I guess, even if the lights were alittleoverboard. It was a big classical-style building close to the office, with a couple of big Christmas trees through the room and tables dressed in sleek white tablecloths, strings of garland hung up along the edges of the room, packed full of lights. Columns wrapped in lights, lights around the edges of the tables, lights in the trees, lights hung from the chandeliers, lights wrapped up in bundles of tinsel and ornaments in the center of each table, and so many cables hastily run under carpets… place was probably a fire hazard. If it caught fire, I hoped itkilled me first. Soft symphonic Christmas music streamed in from the speakers overhead, falling over the bustling sound of conversation—the whole company was packed in for this, not just our department, and I always forgot how many people worked for the company, even if I was emailing a million different people all the time.

And all of them had way, way too many lights because I got distracted by sitting on Lucy’s lap.

Kelcey grinned at me. “So, can I ask you a question?”

“No,” I said, and I started walking, and she picked up her pace to walk with me.

“How long have you and Lucy been dating?”

“Zero years, zero days, zero hours and zero minutes.”

She cut in front of me, turning to face me, her grin even bigger. “You two only just got together?”

I threw my hands up. “No, we didn’t—”

“Oh my god.” She put a hand over her face. “Don’t tell me I interrupted you two… getting together—”

“Kelcey.Work-appropriate conversations, please.”

She looked like a kid meeting Santa. “Oh mygod,that’s a yes. Congratulations, you both—”

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