Page 31 of Until You

Lanie glanced over at her cousin, who was still distracted. “It should have an auto-recovery file, but the computer might have stored it in a different folder. You pulled it out of the cloud, right? Check your documents and desktop. Or better yet, do a search of your entire computer with the first part of the name of the file. Maybe that will pull it up.”

“Good idea.”

“That’s why I get paid the big bucks,” she teased, although she was secretly flipping out. If the file was really gone, she would either have to accept that the report wouldn’t be turned in on time or tell Britt she had to leave so she could help Stephanie. A voice in her head told her there was no shame if they couldn’t get the report done on time. It was an unreasonable request, purposely set up to test Lanie. But she was too stubborn to let Eve win, even though Stephanie was paying the price.

“Steph,” she said, trying to keep the defeat out of her voice. “It’s okay. Eve purposely set us up to fail, so maybe we should just throw in the towel. At least we tried.”

“I found it!” Stephanie squealed in her ear. “It was on my desktop.”

“Oh, thank God.” Lanie sighed and rested her forehead on Tyler’s chest. “But that doesn’t change what I said earlier. She can’t assume we don’t have a life and assign unrealistic deadlines.”

“But we don’t have a life,” Stephanie said in a much more chipper tone than before. The two of them had joked endlessly about the fact that their career was their life, but tonight it seemed totally pathetic.

“Maybe it’s time we did.”

“Lanie!” Brittany called out, and Tyler grabbed her arm.

She glanced up, realizing that not only had she rested her head against his chest, but the rest of her body was pressed against him.

“I’ll come by the office when I’m done,” she said as she hung up

Lanie spun around to face her irate cousin.

“Seriously, Lanie. It’s a Saturday night. Can’t you let your job go for just one night?”

“It’s my fault,” Tyler said, taking the phone from Lanie and putting it back into his pocket as he walked toward Britt. “I asked her to make a call for me.”

Brittany put her hands on her hips and gave him a pointed look, clearly not buying it. “Right…” She turned to Lanie. “Who did you call?”

“Um…” Who did she call? “Are you really going to invade Tyler’s privacy like that?”

“Lanie.”

Lanie cast a glance at Tyler, who made a gesture to his head. But she blurted out, “I was calling his date.”

“What?” Brittany asked in shock.

Tyler’s eyes widened, and Celesta looked upset. That was interesting.

“Yeah. I was calling his date…because of his head. He can’t meet her at the bar for drinks because he has to go get stitches.”

Tyler looked like he was enjoying this too much.

Brittany’s eyes narrowed. “So why did you call her?”

Lanie glanced over at Tyler, then her cousin. “He said she’d never believe him if he called, so since I was the one to maim him, I thought that I should call and cover his ass.”

“And did it work?”

Lanie released a short laugh. “What do you think? She thinks he’s spending the night with me and trying to get out of their date.”

Britt swung her gaze from Lanie to Tyler, then back again. “I don’t believe it for a second. You’re having Lanie cancel the first date you’ve had since April?” she asked in disbelief.

And that was even more interesting. One, how was Britt so familiar with Tyler’s dating life? And two, Lanie had seriously misread Tyler as a womanizer. No self-respecting player would have gone five months without sleeping with a woman, let alone a date.

“Britt,” Tyler said in a tight voice. “Believe it or not, I don’t clear my social life with you.”

Britt wasn’t buying it. She turned back to Lanie. “What was her name? Both of you say it at the same time.”

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