Page 88 of Beautiful Crazy

I could send flowers to his office.

Nah. Guys don’t always love flowers.

Clean the loft from top to bottom?

Nah. Something just for him.

Date night?

Maybe.

Blow job?

Well, obviously.

Surprise lunch date?

“That’s it!”

Lola meows at my outburst.

“I can surprise him at his office and take him to lunch! He’s close to the sports bar, and he loves their burgers.”

Lola meows again, so I lean over and scoop her into my arms. “I think he would like that a lot, don’t you, Lola?”

Her purring is all the confidence I need to get myself put together and prettied up for Emmett so I can take him on a quick surprise lunch break.

With all the busy traffic downtown, sometimes it’s just as fast to walk as it is to drive, so since the weather is pleasantly warm again today, I think I’ll walk to Emmett’s office instead of getting my car. The sports bar he likes is just up the block from where he works so it’s an easy and relatively quick jaunt.

I enter the tall glass building and take the elevator up to the eleventh floor excited to surprise Emmett.

“Can I help you, miss?” The older woman behind the front desk asks. The nameplate on her desk says

Mrs. McMurray.

I smile at her and let her know who I am. “Hello. Yes, you can actually. I’m a friend of Emmett Fox’s and he doesn’t know I’m here.” I lean in to be a little more secretive. “I was hoping to surprise him with a lunch date today.”

The receptionist tilts her head, grinning from ear to ear. “Oh, well isn’t that the sweetest thing. We just love Emmett around here. He’s such a gentleman.”

“Well, he’s always talking about how much he loves working here.” That’s partially true. “And I know he’s had a couple very exciting days, so I wanted to do something nice for him.”

“Oh, my, yes. He shares a cubicle office space with three other people. Their room is just down that hall.” She points to her right. “And it’s the third door on the right. Why don’t you walk down there and surprise him yourself? I won’t tell him you’re coming.”

Hope flutters inside me. “Thank you, Mrs. McMurray.”

I step quietly down the hall, looking around as I go. The entire floor is made up of glass offices and cubicle spaces. The walls are a drab gray with matching gray cubicles. Except for several large posters of corporate account logos, there’s no color in here at all. I could never work in a space like this. Sure, the neutral color is basically a blank canvas, but I need the color throughout the day to keep my imagination moving in the right direction. I need the energy from the yellows and the oranges and the reds, and I need the calming blues and purples. Staring at gray all day would turn me into a very unhappy and uncreative person, but to each their own.

When I reach what should be Emmett’s office, there’s nobody in the room. I can tell which cubicle is Emmett’s right away, though, as he has several pictures of us tacked just above his desk. There’s a picture of us from Beckham and Hadley’s wedding that he took just after our activities in the loft as well as one of us dancing at the reception. There’s another one he took of us at Wood’s Tavern the last time we were there for karaoke night. It makes me smile that he thinks about me during the day.

“Did Emmett see that today?”

A few voices pick up from outside the office door. At the sound of Emmett’s name, I peek over his cubicle and see three ladies standing in the hallway that I obviously don’t know.

“Yeah, he said it was nothing, but it doesn’t look like nothing, right?”

One of the girls laughs. “There’s no way it’s nothing. That girl is all over him.”

Girl? What girl?

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