Page 74 of So Much More
“You done?” she asks after about ten seconds.
“Huh-uh,” I voice without moving my lips.
She pokes me in the belly, which makes me jerk away from her.
“Hey, I wasn’t done,” I protest.
“Ridiculous man.”
I grin at her, raise her hand to my lips, and kiss each of her knuckles before letting go of her.
“You going to keep standing there gazing at me with adoration?” she asks, when I don’t leave.
“Yep, until you go inside.”
“Not gonna happen.”
“Why?”
My heart clenches when she says, “Because I want to watch you walk away.”
thirty-two
“Can I take you to lunch today?” Randall asks when he stops by my office Monday morning.
My stomach quivers as I glance at my open day planner. “Yeah, but I need to be back by one for a meeting.”
“I can make that happen. Think about where you want to go.”
He’s gone before I can respond. That’s probably for the best, because he’s wearing the navy-blue suit again, and if he had stuck around much longer, I may have started drooling. It’s going to be hard to get through lunch with him without making a fool of myself.
The next few hours are filled with a flurry of phone calls, and before I know it, Randall is leaned up against my doorjamb again, looking so delectable it ought to be a crime.
“Ready?” he says.
“Yep. Let me grab my purse.”
“You don’t—”
I cut him off. “I do need it. We’re supposed to take turns paying, remember?”
I can tell he’s tempted to roll his eyes, but he refrains.
“I want to pay,” he says. “In fact, you agreed to let me take you to lunch, which implied I would be paying.”
“Not gonna happen. Plus, there’s more than one reason why women carry purses, you know. They’re not just for carrying money around.”
I can tell he wants to make a comment, but he thinks better of it and instead holds out his hand to me. “We need to get cracking, if we’re going to have you back here in an hour.”
As we walk through the office, several co-workers see us, and they all glance at our joined hands, but nobody comments on it. Brian must have spread the word enough that nobody’s surprised to see us together.
“Where are we going?” Randall asks as we wait for the elevator.
“Surprise me.”
He takes me to a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant a few blocks away.
“I didn’t know this was here,” I say.
