Her mind swirled. How did she process this? “What would have happened if one of us had just said something?” She clutched both letters, intending to examine them when her mind stopped whirling. “I have to go.”
When she stood, he reached out and took her hand. “Wait, please.”
She jerked her hand away reflexively and watched as a look of resignation crossed his face. “Brad, here’s the problem. I am going to react. I’m going to flinch and jump and startle. I’m going to obsessively check my environment and double-check my house and make sure all my doors are locked. I am way better than I was three or four years ago. I’ll be better three or four years from now. But like my limp, I cannot help how I react to movements and actions, especially of men. You don’t like it. You think I’m reacting toyou, but I’m not.”
He stood and reached for her hand again. “I think I’m starting to understand that. I apologize for taking it personally. I think part of it was worrying about what it was doing to you.”
“It doesn’t do anything to me. It’s just reflex.”
He stepped closer and ran his hands up her arms. “Then I’ll learn not to worry about you over it, if you’ll give me another chance to not be a presumptive jerk.”
Feeling the chaos in her heart start to settle and right itself, she leaned forward and put her forehead on his chest. “Deal,” she whispered as his arms came around her.
Brad stepped off the elevatorand immediately saw Ian coming out of the conference room. “Hey,” Brad greeted, shaking his hand. “Thought you were gone for your summer mission trip.”
“Six a.m. tomorrow,” Ian said, slipping his phone into his pants pocket and gesturing with the thin tube of building plans. “I should have left an hour ago, but we had something come up with the HVAC at a job. Had to stay and finish that.”
“You know, there are other engineers here.” Brad laughed and slapped a hand onto his shoulder. “You have a good trip. Give Calla our best.”
“You bet.” They walked in different directions. Brad stopped and talked to two more people before he made it to Valerie’s office.
He tapped on her door then opened it at her bidding. He found her sitting on the floor, surrounded by fabric color samples. She had a pencil between her teeth and a pad of paper in her lap. When she saw him, she smiled around the pencil.
“Miss Flynn, I was coming to see if you want to have lunch with me.”
“Mr. Dixon.” She slipped the pencil behind her ear and gestured at the floor. “I need a few more minutes. I’m almost at a stopping point.”
He crouched next to her and fingered a swatch of cloth the color of dark mustard. “What are you doing down here on the floor?”
“In Savannah, our workspaces were so small, so to work with a bunch of samples or something, I’d go into the break room and take over the floor. I just got used to it as a way to help me really think. Something about being down here helps me isolate my thinking and draws out my creativity.” She reached forward and picked up a bluish cloth and a tannish cloth. After reading the labels, she made notations in the notebook and set them to the side. She did the same thing about three more times, then smiled up at him. “All done.”
She gathered all the samples into different piles and put some of them into a file envelope, then she shifted to stand. It pained him to watch her shift her body to stand up. He could tell the movement hurt her hip and back. Nothing about the movement looked fluid; nothing looked natural or graceful. Once she got to her feet, she limped to her desk and put the notebook and pencil down before she used the desk as a brace to stretch.
“Sorry. Sitting on that floor makes everything tighten up.”
It bothered him, but it didn’t appear to bother her, so he tried not to make a big deal of it. “Would it be better to use a conference table?”
“You’d think but it doesn’t feel the same. Must just be because of the way I trained my mind. Or, I like being down in the midst it all and that’s how I have to do it.” When she stepped away from the desk, she moved with more ease and less obvious pain. She pulled her purse out of a desk drawer and grabbed her ID out of the computer’s key-card reader. “Okay,” she smiled, “ready.”
He had his hand on the doorknob when she stopped and smiled up at him. “This is the third time this week we’ve had lunch. At this point, when we walk out that door, people are going to start talking. Are you ready for that?”
“Are you?” His smile and his glance made Valerie catch her breath. He could barely wait to have the world acknowledge them as a couple.
Her laughter filled the room. “If I weren’t, I would have said no to lunch. I just don’t know if you, as a Dixon whose life has been spent slightly separated from the pack, can fathom the amount of gossip that goes on in an office environment. What happened a few weeks ago in the women’s bathroom was just the tip of a proverbial iceberg.”
Brad thought he was ready for any interoffice gossip. Her words made him question that notion. Maybe he needed to back off and let her lead a public romance.
He ran his tongue over his teeth and smiled a little closed-lipped smile. “Well, Valerie, while I appreciate the schooling, I can assure you that I know all I need to know about office gossip. And, the best way to kind of get ahead of that is to come to your office three days in a row and take you to lunch. I might even convince you to let me hold your hand walking back into the building. That should really bring it all home, don’t you think?”
She looked up at him, processed everything he said, then threw her head back and laughed. “You are what your mama would call incorrigible.”
“I am that.” He held the door open and let her precede him out into the office area. “I actually have to restrain myself quite often.”
Three steps into the cubicle area, Valerie stopped walking. He almost stepped into her. She pivoted and grinned up at him before quickly rising to her toes and giving him a quick kiss on the mouth. He was so surprised that he could only grab a shoulder in response. “I, too, can be incorrigible. How do you think I learned the word?”
She winked and turned back to keep walking to the elevator. His lips tingled and hungered for a longer, deeper kiss. His heartbeat roared in his ears. Brad paused for half a second before resuming his course. He fought against the desire to look behind him and see if anyone watched or whispered at their backs.
Once in the elevator, she leaned against the wall and smiled up at him. “So much for sealing it,” he said.
