Dawn Atkins - Swept Away

“Sounds like fun.”

He smiled. “To you, sure.” He gave her that look that made her wiring crackle. “But I’m not you.”

No, wait. The crackling was coming from her borrowed laptop, which was grinding to life with agonizing slowness and enough noise that Candy expected some of Ellie’s espresso to drip out.

“For what it’s worth, the PQ2 got me wrong, too,” Candy said.

“How so?”

“It made me seem like I don’t take work seriously.”

“You? No! How could that be?” His eyes twinkled at her. “Maybe because of the time you brought in all those cans of Silly String and made a mess in the lab?”

“Everyone was getting cranky. We needed a break. And it cleaned up easy.”

“Or how about when you spiked the Halloween punch?”

“Come on. It was a party. I warned Valerie first.”

“She was pregnant, right?” He nodded. “Your costume was…interesting.”

She’d dressed as a zombie hooker, which would have been fine, except she’d only convinced a few people to dress up, so she sort of stood out.

“Happy workers are productive workers, Matt. There are studies that show the benefits of morale building and—”

“As I recall, three people went home too drunk to work, someone tossed their pumpkin cookies into a trash can and everyone else but Val slept away the afternoon over their keyboards.”

He was smiling, but light glanced off his lenses and she couldn’t tell if he was amused or making fun of her. The Halloween party had been early in Matt’s time at SyncUp. If she’d known that six months later he’d be her boss, she might have been more careful about how she behaved around him.

“As I recall, you laughed a lot. Plus, you won the one-on-one wastepaper basketball tournament the next month.”

“Your idea, too, correct?”

“We’d put in two sixty-hour weeks on the Payroll Plus revision. We needed a break.” She’d come up with the idea of a modified basketball game using office chairs with trash cans on file cabinets for baskets and wadded printouts as the balls.

“That was fun,” he mused.

“And afterward, we were refreshed for more work. Work hard, play hard, that’s my philosophy.” She hoped he’d buy that. It sounded like a bluff. That’s how her family would see it, considering her history. She’d been erratic in college, uncertain in the work world and switched jobs a lot. Her parents, on the other hand, had built a business from scratch and her brothers had bee-lined from law school to successful law practices without an eye-blink of doubt. The four of them thought her a flake and the idea seared her with hot shame.

“I see.” Matt seemed to be fighting a grin.

“The point is the PQ2 got me wrong.” She spoke too fiercely. “It mischaracterized you, too, remember?”

He didn’t respond and she was afraid she’d sounded too defensive.

“Anyway, I want to show you what I’m thinking on Ledger Lite.” She put her finger on the touch pad, except at that instant the machine ominously ceased grinding. The screen was white—half built.

“Damn!” She banged the side of the laptop. “The tech guys said this unit was a workhorse.”

“Let me take a look.” Matt turned the computer toward him, swamping her with the scent of lime and warm man. He clicked keys, then rebooted with three nimble-looking, knowing-seeming fingers.

She couldn’t help imagining what they might do to her private touch pad. She shifted away from him, bumping the computer cord. There was a crackle and the screen went dead black.

“Ah. May be a short in the transformer,” Matt said. He unplugged the cord assembly and carried it to the kitchen.

Now what? She hadn’t printed out anything since the spreadsheets were huge and the artwork mock-up looked better on screen. If her computer was dead, so was her plan.

IT WASN’T AS THOUGH HE could actually fix the damn cord, but Matt needed to escape Candy Calder. She smelled as sweet as her name and inhaling near her made it impossible to hold a thought that didn’t have sex in it.

He pawed through the drawers looking for a Phillips screwdriver, but had to settle for a paring knife, which he twisted into the tiny bolts on the transformer box.

This predicament had Ellie’s fingerprints all over it. She must have figured that Candy would cheer him up after Jane.

The odd thing was that the breakup hadn’t been as hard on him as he’d expected. Maybe he was numb or still in shock, but he’d felt mostly relief, which didn’t seem like the proper response to the end of a nine-month relationship.

Either way, he had no business hanging with Candy Calder and her mischievous eyes the same violet as the SyncUp logo. Or those puffy lips of hers. He’d watched her wrap them around a margarita glass that night after his first week at SyncUp and wanted—no, craved—a taste. Then he’d fumbled the kiss and knocked her on her ass.

The woman threw him, made him act herky-jerky and stupid. And now she’d dragged an old computer here to show him her work? What was her angle? It couldn’t be the same as Ellie’s. No way would Candy allow Ellie to plot a hookup. After that goofed kiss, Candy thought him an oaf. Probably had had a good laugh with her SyncUp friends. And everyone at SyncUp loved Candy. The whole place rang with her laughter.

The husky honey of her voice warmed him straight through, made it hard to think about anything but her.

The PQ2 had nailed her and her playfulness, all right. It had nailed him, too, for that matter. He was nonsocial, as she’d said. He valued alone time, hated mindless chatter and worked hard. Maybe too hard, but he loved what he did, dammit, and what was wrong with spending time with what he loved?

Something was. Even Jane had gotten on his case. Supposedly that’s why she’d broken up with him. What had she called him? A workaholic with no capacity for relaxation. Then she’d gotten nasty. You wouldn’t know fun if it threw you a surprise party.

That was a case of the pot calling the kettle black, if he’d ever heard one. A commitment to their careers was something they shared. Hell, Jane routinely put in sixty-hour weeks at her law firm. He had no problem with that. They’d fit their relationship around their schedules just fine.

Fun had its place, but hard work and dedication were what had earned him the VP spot at a hot software firm. And now, to keep it, he’d have to learn to…chitchat. God.

He was an engineer first, a marketer second and nowhere in there an ass-kissing backslapper.

Ironic that he’d been discussing his problem with Candy, who was the most social person he knew.

The last screw emerged from the transformer box, so he tried separating the two halves. No use. There seemed to be an adhesive. He was prying it open with the knife blade when Candy approached.

“You getting it off?” she asked softly, inches away.

Her closeness and her words made him stab himself in the thumb. “Damn.” Blood oozed, so he pressed his index finger against the spot.

“You cut yourself?” Candy yanked his wrist up into the air.

“What are you doing?” he asked as calmly as he could with her breasts right…there, sticking out at him. So alert.

“Elevating the injury above your heart, of course.” She was so short she had to tilt her head up to talk to him. Her big eyes invited him to dive in and drown.

“It’s fine,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

She lowered his arm and leaned in to study the little nick, her perfumed hair tickling his chin, her fingers warm on his skin.

“Not even bleeding, see,” he said, backing away from the same heat he’d felt on Oaf Night. “Your computer’s dead, Candy.”