She released a disbelieving laugh. Are you serious?
Hair down. Selfie. Now.
Undo your top two buttons, too.
Feeling silly, she gripped the rubber band holding her hair back and tried to pull it free. It caught, and when she pulled harder, it snapped, unraveled from her hair, and landed on the floor. She worked the strands apart with her fingers and then loosened the top buttons of her shirt. Her face peered at her from the phone screen, but she looked . . . different. She didn’t look like regular Stella. She looked like Secret Stella, the girl who was going to see her lover tonight.
Her finger accidentally hit the camera button, capturing her face as understanding hit. That was what they were. They were lovers. She liked the sound of that, quite a lot.
She sent the picture to Michael.
Almost instantly, her phone vibrated.
Damn, Stella.
Sexy. As. Hell.
A laugh bubbled free, and she was half tempted to send him something really sexy. Except she had no clue how to go about it. There was probably an art to the camera angle and body positioning, and her office was surrounded by windows. Either her colleagues would get an eyeful or she’d have to figure out some way to stuff her phone inside her fitted clothes.
She set her phone down in defeat and made herself focus on her work, which she still loved. As she waded through the data, she ran across an interesting finding: The vast majority of married men didn’t buy underclothes—not even for themselves. Their wives did. Screening and filtering the data, looking back through the many years of numbers provided, she discovered they quit purchasing underclothes even before public records announced their marriages.
What was going on there? What kind of anthropological phenomenon was this?
The thrill of a new puzzle simmered through her veins, captivating her. She plotted the data against several different variables, analyzed the curves and seemingly random scatter graphs, looked at the statistics. She could not figure it out. She loved when she couldn’t figure it out.
Her phone buzzed, and the screen read, Dinner with Michael.
She sent a longing glance at her computer monitors, but she didn’t let her hands touch her keyboard again. There was no such thing as five more minutes for her. If she went back to work, the next time she surfaced from the data would be well after midnight. That was why she set the alarms.
Also, Michael was just as interesting as the data, and he made her laugh. He smelled good and felt good and tasted good and . . . She hugged herself as her feet danced over the carpet. This was almost too much perfectness. Exciting work during the day. Exciting Michael at night. She wanted this every day, forever.
She saved her work, powered down her computer, and gathered up her things. Walking down the hallway while people were still in the office was something she did rarely, but her coworkers didn’t usually think much about it. Tonight, however, the unusual attention she got as she passed by confused her. The top econometricians in their offices paused in the middle of writing formulas on their whiteboards. The younger analysts in their cubicles gave her startled looks.
As she strode past Philip’s office, he looked up from the papers on his desk and did a double take. She waved at him and went to the elevator banks. Just as the doors began to close, Philip jumped inside.
“You’re heading out early today,” he said.
In the process of adjusting her glasses, she realized her hair was down. This was why everyone was acting so funny. She rolled her eyes. It was just hair. “Dinner plans.”
Philip’s light eyes tracked over her in a thorough sweep. “Meeting someone?”
She tucked her hair behind her ear. “Yes.”
“Took my advice, huh?” he said with his usual smirk.
“I did, actually. Thanks.”
He blinked, and his eyebrows climbed. “You’re surprising, Stella, and you look good with your hair down.”
The appraising nature of his gaze made her thoroughly uncomfortable, and she itched to refasten her top two buttons. “Thanks.”
“So who is he? Do I know him? Is it serious?”
She tapped her fingers on her thighs. “I don’t think you know him. I hope it’s serious. It’s serious to me.”
“Don’t ask him to marry you too soon, okay? That scares the crap out of guys.”
She scowled at him.