All Fired Up (DreamMakers) (2 page)

Both men sighed. “Must we do this every time?” Parker grumbled.

“If we want to avoid a lawsuit, then yesiree.”

Dean dropped into the chair opposite her, threw his feet up on the desk and began reciting in a singsong tone like a student repeating the times table. “One. No recording devices. Two, all interactions must take place in public. Three, there—”

“Parker’s turn,” Didi cut in.

God. It was like they were back in preschool. “Aren’t you going to give Dean his gold star first?” Parker taunted.

His receptionist’s gaze turned icy cold.

Okay, then. “Three. There will be no discussion of personal details of clients except as it pertains to arranging the date.”

“Which is total bullshit,” Dean interrupted. “Not that we’re about to go blabbing information, but face it—if we find out shit, it’s because someone said it in public. You know the kind of crap people talk about these days? Hell, this asshole in the restaurant waiting line yesterday—he gave his girlfriend’s address, phone number and measurements out loud while talking on the phone.”

Didi swatted Dean’s feet off the desk. “Yes, people are stupid, but that doesn’t mean you boys have to be. DreamMakers will rise above the stupid and stay on the straight and narrow. Set a good example for the world.”

“You’re a dreamer, Didi.”

While Didi and Dean went off on a tangent, Parker read over the questionnaire again, but the details provided were so vague it was impossible to get a sense of Shotelle’s girlfriend. Ah well. Hopefully after tonight, they’d have all the details required to knock the lady’s socks off with a date for the ages.

As much as it pained him to bring even an ounce of joy to a douchebag’s life, the money was too good for Parker to ignore. Which meant by the end of the job, he was going to know Lynn Elizabeth Davidson inside and out.

Her computer monitor flickered for the fifth time in the last hour, and Lynn swore softly, palms pressed to the desk on either side of her ergonomically correct keyboard as she mentally urged the disruption to vanish like it had every time before. She glanced at the overhead lights, but they were still on full. A quick peek over the pale purple cubicle dividers at her coworkers proved they were still hard at it.

Nothing wrong with
their
screens or power sources.

Lynn pushed her computer chair aside and leaned under her desk to follow the cables. If she lost the past four hours’ work because her power failed, someone’s head was going to roll.

The back of the desk had a protective metal panel on it, but she figured out if she lifted and pushed it to one side, she could get on her hands and knees and poke around. A quick examination was enough to discover the cord didn’t end at a power strip. Instead, the thick black cable joined a half-dozen others and disappeared under the cubical edge toward the hallway.

Great. More investigating needed. She was in the middle of backing out of her awkward position when a familiar voice interrupted her.

“Is this the new office exercise routine Marti was raving about in the lunchroom today?”

She jerked upward in surprise, smacking her head on the underside of the desk hard enough to see stars. “Jeez, Suz, warn a girl next time.” Lynn crawled into the clear, hand going to rub the rising knot as she scrambled to her feet. “A call, a wave…”

“It’s hard to wave hello when all that’s aimed outward is a butt.” Lynn’s BFF since high school, Susanna Jones, leaned her curvy hip on the desk edge as she settled neon-yellow-clad arms across her chest. “And you have so little butt, damn you, that makes it even tougher. Did you lose an earring?”

Lynn shook her head even as she blinked to stop her eyes from watering. “Where did you get your sweater?”

Suz popped up and pirouetted like a tipsy music-box dancer, with her arms flung to the sides. The position only emphasized the black lines running through the gaudy fabric in horizontal streaks, rising and falling over Suz’s ample breasts as if someone had painted racing stripes on her chest. “You like?”

It had to be a trick question. Nothing was this simple with her friend, not even clothing choices. Lynn stuck to her usual modus operandi and told the truth. “You look like a molting bumblebee.”

Sheer delight streaked across Suz’s face, making her green eyes sparkle with mischief. “Really?”

“On your last wings. Liable to crash and burn into the next flower patch in a pollen-induced stupor. Where did you even get it? No—” Lynn held out a hand, “—more important,
why
did you get it, and why are you making my eyeballs bleed?”

Suz cracked the gum bubble she’d blown. “It’s not for you, silly.” She checked around before leaning in closer and lowering her voice. “I was informed I have the fashion sense of a turnip. I thought I should prove her wrong. I’m much worse than a turnip.”

“Because you don’t give a hoot about high-fashion clothes, and with your figure, you don’t need to.” Lynn didn’t mind being trim and in shape, but every now and then she’d kill to own Suz’s curves. Ever since high school, their girls’-night-out pictures had showcased them like human salt-and-pepper shakers—Suz the fair-skinned blonde with knockout curves, Lynn with her dark hair and dark complexion showcasing slim but feminine lines. Her best feature was her shockingly light eyes—“moonlit crystals on a Mediterranean beach”, a silver-tongued date had once informed her.

No, Lynn was happy with her body but still pissed on Suz’s behalf. “Who was the smartass who insulted you, or do I need to ask?”

“It was Dana Hastings, of course.” Suz adjusted the raggedy cuffs on the ancient monstrosity as if she were on a Paris fashion runway. “I’m on my way back from her desk. You should have seen her recoil in disgust.”

Lynn couldn’t help but snicker in response even as she double-checked her work was still in place and her computer screen hadn’t done another vanishing trick. “Please don’t wear it to yoga tonight, or we’ll be banned for life for disturbing the delicate balance of the universe.”

“Hey, what do you think caused the big bang in the first place?” Suz paused. “Speaking of big dicks, I mean
small
dicks…”

Damn.
“That was a very cheesy segue. I’m going to ignore you.” For some reason, Lynn’s on-again, off-again dating situation with Phil Shotelle, one of the upper management at Bay City Press, was a source of constant annoyance to Suz.

“Tell me you’ve seen the light and dumped the stiff, and I’ll float my bright little wings toward my desk.”

Lynn sighed as she pulled her fingers through her long hair, attempting to straighten not only the tangles caused by the excursion under her desk, but the tangles in her brain. It was a good thing she had work she loved and Suz to distract her, because her current dating relationship wasn’t lighting the night on fire.

And that was fine.

She supposed.

A sense of guilt struck. Poor Phil. He hadn’t done anything to deserve getting dumped on, and she found herself defending him yet again. “He’s not a bad guy, Suz. Really, he’s not.”

Suz took a step forward, finger extended in accusation. “But you’ll admit he’s not a good guy either, right? Or not the right guy for you. He’s boring and old and never
ever
makes your heart pound.” She clutched her hands together. “Come on, pretty please admit that much.”

“Thirty-nine is not old,” Lynn insisted, dragging her hair into a ponytail and securing it in position with an elastic. Suz had a point, though. Her relationship with Phil wasn’t one of passion. It was more one of…

Convenience. Or reliability. Familiarity?

Shit. Those definitions were too close to
boring
. Lynn shook off the strange sadness the topic always wrapped her in. “Face it. You’ve never liked Phil.”

“Because I have good taste in men.”

Lynn couldn’t speak for a moment, the constant chain of guys Suz had enjoyed over the years flashing through her brain and making her blink. Her friend was careful not to hook up with axe murderers, but she didn’t resist temptation as far as enjoying herself. Lynn would have been jealous if she didn’t love Suz so hard, and besides, she wasn’t looking for a different lover every night.

Although one who knew where her clit was would be a nice change of pace. Or one who even seemed remotely interested in at least searching. Phil’s chivalrous behavior was positively puritan.

Meanwhile, she lived vicariously through Suz’s escapades. “So you’re insisting you’ve only dated absolute princes among men,” she teased. “All of them. Every. Single. One.”

“Yip,” Suz gloated. “If you let me help pick a guy for you, you too would wear a smile like mine in the mornings instead of needing four cups of coffee before you’re halfway human.”

“Come on, you’ve had a few duds.” Lynn scrambled for an example. “Say…your boxer?”

Suz blinked then shivered hard. “You mean the one who tied me up and made me orgasm so often and so hard I passed out? Yeah, he was such a loser.”

Jeez
. “How about the pilot?”

That suggestion brought a heavy sigh from her friend, but the reason for the reaction wasn’t what Lynn expected. Suz lifted a hand and fanned her face. “You talking about Kakeru? The San Fran to Japan-based pilot who brought his copilot along for the ride—
nom nom
, I might add—or the KLM pilot who taught me all the dirty words in Dutch, or the—”

Lynn’s computer monitor flickered again. “Shit. Sorry to cut this scintillating conversation to a close, but I’m ten minutes away from completing my revisions on the layout, and I need to get them done.”

Suz shook her head sadly. “He’s no good for you.”

“We’ll talk about it after yoga.”

Her friend made a low clucking noise. Lynn whipped her head up, then realized Suz wasn’t commenting on her lack of willpower to call it off with Phil.

Dana Hastings was marching past, four-inch stilettos flashing as she strode forward in her expensive suit. Her nose visibly twitched as if she smelled something funny in their vicinity.

She’d only gone a half-dozen steps past Lynn’s cubicle before Suz turned. “Gotta run,” she muttered. “We
will
talk about this more tonight.”

She took off after Dana, the long, uneven ends of her sweater flapping behind her like tail feathers, and Lynn giggled. God, she loved that woman.

Turning back to her computer screen wiped the smile off her face. “You, I don’t love. Come on, computer, behave.”

At the moment, solving the power-source problem was more important than mentally debating, again, her love life. Lynn found the electrical cables where they popped up on the far side of the cubicle wall. She followed the black bundle as it slithered along the edge of the moveable wall, finally crossing a structural dip in the hall and vanishing around a corner.

It was like running an obstacle course. Only when Lynn rounded the corner she had the joy of one more obstacle. The left side of Dana Hastings’s desk stood directly in front of the bundle, and no amount of searching on either side exposed a new escape route.

Somewhere under the desk was the issue.

Lynn glanced around, but the manager Dana clerked for was out of her office. After making sure no one else was looking, Lynn fell to her knees and once again crawled into the close confines of under-desk dwellers.

She wasn’t going to even think about spiders.

Fortunately, she’d already figured out the back-of-the-desk trick, and she had the cables in sight in less than thirty seconds. The source of her troubles became perfectly clear—a main power breaker was set along the wall, and one of the plugs had worked partially free. She shoved the head in tightly, a satisfying click sounding as the prongs locked into position. Good. Now she could finish her job.

She gasped in pain as her hair caught on something, the ponytail she’d put it in snagging on a loose screw. Her head throbbed for the second time that day as she stilled, reaching upward in an attempt to loosen the knot without ripping out part of her scalp.

At least no one was around to see her humiliation—

Click.

Click.

Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.

High heels. Rapidly approaching. Lynn resigned herself to being caught. She worked carefully on her hair while waiting for the perfect moment to announce her presence.

“Of
course
, Mr. Shotelle,” Dana purred.

Lynn froze. Phil was here on the production level? He never came down from—

“It’s never a problem for
you
to call me,” Dana said in a teasing voice. “That’s why I gave you my cell number.”

A flirty little laugh followed, but all Lynn could focus on at first was that Phil was on the phone, not on the floor. Her heart thumped once, hard, then stopped completely as Dana’s shiny gold shoes paused two paces from where the desk chair had rolled after being shoved aside.

Stuck with her head twisted to one side, Lynn’s only line of sight was through a narrow crack. Dana’s legs from feet to mid-thigh was about it for a view, but it wasn’t so much being stuck under the desk as the overheard conversation that turned Lynn’s blood to ice.