The Kiss Quotient(54)

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17



She was supposed be working. The online underclothes project was interesting. Normally, she’d have finished by now. But she simply could not look at underwear, even the word underwear, and not think of Michael.

The desk drawer where she kept her phone beckoned to her. She wanted to text him. Was that . . . allowed? Aside from that night at her office, they’d only texted for logistical purposes.

She tapped her fingers on the surface of her desk before she fisted her hand. How was she supposed to seduce him if she couldn’t get up the nerve to send him a simple text message? She dug her phone out.

Hi.

She deleted the message before sending it.

I miss you.

Just the sight of those words made her palms sweat. Too direct. Delete.

I wanted to confirm our plans for tonight.

She hit send and placed the phone on her desk as she stared at her computer monitors without seeing a single thing. The screen on her phone went black from inactivity. He was probably busy.

Her phone vibrated, but instead of buzzing once to indicate she’d gotten a text message, it kept buzzing. A phone call.

She peeked at the screen, and her heart jumped when she saw it was Michael. She hugged the phone to her chest before answering it. “Hello?”

“Hi, Stella.” In the background, his mom gabbed in Vietnamese and a sewing machine whirred. “I need both hands so I decided to call you back instead of texting. We’re still on for tonight. That Thai place in Mountain View.”

“Okay, I’ll meet you there.”

“Perfect.”

The sewing machine paused, and silence hung in the virtual space between them. She willed him to speak. She wanted to hear his voice again.

“Remember clothes. For my place. Unless you don’t want to stay there. You don’t have to,” she said in a rush.

“No, I’m fine with that. I just forgot. Thanks for reminding me.” He chuckled, and Stella’s hands tightened on the phone. She really, really missed him, and it had only been a day since she’d seen him last.

His mom said something, and he sighed. “I have to go. Looking forward to tonight. Miss you. Bye.”

Her breath caught before she murmured, “Miss you, too.” The line had already disconnected, however, and she said the words to herself.

How did other people get through their day when they missed someone like this? She wanted to see him.

She tapped on her phone’s photo bank, and found it, as she’d known it would be, empty. Feeling impulsive, she texted Michael again.

I want a picture of you for my phone.

Please.

She waited.

When she lost hope that he’d respond and set her phone on her desk, it vibrated.

It was a quick selfie, a close-up of his face with his eyebrow raised. He looked goofy but still utterly delectable. She sighed and ran her thumb over his cheek.

Her phone buzzed again with text messages from him.

Where’s mine?

I want your hair down.

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.