“I’m—” She grabbed her coffee mug, standing so abruptly she sent her chair flying back against the wall. “I’m going to get more coffee, since this morning was such a disaster. I look forward to seeing what you come up with for your proposal.”
The last part was delivered so stiffly that it was obviously more a formal send-off than a genuine expression of interest. And before Asa could come back with a retort, she was gone, leaving him standing alone in her own office.
Also leaving her notepad completely unguarded, sitting next to her keyboard. He slid it closer, his eyes scanning the rest of the entries after the cryptic cat pants. It was clearly a to-do list, mixed up and abbreviated in some trademark Lauren way. He was lucky it wasn’t in binary.
Grinning, he grabbed a pen.
Chapter
Three
It had been Lauren’s every intention to leave work a few minutes early, but of course that meant she ended up stuck on a call at five minutes past five.
“Your payment does show on the ledger, Mr. Stockard,” she said, trying to keep her voice patient. “If you look at it again, you’ll see we applied three fifteen to the overdue balance on October’s booth rental, and one eighty-five toward this month’s bill. That’s why the amount due is—”
“Yes,” Mr. Stockard cut in, “but where is my five-hundred-dollar payment! I brought it in myself. And I don’t see it on the ledger!”
Mr. Stockard was one of Cold World’s vendors who rented space along Wonderland Walk to sell their wares. In his case, it was adorable hand-whittled woodland creatures that were surprisingly popular among hipsters. He also insisted on paying his rent via check, which he brought in person, always for a number that was not listed on the ledger that Lauren had to provide him to try to get him trued up . . . and then the cycle continued.
He was still ranting, and Lauren doodled little circles in the margins of her notepad, waiting for the moment when she might be able to cut back in. When she’d come back from getting coffee earlier that morning, Asa was gone. Which, of course, had been the entire point of her leaving. But afterward her office had smelled like him, and then it turned out he’d left behind something else, too—a new entry on her notepad, no number next to it. Just INITIATE HOLIDAY SPIRIT SEQUENCE! written in blocky capital letters, bold and surprisingly neat. Whatever that meant.
Messing with someone’s to-do list should be illegal. Like opening someone’s mail or stealing their identity. Or reading their diary—it felt as bad, to Lauren. Not even that he’d written something on it, but that he’d seen it at all. It made her read back over every entry, wondering if there was anything incriminating, how each one might look through his eyes.
Cat pants was a definite low point.
She realized Mr. Stockard had paused to take a breath, and she’d been tracing over Asa’s letters with her pen, building them up with scratchy lines of ink. She set her pen down and tried to make her voice firm.
“I’ll look into it first thing in the morning, Mr. Stockard,” she said. “And have a new ledger ready when you open your booth this weekend. How does that sound?”
“Well, I suppose—” he started to grumble, and she cut him off before he could go into another rant.
“Great,” she said. “You have a wonderful day, Mr. Stockard. Thank you for trusting Cold World with your business.”
She hung up the phone, glancing at the digital clock on the display. If she left right now, she could still make it by five thirty, but it was going to be cutting it close . . .
“Oh, good,” Kiki said, stopping in the doorway. “I was hoping to catch you. Listen, do you still have my red off-the-shoulder dress?”
“Yeah,” Lauren said. “Sorry, I—”
She’d borrowed it from Kiki six months ago, for a date that had never ended up happening. Kiki had insisted she hang on to it until the date got rescheduled, but it got pushed back twice more and then eventually the guy had stopped responding to messages on the app, and somehow that stupid dress was still in her closet, a reminder of what a failure her romantic life was.
You could’ve been wearing it tonight, at dinner with Daniel, a voice in her head reminded her. She didn’t know how long this visit was going to go, but she probably could’ve met up with him after. Why hadn’t that occurred to her in the moment?
Kiki waved off her apology. “It’s fine,” she said. “But I’m going to have to go to Marj’s holiday party this year and I promised her I’d show her all the options. I think she’s seriously afraid I’ll show up at a swanky law firm shindig wearing a negligee or something.”