13
Lana sat at her cluttered desk, a murmur of busy employees simmered around the office.
She slapped another memo note on her monitor, ‘toothpaste’. She recalled Rory’s huffing and puffing while he rummaged through the bathroom cabinet earlier, his toothbrush stuffed in his mouth.
He had thrown together some leftovers and made a tasty omelette for their dinner, then apologised for calling her a prude.
The guy remained adamant that he was only trying something new in the hope it would add a bit of excitement to their sex life. After a few minutes of grovelling, he assured her that he wouldn’t tighten his fingers around her throat again, if that pacified her.
She definitely didn’t want him to do it again. It scared the crap out of her and sure as hell didn’t turn her on, nevertheless she felt like a total let-down.
Lana read and then re-read the hefty report that landed on her desk that morning, but jumbled words just floated around in her head, interrupted by thoughts of Verto Veneri.
She took solace in the fact that her thoughts were her own and none of her colleagues knew that she was day dreaming about a man who wasn’t her boyfriend. She couldn’t imagine any of them joining the elite club, not even her friend Amanda, who would flit from man to man like a beautiful red-headed faery.
“Good weekend?” Amanda called over the adjoining desk divider, her bouncy red curls sprawling down her shoulders.
Looking up from her report, tucking her hair behind her ear, Lana tilted right, peering around her monitor. “It was okay. What about you?”
Amanda stood, unbuttoned her denim jacket and tottered around to the edge of the desk. Shoving a mass of unread pages into the middle, she perched daintily, pulling her tight black trousers up at the knees.
“Oh. My. God. Guess who was out on Saturday night?” Amanda hunched down, close to Lana’s ear.
Lana lifted her chin and met Amanda’s pale green eyes, her porcelain skin glowed with the youth of being twenty-something.
She tapped her pen, waiting on the gossip that Amanda so often divulged. “Don’t tell me, it was James?”
Her forehead creased and her thin lips pursed. “How did you know?”
“I can see it all over your, ‘I’ve had sex’ face.” Lana smirked.
Amanda’s skin grew rosy, her low-cut ivory top exacerbating her flushed neck. “Jeez, is it that obvious?” Her nose wrinkled. “Is that why Richard grinned at me like a horny dog this morning?”
Lana’s gaze descended to Amanda’s ample cleavage. “I doubt that’s why he was grinning. Perhaps you gave him an eyeful.”
Amanda’s long fingers grappled the opening at her top in an attempt to heave it higher. Her eyes twinkled under the lights.
“He was amazing in bed, you know. I’ll tell you all about it at lunch. Does 12 noon, suit you, we’ll go to the deli? I have a meeting in ten minutes, so I’ll just see you downstairs, okay?”
Lana flicked her gaze to the bottom of her monitor where the digital clock displayed five past ten, which meant two long tedious hours until lunch.
Two hours of mundane report reading, two hours until she could escape the squeaky seat that held her captive at her desk.
Her phone rang. “Lana, a delivery guy has left a bunch of flowers for you. What floor are you on?”
She inhaled sharply. “You sure they’re for me?”
“Yup, the card says, ‘To Lana, we will finish what we started’.”
Who are they from?
They couldn’t be from Rory, it wasn’t his style to send beautiful flowers. The best effort he made on her last birthday was a dying bunch of carnations from a bucket at the petrol station.
There was absolutely no chance that they were from Marcus McGrath either because he started and ended it all in the space of a few hours.
“You know where my desk is, right? Sixth floor, near the printer, Johnny. Thanks.”
“I’ll be right up.”