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.
Dana’s shoes rotated toward the wall, her voice dropping to an intimate whisper. “Do I get to see you for another…emergency…tonight, sugar bear?”
Emergency? Seeing Phil?
Comprehension hit in a rush. Lynn dropped her head in exasperation, and the lock of hair still caught on the screw yanked a bunch of strands free. Only sheer frustration stopped a scream from escaping as her scalp throbbed in protest.
Phil’s emergency, the one he’d sorrowfully told her about as he cancelled their Sunday date, had involved Dana Hastings calling him sugar bear?
Only the click, click, click of Dana walking away saved Lynn from being tossed in prison for murder. She wouldn’t have minded scaring the bejeezus out of Dana before marching upstairs to Phil’s office to bludgeon him to death with whatever advertising plans lay strategically placed on his desk. The ones she swore he propped up every morning to prove how important he was.
Fucking bastard. So much for being reliable and…and puritan. All his sweet talk about respecting her and being old-fashioned regarding sex was one hundred percent horse hockey—he was dipping his doughnut in someone else’s coffee.
Ass.
Jerk. Butthead.
Making up insults passed the time as she undid her ponytail, carefully escaping the trap she now welcomed having crawled into. By the time she’d regained her freedom, Lynn was over her rush of anger. She’d needed a good solid reason to move on, and this was it, baby. This was it in spades.
Forget killing him. Phil Shotelle wasn’t worth the energy to even bother tossing him a kiss-off. Maybe she’d take Suz up on her offer of helping Lynn find a date.
In a month.
Or a year.
When she was no longer sick of the entire population of Y-chromosome carriers.
Chapter Two
Everything that could go tits-up, would. Parker wanted to kick his own ass for thinking the rule wasn’t in effect in civilian territory.
“Dean. Change of plans. She’s not headed home.” He let a single car slip between him and the sporty hatchback Lynn and the blonde woman with her had driven from the parking garage of the Bay City Press.
His partner’s voice echoed through the radio, slightly tinny. “I’m leaving the office now. Where should I meet you?”
Parker adjusted the radio setting to lower Dean’s volume. “Not sure yet. Depends where the studio is.”
“Studio?”
“Yoga, apparently. I scored big at the news office. Went in through the mailroom and spotted a package on the counter. Took it all the way to Lynn’s floor in time to catch her and a friend discussing their after-work yoga plans.”
Dean’s wicked chuckle echoed over the line. “Dibs on checking out that action. Did I ever tell you about the yoga instructor I dated? The woman could bend in ways that were illegal. Talk about flexible—”
God. “You’ve told me a hundred times, usually when there was no way I could shut you up.”