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“Listen to what?” Nikki asked, playing stupid. She picked her way through the overgrowth that crowded the stone pathway.
“I sent you a thing!” came the excited reply.
“I’m just getting to work now. Where did you send it? My email?” As Nikki turned the corner, branches reached out and brushed along her bare thighs.
She’d had an easier time getting dressed that morning and had opted for shorts that were probably too short for the workplace but oh well. It was a thousand degrees outside, and Johnny had never set a dress code.
Her shorts were hot-pink dolphin-cut running shorts with white piping on the trim. She’d paired them with a white t-shirt with Blondie on it and her lace-less Chucks. Because tying shoes was still difficult.
Her hair…
Well, her hair looked a lot like it did when she’d been a child running wild at the lake house all summer long—free and messy and probably tangled. But she’d done her best.
A huff came through the other side of the phone.
“No. I texted it to you.”
Nikki chuckled. “The text you sent four point one milliseconds before you called me?”
No reply.
Nikki grinned and ducked, pushing some overgrowth out of her face. She needed to tell their maintenance service to get over to this side of the building before the vegetation swallowed the building. How was this better than braving the wasps at the front door? She was going to have to check herself for ticks after her small trek through the jungle. “I haven’t listened to it yet, Z.”
“Call me back when you do.”
The line went dead.
Nikki looked down at the screen to verify the pop star had hung up on her and she snorted.
On one hand, her spontaneous and secret friendship with Zara Lorna, award-winning recording artist, was one of her favorite things about her life. On the other hand, it often gave her indigestion.
Today was an example of the former.
She slid the phone into her side pocket and finally emerged from the wilderness.
And stopped short.
“Ohhh no,” she said to no one. Well, she said it to herself. But herself wasn’t listening.
Because there, at the back door to the studio, the very door she was going to need to walk through to get to her job, the one that paid her bills and gave her joy, was André.
No, wait.
NotjustAndré.
It was André without a shirt.
Wait again.
It was André, sans shirt, in jeans that were slung waaaaay too low to be legal, those stupid suspenders the only thing keeping his pants from showing the world what the good Lord had made with love.
And that was not all.
He was carrying a roll of carpet over one shoulder out to the dumpster which had been moved to the back door from its usual place in the alley.
She inhaled slowly, trying not to think about how André had probably been the one to move the dumpster. He’d probably done it by himself with no help, his back muscles straining and his glutes and thighs testing the seams of his jeans.
Were those Wranglers?
