Page 7 of Boss's Baby Surprise

With a shrug, Kyle continued to work.

I watched as he seemed to doodle in strenuous details on a patio.

“If you’re going to do that, you might as well put in fairy lights,” I said as I began to draw in swags of string lights.

Our hands were in close proximity, and our pencils seemed to dance around each other. Kyle bumped my hand, causing me to make a squiggle across the drawing. I glanced up, and he was smirking, so I bumped his hand back. Kyle immediately shifted the paper and created a grid of dots.

I knew this game. It was a race to see who could box off the other person’s lines. The next thing I knew, I was giggling, he was laughing, and we were having sloppy scribbling pencil wars.

The next time I looked up at him, it felt like all the air had been sucked out of the room. His smile melted and I stopped giggling. The laughter was replaced with something much more dramatic and charged. I swear I could feel lightning crackle through the room between us.

“Don’t move,” Kyle demanded.

I didn’t think I could have, even if I wanted to.

He sat down but kept his eyes on me.

I glanced down. His pencil moved with tight, rapid motions.

“No, don’t look. Not yet,” he said.

“Sorry about that,” Steve said as he stepped back into the conference room.

Kyle cleared his throat and tore a corner from the sheet of paper we had been drawing on. He folded the section and tucked it into his pocket.

I eased back off the table. My knees were still on my chair, but I was practically lying across the conference table to be closer to Kyle while we were being silly.

“Anything good develop while I was indisposed?” Steve asked.

I tried not to blush.

“I beat Clarissa at snakes,” Kyle announced.

“You did not. I totally boxed you in,” I declared.

Kyle leveled a calm, even look at me. There was no hint of that charged moment between us in his eyes, but I swear I felt something in his words. “I challenge you to a rematch.”

4

KYLE

Iwatched Alayna leave my office, her arms full of rolled up architectural plans. Steve followed behind her like a well-trained puppy, laden down with even more rolled up drawings. We had a client who unfortunately didn’t seem to understand my scope of responsibility, and they told their structural engineer to follow up with me regarding aspects of their new building that I had nothing to do with. In typical Alayna fashion, when she brought the problem to me, she already had a solution. She just needed my go ahead to proceed, which meant that I would have free time to work one-on-one with Clarissa this afternoon.

As they left, Clarissa arrived. There was some shuffling of feet as she danced around trying to get out of their way.

“What’s that all about?” Clarissa asked after she stepped into my office.

“Somebody else’s problem,” I replied.

“Oh, yeah? And what exactly is their problem?” She sat down across from me and opened the little black sketchbook she always had with her.

“Are you taking notes?” I asked.

She was always taking notes. This woman was perceptive and tried not to miss any little detail. She looked up at me with a pencil poised over a blank page. “Of course. Always.”

I leaned forward on my desk, resting on my elbows “Then write this down,” I started. “Get yourself an Alayna. And when you find yourself one, overpay them because they will be worth every penny.”

Clarissa scribbled frantically in her notebook.