Always You - A Second Chance Romance

Chapter 26

I picked Luke up from his hotel and we headed to the office. He seemed in a fairly good mood, but also seemed a little distracted. I was concerned that the events from last night had upset him, but I didn't know how to bring it up without potentially making things worse.

We had a morning call with Chris where we updated him on our progress and talked about our next steps. We were expecting a large shipment of the framework and shelving for our booth design today. Our plan was to start building the booth, maybe finish it today, and then connect with marking on the visuals we had requested from them. Our goal was to finish the design and set up this week then pack up everything and ship it to Chicago so we could present everything to the board in a couple weeks.

Chris seemed pleased with our progress and was glad to see we were working well together. We ended the call just in time for a part of our delivery to arrive. Luke signed for the pallet and had them bring it into the workshop so we could get started.

We were quieter than normal, only really talking to ask where a part should go, or if we had located a piece as we unpacked the pallets. We laid out the parts and did an inventory of what we had received so far. Everything was accounted for, so we sat down to wait for the next shipment to arrive and worked on our laptops.

When I finished my work I looked up at Luke. He was seated on the other side of the room, working intently on his laptop. I wasn't sure what he could be doing since most of his work currently was the project we were working on together, but I wasn't going to ask him. He didn't seem to be in a talking mood, so I knew something was bothering him.

I tried to find something to do on my laptop, anything to preoccupy myself, but my eyes kept wandering to Luke. My eyes traced his profile half a dozen times, admiring how handsome he was. As he scrolled on his computer, he leaned forward on the table he was seated at, resting his arms on the table. His biceps flexed, his shirt tightening around his arms, and I felt a hot flush wash over me. He was so hot - and his t-shirt made it impossible to ignore just how muscular and toned he was. It fit him perfectly. I wanted to pull it up and feel his strong stomach and body with my hands... maybe my tongue too.

"You okay?" Luke suddenly asked, tearing me from my fantasies. I felt my face turn red as I looked away from him.

"Yeah, I'm good, just thinking," I mumbled.

"What are you thinking about?" Luke asked me. I looked back up at him and he had a smirk on his face like he could read my mind of all my dirty thoughts I was just having. I shrugged.

"Nothing," I said.

"It didn't look like nothing," he said, laughter in his voice. I rolled my eyes and looked away, trying to hide my face as it turned red again. Luke started to say something but we were interrupted by the delivery driver banging on the back door. I cleared some room on the floor while Luke pulled the pallets in on the pallet jack, stacking them next to each other. We unloaded them and organized the contents like we did before with the previous pallet.

"I'll go grab the tool boxes from the cage," I told him when we were finished unloading the pallets. I didn't wait to hear his response and dashed out of the back door from the workshop.

The 'cage' was the loving name the company had given a permanent storage shed in the back of the parking lot where we stored decades of old samples, old merchandising and marking materials, and all our tools to keep the office as presentable as possible. It was a time capsule from hell. No one ever had the time to sort through all of it, so it kept piling up.

I unlocked the roll up door and slid it up, flicking on the light switch next to the door. The overhead lights flickered on, illuminating the racks of boxes that filled the space. The first few aisles were all marketing materials, while the rest was all product. The first two aisles of product were reserved by me for materials and tools. They were by far the most organized shelves in the whole unit, and probably the only ones that had been cleaned out in the last decade. The aisles were narrow, barely wide enough for two people to stand next to each other. We had really crammed as much storage space as possible into the space.