Mistaken for Love (The Love Vixen #7) - Delancey Stewart Page 0,1

which made me uncertain whether this was the right place to leave things. I didn’t want my uncle to get an angry phone call when people found their coffee an hour later, abandoned and cold. I set the food on the table and went out to find someone to tell that it was there.

A right turn out of the conference room led me into an area where several people sat at computers, clearly engrossed in whatever they were doing, and another hallway lined with glass doors stretched in front of me.

“Hi,” I said to a woman about my age, who seemed about to stand up and bustle off somewhere.

Her head snapped to where I stood, and after a quick glance up and down my body, she sighed and said, “Finally. You’re a little late, you know. Don’t make a habit of it, okay?”

Her smile was friendly enough, so I just smiled back and nodded. “I put the—“

She was already dashing off in front of me, heading for one of the office doors. “Come on, then!”

I glanced around, a little off balance. Maybe she wanted me to let someone else know where the food was. I followed her down the hall and through one of the office doors. A dark-haired man was bent over a desk, peering at something spread out on it, like a blueprint of some kind.

“She’s here,” the girl announced, and the man stood up, a deep frown on his handsome face.

“Good. We’re really glad you’re here.” The man’s dark eyes were some mystical shade of gray I didn’t think I’d ever seen before, and they were momentarily distracting, set as they were in his square-jawed, rugged face. A dimple showed on either side of full lips as he smiled at me.

These people were really jazzed about cheap coffee and bagels. “Okay, well, good,” I said, still trying to force real words to form in light of the man’s laser-sharp attention on me. “So I’ll just—“

“Ready to dive right in,” he said. “Good. Just follow me.”

I don’t know if it was the royal blue tie that screamed “I’m in charge” or if it was his take-no-prisoners tone, but I found my feet heading off after his Italian loafers as he hustled out of the office and back down the hall.

The girl who’d walked me in followed too and kept shooting me encouraging smiles and nods. “It’s not always like this,” she said. “Normally we would take more time for introductions and stuff, but we’ve got this huge account that we’re about to land, and it’s totally all hands on deck right now.”

“Sure,” I said, barely able to keep up as the hot guy in the suit turned a corner ahead of us. I was beginning to think there was some kind of misunderstanding at work here, but I was also kind of curious where in the world the guy was headed.

He stopped in a room with a couple desks next to a window that looked down on Madison Square Park. I inhaled sharply, the view of the crystal blue sky outside hanging over the city skyline taking my breath from me. “You’ll work in here,” he told me, indicating one of the desks. “And the first thing we need is just for you to go through the PDFs I’ve dropped on your desktop and read them for consistency. I want your first reaction to each one too, to the imagery, the color scheme. Just as a layman, you know.”

“As a layman,” I parroted, feeling my brows wrinkle. “So you just want me to give you my reactions to these documents? Because I’m, like, just a regular person?” I wondered how many other delivery people got pulled into this kind of casual focus group at Maximal. “Um. Okay.”

He nodded and the girl wrung her hands. “Also just make sure if we capitalize a product name on one, we’re doing it on all of them,” she said. “I mean, of course the finals will be proofed properly, but it would be helpful, if you don’t mind.”

“I guess I can do that.” I was intrigued. And my uncle had said to take as long as I wanted getting back. Maybe for a couple minutes I could help these people out and pretend to actually work here. I’d sit at this computer in front of the stunning skyline and imagine myself as something totally different than what I’d ended up becoming.

The man waved at the chair behind the desk, and I felt