“Hair,” Carl at reception said bluntly, still staring in shock at my hair. Because it was down.
That was it.
Though in fairness to Carl, my hair was never down at work and it was professionally blown out for the first time since high school graduation—hence the whole being d
own thing.
On a regular basis, I was a wash-and-air-dry kind of girl, but I’d woken up early this morning and paid a semi-absurd sixty dollars plus tip to make my hair bounce and shine like something out of a L’Oreal commercial, because as soon as I was finished with work tonight, it was going to be the night.
The super special, extra romantic kind of night to remember forever, and dammit, I wasn’t about to let a single strand of my hair move out of place till it was seen by the man I’d had it so perfectly done up for.
Even if that meant showing up to work like this and breaking part of my self-imposed dress code for the office.
Ponytail. Basic makeup. Heels no higher than two-and-a-half inches. I could wear whatever I wanted once I was officially promoted to agent but till then, this was the rule. Unless, of course, it was a very special occasion.
Which today, it very much was.
“Ooh yesss, girl, he’s gonna love it,” Liza squealed excitedly, eyeing the garment bags I was carrying as I wheeled my luggage past The Pit, the cluster of assistant desks that sat across the big glass wall of agent offices.
As recently as a year-and-a-half ago, I’d sat there too. But then Adam was promoted up the ladder and with him, my desk was upgraded to a wonderfully quiet, much more secluded corner fifty feet down, right outside his shiny new office.
Flashing a big grin at Liza, I continued down the hall toward my head-on view of Adam sitting half-reclined at his sprawling glass desk, looking every bit the cocky bastard he was while wearing a tailored grey suit and bored smirk on his lips—generally the sign that he was putting next to no effort in charming the pants off whomever he was talking to.
And that was definitely the case right now, considering he was talking to Kenzie Engelman, the boss’s daughter-slash-our resident rich girl intern who spent most of her work day tending to her fairly massive following on Instagram and trying to flirt it up with Adam.
Whoops.
Considering I doubled as Adam’s bouncer on a day-to-day basis, I knew well that Kenzie had taken my late arrival to work as an opportunity to pounce and subject my boss to her unique brand of flirting, which consisted basically of showing him shots from her latest “photo shoot” and asking which he thought were “cute enough to post” on Instagram, and which were only “medium-cute,” and thus only worthy of Stories.
Sorry, bud, I winced, though my guilt was nixed as soon as Adam looked up to catch me striding down the hall.
He was mid-sentence when our eyes met, and though he didn’t miss a beat of his speech, he paused in the middle of flipping a page in his file, his piercingly blue gaze assessing me for a moment before his dark eyebrows lifted high at the sight of my swishy hair.
But the double take lasted all of a second before he caught sight of all the extra bags I was carrying and with a brief but deeply ridiculing shake of the head, rolled his eyes swiftly back to his file.
I snorted.
“Dickhead,” I said under my breath as I got to my desk, because that was exactly what he was.
And because he knew exactly what all my extra luggage was for.
It wasn’t for the big client meeting we were flying to Palm Beach for in three hours—it was for the giant surprise that was to take place after, that I’d spent the entire past week meticulously planning for my fiancé, Caspar.
It was his twenty-ninth birthday tomorrow and we were originally scheduled to spend it apart because of work. I had to be in North Carolina with Adam for a big meeting with our potential client, Sean Knox, and Caspar was shooting his latest short film in West Palm Beach. Thanks to our hectic work schedules, we hadn’t seen much of each other in literally months, and it would be an understatement to say that things had felt strained between us of late.
But tonight was going to change everything, because as brutally corny as it sounded, it was like the stars had miraculously aligned in the name of our love.
Out of nowhere last week, Sean Knox had decided to report to Spring Training early, which meant that Adam and I would no longer be meeting him at his home in North Carolina, but at his Spring Training rental in West Palm Beach—right where Caspar was working.
The sudden change of plans had come exactly six days ago and since the moment I heard, I’d been scrambling like a crazy person to orchestrate the biggest, sexiest, most romantic birthday surprise for Caspar.
And of course, Adam had spent the same amount of time rolling his eyes as hard as humanly possible, because he didn’t have the highest opinion of Caspar, and like a true dickhead, was never exactly shy about letting it be known.
Beyond deeming my fiancé “needy” for how often he texted to check in when I was at evening work events, Adam had also once called Caspar “an offensive caricature of a person from LA.”
“I mean there’s the aspiring filmmaker thing. The yoga thing. The green juice thing. And not that anyone should be a vegan evangelist, but you definitely shouldn’t be if you aren’t goddamned vegan yourself half the time,” Adam had said, which in fairness, was a pretty solid point.
Still, I called him a jerk in my head as I took a seat at my desk.