Merry and Bright by Jill Shalvis Read Free Book Online Page A

him into her office, where they proceeded to call her name all morning. By lunch she’d peeked out her door so often for a sight of her Mr. Wrong that two of his workers thought she was stalking them. Annoyed at herself, she ate a few of the cookies.
    Just a few.
    All afternoon she could hear Jacob’s voice on the Nextels of his workers as they communicated, and every time she did, she felt the urge to eat a few more cookies.
    By quitting time she’d consumed a total of seven, leaving only five.
    Alice stuck her head in Maggie’s door to wave good-bye and Maggie absentmindedly waved back, sneaking out one more cookie. She was thinking about the last four when Alice called her cell phone.
    “Didn’t you just leave?” Maggie asked her.
    “I did. I am. Your car has a flat.”
    Dammit. She needed new tires. “Okay, I’ll call Triple A, thanks.”
    “Call now so you don’t have to wait.”
    “I will.” She hung up and looked at the cookies. Stress. Stress made her hungry. Jacob didn’t need four cookies, they were huge. So she took one more while she went back to her computer, and when she looked up again another hour had passed and the construction workers were gone.
    And so was their stuff.
    They were done, they were gone, and Mr. Wrong hadn’t even come to say good-bye. That hurt. But it also meant that the cookies were hers, so she ate one more and called Janie. “I made Jacob a dozen cookies and ate all but two by myself. Not counting the dozen I ate last night.”
    “This is why you’re single.”
    “Thanks.” She hung up and took her loser self to the parking lot where she found her flat tire and remembered that she’d forgotten to call Triple A. With a sigh, she sank to the curb by her car and pulled out the Tupperware.
    Yep, two cookies left.
    A double loser.
     
     
    Jacob had his final check in hand, including the bonus that they’d earned by the skin of their teeth. It’d been a helluva tough forty-eight hours but he was done.
    Free.
    Leaving Scott’s office, he went by Maggie’s to say good-bye before heading to the airport. He hadn’t had a moment to breathe all day, but he’d thought about her. Thought about her and how she’d looked sitting on her worktable with no panties . . .
    Her office was dark. He’d missed her. Frustrated, exhausted, and now disappointed, he left the building. It was a typical L.A. winter evening, fifty-five degrees with a rare addition—clouds gathering, blocking out any moon or starlight—not that there was ever much of that visible in downtown Los Angeles anyway.
    The streets were decorated with red garland and festive colored lights, along with a long string of red brake lights—business traffic trying to get to the freeway. He walked through the parking lot and came to a surprised stop in front of Maggie, sitting on the curb by her car, eating . . . a cookie? “Hey.”
    “Hey, yourself.”
    “What are you doing?”
    “Eating a cookie.”
    “Okay.” He waited for her to expand on that but she didn’t.
    “You can just ignore me,” she said instead.
    Uh-huh. As if he could. Nothing about her was ignorable, not from the tips of her toes poking out her high-heeled sandals all the way up those sweet, lush curves to the strands of her adorably messy hair. “Why are you sitting on the curb?”
    “I was talking on my cell to my sister. Just doing my part of the statistic that says the average American spends two years on the phone.”
    “I’m not anywhere close to average.”
    “I know. You’re bigger.” She covered her face. “Sorry. Sugar rush. Too many cookies. Waaay too many.”
    She had a dab of chocolate on the corner of her mouth, and he found himself fixated on that. “What, no facts on cookies?”
    “Oh, I have cookie facts. I was just trying to hold back.”
    “You don’t have to hold back with me, Maggie.”
    “Okay. Did you know it was Ruth Graves Wakefield who first used candy-bar chocolate in a cookie recipe while at the Toll