Present Day

I hear my favorite sound when I head to the break room to grab a bottle of water. The sound of a certain woman.

“You know how it is, right?”

That sexy voice. Gets me every time. In the you-know-where.

Ginny is pouring a cup of coffee and talking to a gal who works in operations. “I hear ya,” the woman, Julie, says.

“You’re just so overwhelmed, you try to do two things at once all the time, like you suddenly think you’re superwoman, and you can both wash dishes and dry them at the same time.”

Julie chuckles. “Or fold laundry at the exact moment that you’re cooking.”

“What a skill set. Don’t I wish I could do that.”

“I’d also like to be able to sleep and exercise simultaneously.”

Ginny high-fives Julie. “That’s how it is being a mom. You’re completely convinced you can do everything, and then you get really cocky, and also totally overwhelmed, so you try to do two diametrically opposed things at once that never work. Like brush your teeth and pee.”

“Girl, that never works.”

“Which leads me to my point. All this superwoman stuff—we can have it all—is just a bunch of poppycock. We’re simply trying to do it all, and we fail at all the things that way. For instance, how can I truly do one of the gazillion things on my to-do list while I’m working out? Too hard to answer email. Can’t fold laundry and exercise. And I’ve yet to figure out how to sweep the floors while I’m on the treadmill.”

I figure this is my chance to cut in since working out is my hobby, my passion, my second favorite physical activity. I turn the corner into the room. “You could try doing squats while you brush your teeth,” I offer in as friendly a way as possible. “After all, isn’t that a great use of time? That’s totally achievable. I do that every day, in fact. I always do squats and lunges while I brush my teeth, and I use my electric toothbrush, which runs for a full two minutes. You do thirty seconds on each quadrant of your mouth, so I do lunges on each side. Right, left, right, left, boom, done.”

I do a few squats and a couple of lunges to demonstrate.

The redhead, oh the glorious, gorgeous redhead Ginny—who’s become a colleague, a teammate, a friend, and a lunch companion, which is thoroughly awesome because lunch is one of my three favorite meals, the others being breakfast and dinner—stares at me curiously, her lips quirking up.

“Are you saying I need to do squats, Noah?”

I gulp. I did not mean to insult her at all. All I want is to shower her with compliments. “No, your legs are—”

“You think I’m not working out enough?”

Abort, abort, abort.

I grab the steering wheel of the plane, and I try to fly it out of the crash landing that I’m about to careen into.

The last thing I want is for the woman I’m totally hot for to think she’s anything less than a ten. No, a one hundred. No, a one thousand on the scale of total freaking gorgeousness, charm, and personality.

She’s the warmest, friendliest gal I’ve ever met and has been since day one. If I could just figure out how to get her to see me in a new way.

I point furiously at the legs in question. “No, God no. Your legs are toned, tanned, and perfect.”

I mentally slap myself upside the head. Am I allowed to say that in the workplace? I have no idea what I’m allowed to do in the workplace anymore.

Julie snickers. “I feel like it might be my cue to go. Seems you two have a lot of multitasking and exercise life hacks to chat about.”

She exits as Ginny arches a brow and says, “I’ll have you know, I do try to do squats, because they are good for your legs.”

“They’re great for your legs. I pray at the altar of squats every single day.”

She taps her chin. “But I did kind of think”—Ginny drops her voice to a naughty whisper—“that squats were good for your butt . . .” She trails off, her eyes drifting as if she’s checking out her own rear end. Oh, I would like to be looking out of her sockets right now and staring at her fine ass. Not that I haven’t checked out her cheeks every single time she strolls down the hall. Yes, I like her personality, but I dig her looks too.

A lot.

I’m confident, though, that I can’t compliment her butt. That’s definitely not cool in the workplace.

“Your legs . . .”

Hold on. I don’t know if I’m even allowed to say her legs are perfect. Is that verboten? What the hell am I allowed to say to a woman I work with anymore? We’re lateral here at Heavenly. It’s not like I’m her boss or vice versa, but I don’t know if I’m allowed to hit on a woman at work.

“My legs are strong,” she says with a smile, finishing my half-said sentence. “I live in a fifth-floor walk-up, so I’ve already managed to combine exercise and transportation. See, that’s the one thing I have mastered multitasking.”

I breathe a sigh of relief. We’re on the same wavelength, so I decide to push a little further past the work zone. “Well, that’s awesome. Also, aren’t electric toothbrushes good for, ya know, other things?”

Her grin is the definition of wicked. “Noah, are you about to say something vastly inappropriate about electric toothbrushes?”

“I don’t know what I possibly could have been saying,” I say, as cheeky and innocent as possible.

She steps closer, her eyes tap-dancing with delight. “Were you going to say that using an electric toothbrush is a euphemism for using something else?”

I part my lips to speak when she flashes me a smile, presses a finger to her lips, and says, “We’ll just pretend neither one of us mentioned battery-operated devices.”

She exits in a cloud of honeysuckle copper hair and an Aussie accent that turns me all the way on. And yes, as she walks down the hall, I watch her walk away.

Someday, someday soon, I’m going to come up with a proper plan for how to woo Ginny Perretti.