Chapter 5
LANDON
By the end of my first week, we’d cleared the mess of old tickets, figuring out which ones were already taken care of and which were outright defunct, and moving into the new system, with a literal first-come-first-served setup now.
Well, with some exceptions. Like, when the COO brought me her laptop and asked me to have a look at an issue she was having with a program, she got to jump the line.
I was working on that when Lucas St. James leaned into the enormous room, craning his head around to look at my desk.
I lifted a brow at him, and he grinned, sauntering in and heading straight across the room. I’d have given anything to have half the confidence of one of the St. James brothers. Just the way they moved was so self-assured, so smooth and chill and just . . . No question, I was jealous.
He planted his ass on the corner of my desk when he got to me, grinning manically.
“Why is your ass on the boss’s desk, St. James?” Julia called from her workspace, followed by laughter and jeering from the others.
There was a little . . . not-quite competition between the programmers and the tech team, and unlike at my last job, it truly wasn’t contentious. They all grinned while they were prodding each other, full of shoulder bumps and friendly laughter.
Again, it felt like something from a movie or a TV show. People being nice to each other when they didn’t have to be.
For my part, I was starting to feel like one of those kids who, upon telling stories about his childhood to his friends, got stares of horror instead of the laughter he’d been expecting. If I told my new crew about how things had been in Boston, I suspected they would pity me.
But, I had realized on reflection, I didn’t need or want that. I wasn’t in Boston anymore. I wasn’t living with people so willing to see me hurt. I didn’t have to look at my brother and ex kissing each other at my parents’ dinner table.
I was here, with these people, and everything was pretty freaking great.
I didn’t even miss anyone I’d left behind, which seemed telling about what kind of relationships—or lack thereof—I’d had in the city of my birth.
“Sorry to bother you,” Lucas said, loud and obnoxious for everyone to hear, looking at them instead of me. Then he leaned down, still smiling. “But I wanted to come down and make sure you were coming to trivia night next week.”
“Don’t want to go back to your losing streak?” Julia asked, laughing as he stuck his tongue out at her.
“Now that I’m stuck back, you know, working the job they pay me to do instead of hanging out here in the playroom,” he said, ducking his head, “I can’t just check in all the time. So I wanted to come down and make sure you weren’t making other plans.”
Playroom. Interesting. I cocked my head at him. “Lucas, do you wish you worked here instead of in programming?”
He huffed. “Oh come on. I stare at a screen looking for misplaced punctuation half the day. You guys get to do stuff. Use your hands. It’s fun.”
“You clearly haven’t tried to fix fucking Medson’s frozen computer,” Julia muttered.
Next to her, Alberto groaned. “Again? I swear, next time I get his laptop, I’m installing a parental control app and blocking him from every fucking porn site that exists.”
Everyone burst into raucous laughter, and I almost choked on the sip of water I’d been taking. I wanted to tell them they absolutely couldn’t do that to our CFO, but also . . . I’d seen the stack of support tickets. The man needed to stop using the company laptop for his skeevy porn sites.
Maybe if we installed one with a non-kid sounding name, like Norton, he wouldn’t realize the app was intended for controlling children’s browsing habits, and think it was a new company policy.
I should probably talk to Maia in HR about that first, though.
Actually, maybe there already was a company policy. I needed to look into that.
I shook myself out of my thoughts and turned back to Lucas. “I’d love to come to trivia night again. It was a lot of fun.”
His answering smile was blindingly bright, and unlike his brother’s, Lucas’s smiles never made me feel like there was a predator watching me.
Was I a weirdo, that some tiny shivery thing in the back of my head liked the way it felt, being in a predator’s sights?
I doubted the brothers were different kinds of shifters, but Lucas’s feline nature was familiar, comfortable, and kind in that way that said we could hang out together doing nothing and just be . . . company. Protection in numbers. That kind of thing.
Dean’s sharp eyes and sharper teeth made me shiver and want to run, and that tiny quivering kitten inside me hoped that he’d give chase.
“Awesome,” he answered. “We should, like, have dinner sometime, too.”
Julia turned and looked at him like he’d just suggested we get together for a nice cannibalism party, and he scowled at her. “Next week sometime,” he continued, looking back at me. “I know this great pizza place, it’s Dean’s favorite.”
And now I was confused. Like, seriously confused.
Was he inviting me to dinner, like, as a date? Or along with his brother?
I was pretty sure that as his technical superior, it was wildly unethical for me to date Lucas.
Even if I hadn’t been, he wasn’t exactly .
. . well, he didn’t make me want to run in hopes he’d give chase.
Maybe that was a terrible, awful way to choose a date, but I definitely had a type, and that type was slightly intimidating broody guys.
Not that Geoff had ever made me really nervous, but he’d driven a muscle car and worn a leather jacket. I just hadn’t realized until later that it was all an act trying to impress people. It had worked damn well on me.
“Or I mean, if you don’t like pizza—”
“I love pizza,” I interrupted. Maybe Lucas just wanted to be friends. That was easy enough to go with and maybe make less awkward. I motioned to the department. “We could . . . we could all go. Make it a thing, pizza Wednesday or something.”
Lucas didn’t even hesitate for a second, beaming at me. “Awesome. That sounds perfect.”
Behind him, Julia cocked her head, then nodded. “I could do pizza Wednesday. It’s not a chain place, is it?”
He turned and scowled at her. “Sure, I’m gonna drag everyone out to Papa John’s. Have a glass of garlic butter with your pizza.”
Everyone laughed at that, and she shrugged. “I mean, not gonna lie. That is the best thing they make.”
And suddenly we were all discussing the best pizza places in town.
Yeah, this would be okay. Lucas was not asking me out.
If he had been . . . damn it, the last thing in the world I wanted to do was come between two brothers. Even if I wasn’t the type to date one and then leave him for the other, I never wanted to cause any problems for a family.