Fallen (Stolen, Book Three) (An Alpha Billionaire Romance) by Ella London Page B

lunchtime hits, I’m so fidgety I can’t stand to be around myself. I need to get the hell away from this spot, get some breathing room. Or else I might just explode. Or go march into his office and demand he kiss me again.
    Lauren passes by my desk with a brown paper bag in her hand. Impulse has me saying hi to her.
    “Hey, Emme,” she replies with a friendly smile, stopping in front of me. Today she has on a pair of tight red pants that mold to her figure, along with a form-fit white dress shirt open at the throat. Her red hair is pulled back in a soft bun with pieces loose around her face. She’s gorgeous. “Happy Friday!”
    “You heading to lunch? Want to eat together?” I can hardly believe my own assertiveness. Maybe desperation makes me more social.
    The surprise in her eyes is covered quickly. “Yeah, sure. I’m just going to the cafeteria, but it’ll be nice to have someone to eat with. I usually stay at my desk.”
    “Me too.” I dig into my drawer to pull out my salad and soda and follow her down the elevator to the basement. The doors open, and we turn left, then right into the cafeteria. There’s a table immediately on our right, which we grab.
    We don’t talk much at first. She eats her ham sandwich, and I poke at my chicken salad. My courage is fast fleeing, and all my emotions are a tangled knot in my chest.
    “So how are you liking it so far here?” she asks me, politely ignoring my awkwardness. “You’ve been here…what, around eight months now?”
    “Six,” I correct her.
    “Hm. Seems like it’s been longer.” She laughs. “Time does something weird in this building, I’ve noticed.”
    “I have too.” I give a wry smile, trying to push aside the deeper meaning behind those words. Thoughts of Dane’s tongue plunging into my mouth make me flush slightly, but I desperately refocus on the person in front of me.
    “You’re still in school, right?” she asks. “How are you liking your classes? When do you graduate?”
    Lauren’s gentle questions start to open me up, and I find myself talking about my degree, about what I want to do once I graduate. I even manage to ask her about her own background and what led her here. Turns out she served a semester-long internship here in undergrad, and when she got her Master’s, she knew she wanted to come back here and work for real. Hearing that she started even lower than I did makes me feel a little better about my own position.
    Soon, we’re both laughing about mess-ups we made when we first started at the company. I relay how I accidentally made a hundred copies of a document for a meeting when I only meant to make ten, and Carl was standing there while they all printed out, sighing and rolling his eyes the whole time.
    Lauren snorts and takes a sip of her Coke. “Okay, that’s funny. I remember I was supposed to take notes and type up a report on what I learned from a meeting. Somehow I managed to paste a dating article I’d been secretly reading on my computer, into the document that was supposed to have my meeting minutes. I didn’t notice it in my haste to send it on time. Dane emailed it back almost immediately and suggested I ‘proofread’ it, and then I discovered what I’d done. I felt so mortified.”
    “God, I bet.” Not as mortifying as having him see your private fantasies about him, but still pretty awkward.
    She glances at the time on her phone and sighs. “I’d better get back to work. We have that meeting at three today, so I need to get my stuff done before it’s The Carl Show.” She rolls her eyes, and I can’t help the laugh that barks out of me. “Oh, pardon me. You totally didn’t just see that.”
    “Not at all,” I say, crossing my heart with a smirk. Good to know I’m not the only one who disdains the man.
    She stands and rolls her neck. “Can’t wait to hear his thoughts on how he’s going to woo some of these big companies. I’m sure it’ll be engaging.” With a salute, she adds,