“Just found out about it this morning actually,” he explained, and my eyes narrowed in confusion. “Two potential endorsers are visiting the Philadelphia location today and tomorrow, and they would like to see this location on Wednesday before they head back out West. We’ll be taking them to dinner.”

Oh.

Oh.

He wasn’t asking me out on a date date. Duh. I mean, why would I even think that he was? He was engaged, and Brock had never been interested in me in that way. It was just a momentary lapse of intelligence.

Feeling about seven different kinds of idiotic, I tucked my hair back behind my ear and muttered, “Well, I guess I’ll be canceling my date then.”

“You’ll thank me later for it.” He winked when I looked at him. “Trust me.”

“Okay. This conversation has gone way off track,” I said.

“Those are the best kind of conversations.” He reached behind him and curled his large hand around the mug.

I ignored the comment and refocused. “The reason why I’m in your office is because I wanted to see you—”

“It’s about time you admit that,” he replied smoothly, and those eyes of his, dark and endless, took on a lazy quality that had my pulse once again pounding all over the place. “Have I told you lately how much I like it when you wear your hair down?”

“No,” I whispered.

“I do. You have beautiful hair.” His jaw tightened. “Never noticed that before. You always had it pulled up, didn’t you?”

“Um.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Always pulled up.” With one hand still wrapped around the coffee cup, he picked up a piece of my hair, running his fingers along the strand. His voice deepened when he said, “You’ve always been a pretty girl. I know I’ve said that to you before, but you’ve become such a beautiful woman.”

I wanted to laugh, to ask him if he’d been drinking this morning, but my heart was beating too fast. I had no idea how to process what he was doing and saying. Brock had told me I was beautiful before, but he’d always said it back then in a way that it was just a passing compliment, one tossed out and not really meaning anything. Hearing it come from his mouth now was nothing like before.

Lifting my gaze once more to his, I found that I was unable to look away. Brock was one hundred percent a grown man now and he never, ever had looked at me like he did in this moment, like he was . . . he was starving, and I didn’t understand how he could be staring at me like that. It didn’t make sense, not in the world we lived in.