When Stars Collide (Second Chance Romance #2) - Sara Furlong-Burr Page 0,13

approval. “Those pictures I sent to you, they were meant for my boyfriend. I should have double-checked that I was sending them to the right person, but it was just so late, and I …”

Phineas stared at me, eyebrow cocked, brown eyes reflecting a perfect cocktail of amusement and confusion.

“And you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

He shook his head. “No, but that’s not saying much. I generally have no idea what you’re talking about most of the time.”

“Fair enough.” I glanced down at his cell phone resting on his desk. “I suppose I should start from the beginning, then?”

“That would be preferable.”

“Look, I sent a text to you last night.”

“You did?” He turned to pick up his phone.

“No, no, no, no!” I lunged forward, grabbing his wrist, instantly wishing I hadn’t. “I’m sorry … again,” I apologized, pretending to brush off his suit jacket. “Just let me finish my story before,” my stomach sank, “you open up any texts from me.”

“This has to be good.” Setting the phone back down in front of him, he leaned back in this chair.

Here goes everything.

Unable to make proper eye contact with him, I regaled Phineas with the tale of my attempted foray into softcore porn, including my delightfully relatable faux pas, wherein said pornographic material had made its way onto his mobile device instead of to its intended recipient.

“I never do this … and you can bet for damn sure I never will again.”

“What? Get naked? I don’t proclaim to be an expert on your personal habits, but I’m pretty certain that’s a statement that won’t hold true.” The gleam in his eyes was undeniable.

Is he enjoying this? Does he like having something over me?

“Do my ears deceive me or was that an actual joke from the Phineas Drake?”

He smiled. “What is life if we can’t have a little fun once in a while?” He picked up his cell phone again, sending the butterflies traveling right back into my intestines. “And what is life if we let one mistake define the rest of our days?” He handed me his phone. “The pin to get in is 76590.”

“For the record, I wasn’t nude.” With an appreciative glance up at him, I plugged the pin number into the phone, unlocking the screen. The icon for his text messages was located right on his home screen. Fingers shaking, I opened his texts, finding mine in the middle of a heap of unopened messages, and deleted it.

“Are we all set, then?” he asked.

Grateful, I handed his phone back to him. “Yes. Thank you, Phineas. Truly.”

“No need to thank me. As you saw, I receive quite a few texts—too many to keep up with. So, I don’t keep up with them. I despise text messages, always have. They’re too impersonal for my liking. Chances are your text would have remained buried, lost in the abyss along with all the others.”

“That would explain why I never got that raise I asked for.”

“Really? You send me explicit photos of yourself and you then have the gall to mention a raise?”

“I thought we were putting this all behind us?”

“This all literally happened just two minutes ago.”

“There you go bringing up the past again.”

“There’s our Mena back.” He chuckled. “Frankly, that timid little thing who entered my office five minutes ago scared the shit out of me.”

“Because she thought it would be the last time she would be entering your office.”

He reached for a manuscript at the other end of his desk and set it down in front of him. “On the contrary. It would appear as though you’ll be getting that raise, after all.”

“Come again?” It was my turn to be confused.

He held up the manuscript he’d set down in front of him. It was one I’d given him to review; a paranormal romance novel culled from the heap of manuscripts that had trickled in over the last few months. “This is our next Soldiers of Atlantis, and you discovered it.”

“I mean, it’s good.”

“It’s better than good. It’s great.” He flipped through the pages, reading some of the selected passages I’d highlighted. He’d made notes of his own next to many of those highlights. Phineas customarily gave novels the first twenty pages to capture his attention. If they failed to do so, the manuscripts were cast aside. As he flipped through this one, I saw the etchings of his blue ink pen throughout. “This brings me to the reason I asked you in here. This was