I sighed again, loud enough for her to hear this time followed by a light-hearted laugh at the woman who’d changed my life faster than a gas and go in a NASCAR race. ”I love you.”

”Good, because I love you. See you soon Lauren,” she said before leaving me with a dial tone and a million things running through my mind.

Dammit. The trip home would take ten minutes or so, leaving me with about forty-five minutes to do some work. I skimmed through my mental checklist for what I could get done while mumbling incomprehensible ramblings about lagging front end grosses, finance closes and how much shit I needed to things apparently would have to wait. In all honesty, if I started anything else tonight I would surely be late. While I may be happy in my own little world here, it sounded as though life back home would be less than happy if I left her waiting again.

My fingers tapped on the old yellow desk. I needed to replace it because it was ugly as all hell and often broke my focus, making me feel like I was back in grade school with Ms. Franklin. I hated her class. Another pet peeve was the lack of windows. Maybe I would just move the office all together, although I didn’t plan to spend much time here once everything was running like a well oiled machine. This was supposed to be a way to grow and lend itself to more time off by settling in like all the other rich, fat guys who just called once a day to bust the managers balls, but in typical Lauren Lewis fashion, I dove in head first and still haven’t come up for air.

But god I loved it!

Thirty-five minutes left. Quickly I dialed one sixty-two, an extension I’d gotten all too familiar with. Daniel was the general sales manager of the new store that I was trying like hell to train. He liked to do things his way, unfortunately, his way wasn’t making the kind of money we should be, so I’d given him thirty days to turn it around or he could hit the pavement.

”Daniel, I’ll be heading home in a few. Text me when you leave and tell me how many we got out for the day and average gross and for fuck’s sake don’t dare say some weak shit like five hundred dollars.”