My eyes follow its slow track to the carpeted floor. It dings and bounces three times before it comes to a complete stop. Not eager to fight without a weapon, I bob down to gather my shoe. I don't know if he's clambering for safety or being a gentleman, but our simultaneous dive for my stiletto results in our heads knocking together.
“Oww,” I moan. “Your face is as hard as it looks.”
Panic rains down on me when my hand darts up to my throbbing brow. I’m bleeding. Not just a slight trickle. A full stream of vibrant red blood is gushing down my eye. It makes being mugged the least of my problems, as you can’t get any more frightening than death.
“Fuck,” my elevator companion grumbles under his breath when he notices I’m injured. Ignoring the ding of the elevator announcing its arrival on floor twenty-five, he throws off his suit jacket, unfastens the buttons of his blue dress shirt, then yanks his undershirt out of his trousers.
The wooziness in my head intensifies. He doesn’t just have a handsome face. He has an equally enticing body. Abs stacked on abs, a slim waist, and pecs that are thankfully missing the hair scattered along his sharp jaw—not that you’d be able to see it through the large tattoo on his right pec.
“Thank you,” I mutter, slightly disoriented when he places his wadded-up shirt on the laceration on my forehead.
My brain is throbbing against my skull, but it has nothing on the manic pulse between my legs. I’m being inundated with a manly, virile scent, and there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it. This is pure torture to a woman as domineering as me.
“I’m sure it’s fine now. It doesn’t even hurt,” I lie, dragging his shirt away from my head.
Bile races up my throat when I spot how much blood has soaked his shirt. “Is that all mine?” My hand darts out to settle myself when my question arrives with a frantic rush of dizziness. “Woo. I’m a little woozy.”
Who the hell’s voice was that?I sound like a giddy drunk.
"I think you're concussed." The strange man peers at my wound with worry slashed across his features.
I’m fairly sure his assumption is right when I stammer out, “Concussed from being smacked with too much manliness.”
I laugh at myself.I’m fucking hilarious when I’m on the brink of collapse.
“Alright, Rae. Time for a trip to the ER.”
“Noooooo,” I whine. “I hate the doctomorphors.” That sounded nothing like it did in my head.
When the world moves beneath my feet without warning, I stumble forward. My companion catches me in his arms before the ground and I make kissy faces. After pulling me to his chest, he jabs his elbow into the security panel, redirecting our car to the lobby.
“If they give me a needle, I’m going to pierce your eyeball with my shoe.”
It takes three floors to issue my warning, but it was worth the effort when my savior says, “Duly noted.”
I nuzzle into his chest, wanting the mad beat of his heart to replace the thump in my skull. It is racing a million miles an hour but could lull me to sleep in an instant. It is already replacing the fuzziness surrounding me with a pleasurable, less flighty sensation.
“Excuse me,” I mumble a short time later, my lips as uncooperative as my drooping eyelids.
I wait for the stranger’s glistening baby blues to connect with mine before asking, “What’s your name?”
Halfway out of the elevator, he stills, amplifying the crazy beat of his heart. It pumps three long, panicked beats before he answers, “Alex. Alex Rogers.”
“Alex?” My tongue clicks my teeth when I test out his name. “Alex. Alex Rogers. I like the sound of that.”
I giggle again, my impersonation of James Bond too hilarious not to laugh.
With Alex’s steps matching the purposeful thuds of his heart, it is only a matter of time before I succumb to the blackness engulfing me.
Chapter Eight
“What was I supposed to do, leave her bleeding in the elevator with a concussion?”
. . .
Silence. Dead fucking silence.
. . .
