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When you lived in a small town, which we did, most of the single women there knew me. Knew my family. The fact that I’d had those blinders on didn’t go unnoticed by any of them.
I wasn’t the guy knocked speechless at the sight of a pretty face and pretty eyes.
I was usually the guy who didn’t notice them at all because I was too damn busy and too damn tired to think about it.
Maybe that was part of my problem. I’d not noticed for so long, that this one—with the golden hair and dark blue eyes—hit at exactly the moment when I was feeling a bit unmoored. Unsteady.
That unsteadiness had me taking my sister’s advice (I’d never admit it to her) and ordering a sandwich from the cafe in the hotel lobby. I ate half while I sat at a table overlooking the street, but the stress of the meeting, the suddenly empty calendar, and the strangeness of the encounter on the street had my appetite disappearing quickly.
Wrapping the remainder of the sandwich into the paper, I tucked it into my laptop bag and returned to my hotel room to pack the rest of my stuff.
The elevator, old and historic like the rest of the hotel, was ungodly slow, and I eyed the top of the enclosure warily as it chugged up to the fourth floor. Inside the room, I set my laptop bag down next to the door and tossed my phone onto the bed.
For a moment, I considered face-planting right next to my phone and taking a nap before my drive, but the itch to get out of Portland and get back home was too strong.
My duffel bag was packed quickly, the natural byproduct of taking as little as possible with me when I was forced to travel, but in my haste to get back home, I didn’t do as thorough a sweep of the room as I should have.
I was halfway down to the lobby, another loud, slow ride on the elevator when I went to grab my phone out of my pocket and groaned.
“Shit,” I muttered.
It was still sitting on the bed.
The elevator door opened with a ding, and instead of exiting, I simply pushed the button for the fourth floor again.
As the mirrored panels started closing, a breathless voice called out, “Hold the doors, please!”
I snagged the edge of the door to stop it and exhaled slowly when I heard the sound of quick footsteps approaching.
The door pressed against my hand, and I jerked it back again with a bit more force than was necessary.
“Ivy, wait,” another female voice yelled.
A woman ran in—gold hair pulled back in a severe ponytail, and I realized with an uneven thump in my chest that it was the same woman from outside the hotel—and she tugged my hand away from the door at the same moment she punched the button to close the doors.
The press of her fingers, tight and firm on my arm, felt a whole hell of a lot like the time I accidentally touched a live wire in the wall when I was putting up tile in my kitchen.
A quick jolt of unintended heat, and then gone again, with nothing left to show except a racing heart and tattered nerves.
When she pulled back, chest heaving, gulping in great heaving breaths of air, she sagged into the corner of the elevator. My mouth fell open because it was the same woman, but she was wearing a wedding dress.
An old wedding dress, by the looks of it.
That gold chain was still around her neck, disappearing underneath the dress.
Then her eyes met mine, and she exhaled a shocked laugh. “That was so rude. I am so sorry I just grabbed your arm.”
I wasn’t.
Did she want to grab it again?
I cleared my throat and rolled my neck. “Uh, it’s fine.” I eyed the dress, the ruffled neckline that came straight across her chest, the cut of the skirt and the slightly yellowish-aged look to the hem. Briefly, she closed her eyes, a hand over her chest like she could hardly suck in oxygen fast enough. “Are you okay?”
The woman in the dress stared at me for a second, color pink on her high cheekbones, then slowly shook her head. “I don’t … I have no idea. What did I just do?” she whispered.
My brow furrowed as the whispered words hung in the eternally slow elevator. Right on cue, it slowed even more, emitting a high-pitched whine, a grinding noise that could not mean anything good, and a suspicious-sounding thump.
Then it came to a lurching stop, pitching her forward from her spot in the corner. I braced my feet and caught her with one arm around the waist to keep her from falling, one hand slamming against the railing on the side to keep us upright, and the last thing I saw before it went dark was the terrified look in her navy-blue eyes.
