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That was when the lights cut out.
Chapter 2
Ivy
I could practically see my obituary now.
Ivy Lynch—daughter of Richard Lynch III—dies in a freak elevator accident, wearing a vintage wedding dress and in the arms of a lumberjack.
It wasn’t a story that did me any sort of justice, and I found it just a little bit more difficult to breathe.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “Are you hurt?”
He smelled like trees. And fresh air. And he was so big.
I shook my head because those were wildly unhelpful thoughts.
He was a stranger, for God’s sake, and it didn’t matter that he had arms the size of a fucking python.
“Are you hurt?” he asked again.
“No,” I said. “I’m not hurt.”
Why the hell was I still holding on to him?
Manners dictated a whole slew of reactions different from this one, but I found myself not really caring much what would be required of me in this particular situation.
Yet there was no fighting the years of etiquette classes. I could practically hear my teacher’s prim voice in my head.
We do not cling to strangers like a koala, Ivy. It’s unseemly.
My etiquette teacher also told me that swearing was coarse and unrefined and that didn’t stop the endless stream of profanity that battered relentlessly at the filter between my brain and my mouth.
If that bitch were in here, she’d be holding on to him too. I’d been forced to listen to her for a long time too, because no matter how much she chirped at me, I bristled against every single one of her lessons for a solid decade.
Gently, I pushed against his chest, but he tightened the muscular arm wrapped around my waist, and my stomach swooped pleasantly as a result.
Good Lord, Ivy, I thought. I needed to get laid if this felt even the slightest bit like foreplay.
“Hang on,” he said, his voice a low, pleasing rumble next to my ear. “Just want to make sure we’re not going down. The last thing we need is you getting hurt.”
I sucked in a quick shaky breath. “Right.”
The possibility of a plummeting death. Couldn’t forget that.
Or why I was in that elevator in the first place.
If anything was unseemly, it was that.
Panic crystallized in my veins like little ice chips, my fingers tingling ominously. What in the absolute fuck had I done?
I pinched my eyes shut and heard Caroline’s voice in my head as I bolted into the elevator. She sounded panicked.
Of course she did.
My dad would be panicked too when he heard about this, but maybe he shouldn’t have assumed that I’d marry a childhood friend simply because it would solidify their two businesses.
My heart raced at the thought of Ethan, and not because he was the kind of man who elicited heart-racing thoughts on the regular. If anything, that was part of our problem.
