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“Because it had been so long?”
He lifts a tentative hand, and his fingers feather across my jaw before cupping it. “Because you are the most perplexing, maddening, and tempting woman I have ever met.”
“Is that on your list?” I ask, my pulse pounding as he edges closer. “Because it should be. It’s pretty good.” His mouth is so close to mine. All it would take is an upward press of my toes…
“It’s on there.”
“What else is on this list?”
“Your perfect sense of balance and poise,” he says, and I shove him with the hand still pressed to his shirt but hang on to it too because I don’t want him going anywhere.
“There you go again, being a dick.”
“I seem to remember you preferring me that way.”
And then I can’t wait anymore—I press up and kiss him. It feels familiar and dear, but the way he kisses me back is hot enough to leave me a trembling mass on the floor of this elevator. Surely, I wouldn’t still be standing if the crutches weren’t holding me up. He must hear my unspoken thought, because he says, “I’ll hold you up,” then props them in the corner of the small space.
He sucks in my bottom lip and kisses the corner of my mouth, the top, and the place where my jaw meets my neck. Everywhere his mouth lands, a blaze of fire follows, because this is right—this man, this place, this everything. If we were stuck in this elevator until the end of time it might not be long enough.
Okay, that’s not entirely true—I still want to get out of the elevator.
One of his hands holds me steady at my hip and the other burrows into my hair as he pulls me closer, changing the angle of the kiss. Our teeth gnash because I’m attacking him too, and then I pull away, stayed by a sudden thought.
“Danny, what are the odds of us both getting on the elevator like that, at the same time? Of it getting stuck again?”
“Astronomical,” he says, smiling down at me.
“It’s almost as if…”
As if fate brought us there, I want to say but don’t. Because if I talk like that, I might be tempted to join Delia in her Cult of Josie, and I already own the industrial-sized bag of black salt my sister left here.
He presses a soft kiss to the corner of my mouth, then kisses me harder again, as if he can’t help himself. “I felt drawn to the elevator,” he says, interrupting the words with another kiss. “I didn’t know why, but I knew I had to get on it.”
Then he pulls back slightly, putting a little distance between us. In response to my sound of protest, he says, “I need to say something, and I’m going to get distracted if you’re too close.”
“Because looking at me gives you a hard-on.”
“Because even thinking of you gives me a hard-on. It’s just…About a month before you moved in, Josie told me that I’d already met my soulmate but I’d made a bad impression on her.”
“Yeah, I know all of that,” I say, because even the thought of Daphne puts a bad taste in my mouth. And that was true before I knew what she was really up to.
“I know how it sounds,” he says, his tone almost apologetic, “but I think she was talking about you, not Daphne. You’d already met me, and I know what you thought. You’re not great at hiding your real feelings either.”
I want to respond to that, to tell him that I only thought what he wanted me to think. But I’m hung up on the other part of what he said. “You think we’re soulmates?”
My mind flickers back to the moment in this elevator weeks ago when I asked this man to touch me to make me feel something.
He’s made me feel everything.
“Is it too much?” he asks, his tone worried. Like he thinks there’s a chance in hell I’d walk out on him if it were physically possible.
I lift up and kiss him again, softly, and say, “I love you, Danny Traeger. I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume your forty-two reasons are all amazing and worthy of being on my cast. And I very much like the idea of being your soulmate.”
“Oh, thank God,” he says, bending his head to me and kissing my eyebrow, my nose, my mouth.
And then, I shit you not, the light does the freaky popping thing again, and the elevator starts moving. I laugh into his mouth, and he seems to swallow it. Then the doors are opening, and Shane is waiting opposite us with someone who has a tool belt they are not currently using. Shane’s mouth drops open, and it’s so comical to see a man like him so disarmed that I pull back from Danny slightly and burst out laughing.
I distantly register that Shane is saying something to the man, the super maybe, about the elevator being defective and a lawsuit risk since it’s now broken twice. But I’m still laughing. I’m too dizzy with happiness, with love, to pay such things any attention.
