“You drank?” He looked at her with new eyes as alarms went off in his head.
Too busy looking inward, Gloria missed the edgy look in his eyes. She nodded.
“I drank an ocean of alcohol, trying to drown my insecurities. But all that drinking did for me was give me another problem,” she confessed. “Took me a long time to come to terms with that.”
“You don’t drink anymore?” There was skepticism in his voice. Ann had pretended to be “cured,” too. More than once. And each time, he’d believed the lie. Hoping it was the truth.
“Nothing that’ll give me a buzz. These days, my drink of choice is diet soda or sparkling nonalcoholic cider, nothing strong.” She wasn’t going to allow herself to fall into that trap again. “Hitting bottom made me want to surface again, to breathe fresh air.” She looked around the dim interior. The walls had grown closer together. Her blouse was sticking to her body. She opened another button, but that didn’t do anything to help. Just reminded her of how powerless she was at trying to control the situation. “Kind of what I want to do now.”
Taking her chin in his hand, he moved her head until her eyes were level with his. She was sinking, he could see it. Jack banished the feelings that threatened to take over. Her drinking wasn’t the issue here. Keeping her from succumbing to terror was.
“Keep talking,” he ordered.
Heat and fear combined to make her irrational. “Why, so you can gather ammunition against me to take to your father?”
For a moment a scowl returned to his face. He reined in his temper. Maybe arguing with her could make her forget how she felt about being confined in the elevator. “Is that what you actually think of me? That I’m some kind of a snitch who goes behind people’s backs?”
She wiped the back of her sleeve against her forehead. There was no air. No air. Frantic thoughts assailed her from all sides. She was going to melt. The cable was going to snap and they were going to fall twenty stories. She desperately tried to keep her mind on the conversation. “Going behind my back would imply secrecy. You’ve made no secret of how you feel about me.”
He wanted to keep her talking at all costs. If she focused her anger on him, she might not think about being trapped. “And what’s that?”
She blew out an annoyed breath, as if she was tired of playing games. “That you feel you’ve been saddled with something, someone beneath you.”
His eyes held hers for a moment. No, not beneath him, he thought. The woman was clearly his match in every way. Maybe that was what he had against her. “Your intuitive skills aren’t as sharp as you think they are.”
“Oh?” Just then, she heard what she took to be the cables, creaking. They were going to fall down the shaft. Her throat closed so tightly she was afraid she was going to asphyxiate.
She clutched at his arm, staring up at the ceiling. “What was that?”
“Maybe the power trying to come back on,” he lied. He was beginning to feel a little uneasy himself, but not because of the small space. His unease came from having her so close to him. From the fact that she seemed to fill up every space with her essence.
Her breathing was audible now. “Or the cables about to snap.”
“Not going to happen,” he assured her. “There’s emergency equipment that comes on as an auxiliary fail-safe measure.” He searched for a way to explain what he was saying so that it would penetrate the fog of fear crowding her brain. “Each floor has what amounts to brakes that come out and stop the car from plunging down to the ground floor.”
She didn’t look as if she believed him. Maybe she had already gone into shock, he thought. What the hell were you supposed to do with a person in shock? Keep them moving? Have them lie down?
He decided to compromise. Jack slipped his arm around her shoulders. “Sit down,” he instructed quietly. “Take a deep breath and hold it.”
But she shook her head, her hair flying from side to side. “I can’t. My lungs feel like they’re going to explode.”
If she kept on breathing like that, she was going to hyperventilate. He couldn’t let that happen. Desperate for a solution, he let his instincts take over. Instincts born of inspiration, of need and, perhaps, of more than a touch of desire.
Jack brought his mouth down to hers.
At first she struggled against him, not because she didn’t want to kiss Jack but because she couldn’t get enough air into her lungs.
But then her breathing began to regulate itself as the center of her attention slowly shifted from the very real fear that, despite his assurances about the emergency fail-safes that had been put in when the elevators were installed, they were going to fall to their deaths, crushed inside a silvery coffin.
Instead, her focus turned to the kiss that was swiftly setting fire to the very blood in her veins.
Panic abated in increments.
Gloria felt herself being pressed against him, felt the length of his body imprint itself onto hers. Felt her response as desire, hidden behind thin bamboo walls, broke through, seizing her. Making her tighten her arms around him.
Her heart was pounding, but for an entirely different reason than before.
He’d meant only to divert her. To keep her from hyperventilating. He hadn’t meant to get caught up in what amounted to an unorthodox first-aid application. Not like this. To make matters worse, she’d just shared something with him that had brought back memories he didn’t want to deal with, that made him relive Ann’s last days.
Maybe that was it. Maybe that had made him vulnerable.
And maybe it was none of the above. Maybe it just had to do with the woman in his arms. The woman he’d had an underlying yearning for since the first moment she had looked up at him with those incredible soft-brown eyes, turning his stomach to jelly and nearly turning his mind to mincemeat.
Kissing her only made him want her with a fierceness that was every bit as overwhelming as the claustrophobia he knew she was wrestling with.
Suddenly he realized that he had to step back, had to get air himself. Logic demanded that he try to clear his head.
But he didn’t want to.
Didn’t want to give up this wild surge that was pulsating through him, forging a path through his body. Making him aware of himself as a man.
He hadn’t wanted, truly wanted, a woman since Ann had died, leaving him to wander emotionally isolated in this world. Oh, there had been biological needs since then, but he could always separate himself from them, step outside his body and watch as he went through the physical motions of having sex, his mind absent from the process.
Right now his mind was in full attendance and there was no separating anything. The logic that always presided over his life had somehow gotten lost.
Nothing mattered except that he wanted to make love with Gloria. Wanted to get lost within her as they kept the world at arm’s length.
This wasn’t like her, not anymore, Gloria kept telling herself. She didn’t do things like this anymore: give up who and what she was with an abandonment that was so swift it all but jarred her very teeth. But all those encounters that had taken place in her past had been governed by inebriation. Her brain had always been liberally soused, the ability to think lost inside of a bottle.
But not this time.
She was stone-cold sober, drunk only on this sensation that was vibrating through her like the strings of a harp that had been plucked. She was drunk, but only on the idea of making love.
When his hands caressed her, Gloria moaned audibly, wanting him to