Funny, because now they were even, or nearabouts. Though perhaps she still owed him an orgasm. She stepped inside the lift, feeling his dark eyes on her, and thought it seemed as good a time as any to remind him as much—
‘Good afternoon, Ms Danforth,’ a female voice said.
And Paige leapt fair out of her skin. Her gaze jumped sideways to find Mrs Addable from the ninth floor tucked into the front corner, stroking Randy, her Russian Blue whose hair was the same solid dark grey as his owner’s.
‘Mrs Addable, hi,’ Paige mumbled as she slipped into the gap, behind Mrs Addable, and beside Gabe, who looked straight ahead even while his body heat reached out to her like an invitation. ‘Randy okay?’
Mrs Addable rolled her eyes. ‘He’s decided he’s too good for his litter tray. We now have to take a constitutional down to the garden near the parking lot four times a day.’
Mrs Addable’s eyes slid over lounging Gabe to Paige, who was standing as still and upright as a tower. The older woman’s sharp eyes softened to a dull gleam.
‘You’re Gabe Hamilton,’ Mrs Addable said.
‘That I am,’ Gabe’s deep voice rang out.
Paige had to swallow hard so as not to tremble as the sound reverberated deliciously through her bones. She remembered all too well the feel of his breath against her cheek that came with the exquisite sensation of having him inside her.
‘Gloria Addable. 9B. I heard Sam the Super talking to Mr Klempt the other day about your arrival.’
‘Pleasure to meet you, Gloria.’
‘Likewise, Gabe.’
No Mr Hamilton, Paige noticed. She’d lived in the building for two years and had yet to progress from polite surnames from anyone in that apartment bar the cat.
‘Sam said you’d had some trouble with your bed?’ Mrs Addable added, eyes now front, watching the movement of floor numbers, the slow strokes to Randy’s back causing the cat to purr.
‘True, yet I’ve managed remarkably well,’ he said, pulling himself upright, bringing him closer.
Paige looked directly ahead, not daring to meet his eyes. Yet she felt a beat pulse between them. Two. Three.
‘I have a spare mattress I can send up,’ Mrs Addable tried again. ‘It’s only a single, but …’
While Mrs Addable droned on about the history of her single mattress, Paige felt Gabe move closer still. Close enough when she breathed the sleeve of his jacket brushed against the sleeve of hers.
Then he said, ‘My bed arrived this morning.’
Forgetting propriety completely, Paige shot her gaze straight to his. ‘It did?’
Mrs Addable’s snort of triumph barely touched the edges of her sub-conscious. Gabe’s dark and dangerous eyes had a funny way of blocking out everything else.
His voice was low as he said, ‘The service lift, it seems, is less touchy.’
‘That’s great,’ Paige said, adding a belated, ‘For you.’
Gabe’s cheek lifted in the beginnings of the kind of smile that meant big trouble for her. ‘I’m glad—for me—too.’
The lift binged and when Paige and Mrs Addable both turned with expectation towards the doors, Gabe took the chance to slide his finger down the edge of Paige’s. The shock of his touch shot through her like a bushfire, spreading in half a second flat to the whole of her chest and the ends of her curling toes.
The door opened to the fourth floor. Where nobody was waiting. And stayed there.
Mrs Addable sighed. ‘It’s okay, Randy. We’ll get there eventually.’
As the lift went up and down the next ten minutes, Paige locked her knees, and bit her bottom lip, and prayed for the strength not to moan out loud as Gabe’s thumb traced circles over the wildly fluctuating pulse at her wrist, making her so woozy she saw spots.
And for the first time since she’d moved into the building she was thankful she had a Machiavellian lift.
IT TOOK more than fifteen stupid minutes for the stupid lift to open at Paige’s floor on the night of Gabe’s party. Way too much time in which to wonder if she ought to change her dress. Her hair. Her mind.
She felt edgy. Hyper-aware. As if she could feel even the slightest shift of air dancing across her skin. Because after several days of living out the most hot, illicit, exciting affair of her life under cover of darkness in the privacy of Gabe’s moon-drenched loft, the real world was about to impose on their heretofore perfect little bubble of secret sex.
The lift doors began to close and she slipped inside at the last second, squeezing into a gap amongst a group of bright shiny young things, none of whom she’d ever met. Why would she have? She and Gabe knew hardly anything about one another outside the bedroom.
Which was fine. Perfect really. It kept things super casual.
She wished she’d brought up the party once, at least to get a gauge of what she might be about to walk into. Would she and Gabe treat one another as virtual strangers? As friendly neighbours? Or would they simply avoid one another all night?
This, she thought. This was why she liked things to be simple, straightforward, with all the cards on the table from the very beginning. This nervous tumbling in her stomach was awful. And horribly familiar. Surely it was a symptom that something wasn’t right.
As the lift rose the deep whump whump whump of music pulsed in her bones, lifting the energy throbbing deep within her to screaming point. The lift opened, and the sounds of party chatter and, ironically, Billy Idol singing ‘Hot in the City’ spilled into the lift as the inhabitants tumbled out.
Paige took a deep breath, smoothed a hand over her new dress, ran another over her hair, then with chin tilted she walked into Gabe’s penthouse.
As it turned out, Paige knew plenty of people. Mrs Addable and several other inhabitants of the building huddled by the windows checking out the view. She saw a few girls from uni, and even a couple of guys she’d dated. She felt an odd surge of disappointment. She shook it off. She wasn’t special to Gabe and she didn’t want to be.
She nearly managed to convince herself as much when a quick glance around the jam-packed room revealed a massive red and grey rug now covering the lounge-room floor. A large red urn bursting with a tall spray of stripped willow. And chairs and tables in every place they ought to be. A half second after she got over the surprise of Gabe having decorated she realised every item was from that season’s Ménage à Moi catalogue. The bubbles in her stomach went haywire.
Then the hairs on the back of her neck began to prickle, as though she was being watched. In a party that size someone somewhere would be smouldering at someone, and it was likely she’d been caught in the crossfire. And yet …
Rolling her shoulders to fend off the scratchy sensation, she turned, eyes searching the crowd until they landed on a pair of familiar dark eyes.
Gabe stood on the far side of the large room, his back to the floor-to-ceiling windows, a near full moon and a million stars twinkling in the inky black sky his backdrop. He was so deliciously handsome, so unsettling, so much. And his eyes were focused entirely on her. Dark eyes of a man who was near addicted to doughnuts, knew more about Doris Day movies than she did, and who remembered where she worked even though she was sure she hadn’t mentioned it since the day they first met.
She liked that he was leaving. Liked that he was discreet. Liked that every time she saw him he could barely keep his hands off