‘What kind of name is Gabe?’
Gabe’s thighs burned from being on his haunches the past ten minutes as he tried to rewire the phone and get them the hell out of the box. He could sniff out creative accounting in a company report from a mile away, but he knew less than nothing about electrical engineering.
‘Just Gabe? Or short for Gabriel?’ Paige added when it became clear he wasn’t about to answer.
‘Short,’ he said.
‘That’s sweet,’ she said, clearly not as concerned as he was about the thinning of the air. ‘Like the angel.’
Gabe’s knees creaked as he pulled himself to standing. He turned to find Paige standing in the far corner of the lift, one bare foot on top of the other, her hair now up in a makeshift knot, the ends of his sports coat rolled up at her wrists. Despite the stale air all sorts of parts of him stirred for her again. He shot them down. He was conserving air. ‘You having fun over there while I try to get us out of here?’
‘Tonnes. I’m used to being the one swearing under my breath at this thing. It’s nice to watch someone else have a turn.’
‘Nice ain’t the word I’d use.’ Gabe looked around the small space. No way was he something so pansy-assed as claustrophobic. Though time spent in parts of the world with less than exemplary examples of modern vertical architecture had left him with an ever so slight discordance with elevator travel.
‘Now back to your name—’
‘It’s a family name,’ he said, rubbing his fingers across the stiff back of his neck.
‘Mother’s side? Father’s?’
‘Aren’t you hot?’
Paige blinked her big blue bedroom eyes at him and wrapped herself tighter in the cosy warmth of his jacket. Then she slowly shook her head.
‘The air-con’s been turned off,’ he said. ‘When did that happen?’
‘I haven’t been paying attention. But we’ll be fine here for hours. I read a book about a guy in Brussels who was stuck in a lift for like a week. Lived off detritus he dug up from the carpet. Hugh Jackman was going to play him in the movie.’ She seemed to go far away for a second before she snapped back. ‘Compared with him we have it pretty good.’
‘Hugh Jackman, or the guy in Brussels?’ Gabe asked, trying his best not to imagine being stuck in what amounted to a luxury coffin for days. ‘Don’t answer that. In fact no more talk.’
Her cheek lifted as she held back a smile. He hadn’t realised she was a sadist but she was enjoying his discomfort way too much. Proving it, she slid one foot to the wall, cocking a sexy knee in his direction, drawing her tight dress right up her thigh. Then she took a big deep breath before saying, ‘So, Nate seems like a good guy. Great hair. And that dimple? Adorable!’
Gabe clenched his teeth so hard he was sure he heard something crack. ‘Are you kidding me?’
She blinked several times over. ‘I’m sorry, did you want me to stop asking questions about you, or to stop talking altogether?’
He raised one telling eyebrow.
She did the same, and began to swing her knee side to side, drawing his gaze to those legs. Legs that could make a grown man get on his knees and thank God he’d been born. She asked, ‘Is Nate single?’
‘My father’s,’ Gabe ground out.
She cupped a hand to her ear. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘My name comes from my father’s side.’ He checked the ceiling, wondering at what point he should kick out a panel, climb onto the roof, and shimmy up the metal cord—
‘He was a Gabriel?’
Gabe shook his head. ‘Frank.’
‘His father, then?’ Paige pressed. ‘No? His father’s best friend’s war buddy’s pet llama?’
And whether it was the fact that she was apparently willing to suffocate them both before giving up, or the way she looked so soft and smudged in her pretty bare feet and his big jacket, Gabe gave up something he’d never even shared with Nate. ‘My father’s mother was a Gabriella.’
It was a small confidence, but the surrendering of it was felt. He was more than surprised when places inside him seemed to shift to accommodate the newfound space.
Paige’s knee stopped mid-swing and her bottom lip tucked between her teeth, probably to stop herself from grinning at his namesake, but he didn’t much care. The sheen her teeth left in their wake brought on a blood rush of attraction with a vengeance. Screw it. If he was going to die here, he might as well die smiling. Eyes locked onto her mouth, he ambled her way.
She asked, ‘This was the grandmother who made sure your Doris Day knowledge was up to snuff?’
‘Amongst other things. Gabriel had come through several generations, and Gran had no brothers, so …’
‘So not a girlie name, then.’
‘Not.’ He lifted his eyes to hers, to find them darkened. As if she knew exactly what she did to his blood. And his nerves. And the tempo of his breaths. So long as she never realised she had the ability to shake things loose inside him as well.
She shook a lock of hair from her face and the knot tumbled free over one shoulder. ‘Well, I think it’s … sweet.’
‘Do you, now?’
‘Sweet as pie. Sweeter than how my name came about.’ She laughed, but there was no humour in it. And when she frowned and looked down at her bare toes curling and uncurling against the floor Gabe stopped in his tracks.
He wasn’t adept at deep and meaningfuls. In fact they had the tendency to bring him out in hives. But stuck in the lift, their personal space overlapping, it simply felt decent to ask. ‘How’s that?’
Several beats pulsed between them before she flicked her hair from her eyes again and said, ‘Dad was a cricketer. International. Away eighty per cent of the year. Mum figured he’d be away when I was born—which he was. So, in an effort to include him in my birth, she gave him the job of naming me. Carte blanche.’
Her voice was even, but he felt the cool in her as she spoke. Saw the chips of ice in her warm blue eyes. They echoed inside him, banging painfully against the raw edges of the new space there.
‘Want to know who I was named after?’ Paige’s shoulders lifted as she wrapped her arms tighter around herself, and flicked her hair again.
‘More than life itself.’
She laughed even as she frowned at herself for doing so, the husky sound washing over his skin like waves of warmth. ‘The maid who’d turned down his bed at the hotel when he’d got the phone call.’
God. What a prick. Instinct had Gabe wanting to run his thumb across the vertical lines above her nose. Circumspection had him pressing his feet hard into the floor.
She tucked the wayward lock behind her ear. ‘I think Mum had been hoping to rouse some kind of connection in him. Hoping it would encourage him home more. To us.’
‘Did it work?’
Her smile remained, only now it was bittersweet. ‘Not so much. He cheated any chance he got, and she scrubbed the kitchen till it shone. Until one day she had enough, and asked for a divorce. He had the gall to be shocked. And even while she took him for plenty, he left her broken.’ She shook out her shoulders, and scraped her teeth along her tongue as if trying to get rid of a bad taste in her mouth. ‘Anyway. Bygones.’
Bygones, Gabe thought. Things we pretend don’t matter any more. But sweeping them under the rug only creates a lump to be tripped over time and again. He pushed the thought away.
‘Do