Grateful once more for the dark, he told her only that he bought a small one when he was eighteen. He wasn’t sure why he was telling her any of this as it was. He wasn’t in the habit of talking about his childhood to anyone. There’d been good parts and bad. He’d survived it. End of story. But he was spared having to wonder at how easily the young woman beside him had drawn him out when the elevator jerked.
Amy’s breath caught as she grabbed for him. Jared’s hands clamped around her upper arms. In the awful seconds while she waited for whatever would happen next, she didn’t know if he pulled her to him to keep her from losing her balance, or if he was simply bracing them both. All she knew for certain was that he’d pulled her into his arms, that his body felt as solid as steel, and that she could do nothing but hang on.
With her heart battering her ribs, she buried her head against his chest.
Beneath her feet, the floor remained still long enough for her to become conscious of being surrounded by his heat—an instant before the elevator started to descend. Slowly. The way it always did.
Her pulse still racing, she opened her eyes, drew a quick, decidedly cautious breath. The scents of citrus aftershave and warm male filled her lungs as she blinked at the strip of cashmere between the soft wool lapels fisted in her hands.
The lights had come back on.
“Are you okay?”
His voice came from above her, the rich sounds of it a quiet rumble beneath the strains of the Muzak once again filtering through the speakers.
Looking straight ahead, all she could see was the wall of his very solid chest. She didn’t want to move. For that unexpected, too-fleeting moment, she felt very safe where she was. Sheltered. Protected. She hadn’t felt anything remotely resembling that alien sense of security since long before her father had died.
The feeling vanished with her next heartbeat.
Glancing up, her eyes met his. With her head tipped back, she was close enough to see shards of silver in cloud gray eyes, the carved lines bracketing his beautiful mouth. Already aware of the compelling feel of his arms, she nearly forgot what he’d asked.
He’d gone as still as stone. Or maybe it was she who failed to move as his glance skimmed her face and settled on her parted lips.
For one totally surreal instant, it seemed as if he was about to close the negligible distance between them. Yet, even as her heart nearly stalled at the thought of his mouth on hers, a muscle in his jaw jerked. His hold on her eased.
Releasing her grip on his lapels, she stepped back just as he did.
It was only then she remembered that he’d asked if she was all right. Considering the knotted state of her nerves, she most definitely was not.
“I’m…yes, of course,” she murmured, jamming awkwardness beneath a thin layer of composure. He was watching her, rather curiously from the feel of his eyes on her as she scooped up her stack of mail while the elevator continued its descent. “I’m…fine. I’m just sorry you had to wander under the little black cloud that’s been following me around all day. That’s probably why I nearly ran you over in the office, and why you got stuck in here with me now.” Refusing to consider what else could go wrong, she aimed a commendably calm smile at the cleft in his chin. If she’d learned anything from her years in advertising, it was that perception was everything. If you appeared in control, everyone thought you were. “The good news is that it’s me, not you, and that bad days get better.”
“What about bad weeks?”
“Those are the ones that build character.” Or so her grandma said.
“Bad months?” he asked, and watched as her smile made it to her eyes. Something knowing shifted in those doe-brown depths.
“That’s when you need to find something to do that takes you away from your problems for a while. Whatever you’re dealing with won’t go away,” she warned him, “but for that hour or that day, you’ve taken away its power over you.”
The elevator stopped. Even as her smile fell away, the doors opened to a lobby crowded with office workers. Before J.T. could ask what sort of thing she would suggest as an escape, or what else had happened to her that day, she’d slipped into the mass of people grumbling about having had to walk the however-many flights they’d taken to get to the ground floor, only to now have to wait for an elevator to go back up.
He moved into the crowd himself, stopping a lawyer-type in a three-piece suit to ask what had happened to the power. The man told him that one of the building’s floors was being gutted and remodeled. A worker had apparently shorted an electrical line and tripped the building’s main breaker.
J.T. had barely thanked the guy before he glanced back to see if he could catch a glimpse of short and shining brown hair. He saw no one familiar, though, as he moved through the surge of people and out the building’s tall glass doors.
Frowning at himself, he stepped out into the early fall air. He was on the brick-paved transit mall. MAX, the commuter train, rattled by on its light-rail line. A bus idled at the light on the corner. He couldn’t believe how close he’d come to kissing her. With her mouth inches from his, her scent and the feel of her coltish little body drawing him closer, he’d come within a heartbeat of seeing if she tasted as sweet as she looked.
Sweet. He’d never met a female he would have described that way.
He shook his head, plowed his fingers through his hair. He really needed to focus here. He fully intended to get to know her stepsister. Even if Candace hadn’t seemed to be an excellent candidate for the hunt, Amy wasn’t at all the sort of sophisticated, worldly female that normally attracted him. The sort of woman who’d developed a certain cynicism about the opposite sex herself. When he entered the game, he preferred an equal playing field. The young woman he’d just spent the past hour with probably didn’t even know there were rules. One of which had always been that a woman not get too close.
It occurred to him, vaguely, that the way he’d played for years might need to change. For now, though, all he cared about was that he’d caught himself before he’d done anything foolish. Circumstances had pretty much thrown her into his arms was all. With his first priority being to save his position at HuntCom, he had more to worry about than a young woman who possessed far more insight about his feelings for his backup project than he was comfortable with.
Amy hurried past a curved, Plexiglas bus kiosk, her arms wrapped tightly around her bundle of envelopes as she glanced back over her shoulder. She saw no sign of Jared Taylor on the tree-lined sidewalk. As tall and imposing as he was, he would stand out in any crowd, but he’d already disappeared.
She could still almost feel the strength in his hands when he’d helped her to her feet back in the office—right after she’d plowed into him and scattered files at feet. Just as she could almost imagine that same warmth filling her whole body when he’d held her in the elevator—moments after she’d practically crawled inside his jacket when the elevator had lurched. When he’d let go of her, the way his broad brow furrowed had made it abundantly clear that he’d wondered what on God’s green earth he’d been doing. At least he’d been gentleman enough to pretend nothing unusual had happened while she’d rattled on about having had a bad day.
She turned the corner to the post office, trying to shake off the entire unsettling encounter. She just hoped he wouldn’t say anything about her to Candace. She especially hoped he didn’t let it slip that she’d mentioned having to take care of her grandmother or make a comment about her having had a less-than-stellar day. The last thing she needed was to give Jill’s admittedly beautiful, undeniably well-intentioned daughter any reason to caution her about maintaining professionalism with their clients, or to give her a pep talk about what she needed to do when things weren’t going right.
Candace’s solution for everything was either a new man or a shopping trip. While Amy loved to hit sales, the home where her grandma lived had raised its rates so her budget