The stranger’s expression warmed. No, burned. As if the temperature of the glint in his eye had turned up a notch.
‘Thanks for the offer,’ he said, ‘but I’m set.’
And had he moved closer? Or merely shifted his weight? Either way the lift suddenly felt smaller. The hairs on the back of Paige’s neck now joining the party as they stood to attention.
‘Oh, well. It was worth a shot.’
When the beautiful bow of his top lip began to soften sideways, Paige smartly turned to watch the display as the floor numbers rolled over all too slowly.
‘You live in the building?’ the stranger asked.
Paige nodded, biting her lip so as not to shiver as that dark velvety voice rolled over her skin in delicious waves.
‘That explains your … relationship with the lift.’
Before she could help herself, her eyes slid back to the stranger, fully expecting to find him looking at her as if she might wig out at any second, as Sam the Super always did when she made a complaint. But the stranger’s gaze was making its way over her hair, the curve of her neck, pausing a beat on her mouth, before coming back to connect, hard, with her eyes.
Her next breath in was long and deep, and once again filled with the scents of spice, and all things deeply masculine. Maybe she wasn’t hallucinating. Perhaps he was a fighter pilot/lumberjack/yachtsman by trade. It could happen.
‘It started out slow,’ she said, sounding as if she’d run a mile in a minute flat, ‘a missed floor here and there. But now it’s all the time. I keep pressing the button knowing it’ll make not a lick of difference, as I refuse to stop hoping it will one day simply start acting like a normal lift. While it won’t stop refusing to be one.’
‘Such friction,’ he said, laughter lighting his eyes. ‘A clash of equal and opposite wills. Like something out of a Doris Day and Rock Hudson flick.’ He glanced at the computerised electronic display of her nemesis. ‘With a sci-fi bent.’
Completely unexpectedly, Paige laughed out loud, the sound bouncing off the walls of the tiny lift. And this time when her eyes snagged back on his they stuck. Such dark eyes he had, drawing her in so deep, so fast, she wouldn’t have noticed if the lift started humming Pillow Talk.
The only explanation she had for her reaction to him was her dating drought. He was so against type. She normally gravitated to men who were so clean cut they were practically transparent. Men who’d not have blinked had she slipped them a dating contract: three nights a week, split checks, no idealistic promises.
Whereas this man was so dark, enigmatic, and diabolically hot every nerve in her body was fighting against every other nerve. His big body that made her palms itch, and his scent that made her want to lean in and bury her face in his neck. ‘Getting back on the horse’ with a man like that would be akin to falling off a Shetland pony at the fair and getting back on a stallion jostling at the starting gate of the Melbourne Cup.
And yet … She wasn’t after a dating contract. She needed a springboard from which to leap back into the dating world. And there he stood, beautiful, sexy, and glinting at her like nobody’s business.
She stuck out a hand. ‘Paige Danforth. Eighth floor.’
‘Gabe Hamilton. Twelfth.’
‘The penthouse?’ she blurted before her tongue could catch up with her brain. That was how addled she was; she hadn’t even noticed which floor he’d pressed. The penthouse had been empty since the day she’d moved in. Meaning … ‘You’re not visiting.’
‘Not.’ How the guy managed to make one word evoke so much she had no idea, but he evoked plenty. The fact that he would be sleeping a mere four floors above her being the meat of it.
‘Renting?’ she asked, and his eye crinkles deepened, making her wonder what she’d evoked without meaning to.
‘Mine,’ he drawled.
Paige nodded sagely, as if they were still talking real estate, not in non-verbal pre-negotiations for something far less dry. ‘I hadn’t heard it had been sold.’
‘It hasn’t. I’ve been away. And now I’m back.’ For how long he didn’t say, but the glint sizzling in his dark eyes and making her feel as if steam were rising from her clothes told her he believed it was long enough.
The lift dinged, as lifts were wont to do—normal lifts, lifts that weren’t demonically possessed—right as she was gaining momentum to do something rash. Rash but necessary.
And then the doors opened.
‘Of course,’ Paige muttered as she recognised her own floor by the dotted silver wallpaper, a Ménage à Moi staple. What could she do but step out?
The back of her hand brushed Gabe’s wrist as she shucked past. The lightest possible touch of skin on skin. When little waves of his energy continued crackling through her as she stepped out into the hall, Paige turned back. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask him in for coffee. Or offer to show him the sights of Melbourne. Or any other number of euphemisms for breaking her dating drought.
Then he stifled a yawn.
Like the dawning of the sun it occurred to her that the glint in his eyes had probably been the effect of jet lag the entire time, not some kind of extraordinary instant mutual chemistry between herself and the vision of absolute masculine gorgeousness gracing the lift before her.
If her complexion had been tomato-esque earlier, she’d bet right about then she resembled a fire engine.
Please, she silently begged the lift as they stood facing one another, close now. Just this once. Close.
And it did. The two great silver doors slid serenely towards one another, Gabe’s dark figure growing darker by the second. Until his hand curled around the edge of one door, stopping it in its tracks. Mere mechanics no match for his might.
‘I’ll see you ‘round, Paige Danforth, eighth floor,’ Gabe said, before his fingers slid back away.
Then, as the doors came to a close, he smiled. A dark smile, a dangerous smile, a smile ripe with implications. A smile that sent the dancing hormones inside her belly into instant spontaneous combustion.
Then he was gone.
Paige stood in the elegant hallway, breathing through her nose, feeling as if that smile would be imbedded upon her retinas, and messing with her ability to walk in a straight line, for a long, long time.
The gentle whump of the lift moving up inside the lift shaft brought her from her reverie and she blinked at the two halves of her reflection looking back at her in the spotless silver doors.
Or more specifically at the huge, great, hulking, fluorescent-white garment bag hanging from her right hand. The one she’d completely forgotten about even while her right hand now felt as if it would never feel the same again.
The one with the hot-pink words ‘Wedding Dress Fire Sale!’ glaring back at her in reverse.
CHAPTER TWO
‘I’LL be damned,’ said Gabe to the dark wood panelling on the inside of the lift doors as he rubbed at the back of one hand with his thumb where the heat from the touch of his new neighbour’s skin still registered.
During the endless trudge through Customs, the drive from the airport with its view over Melbourne’s damp grey cityscape, then with the winter wind blowing in off Port Phillip Bay and leaching through his clothes to his very bones as he’d waited for the cabbie’s credit card machine to work, Gabe had struggled to find one thing about Melbourne that had a hope in hell of inducing him to stay a minute longer than absolutely necessary.
Then fate had slanted him a sly wink in the form of a neighbour with wintry blue eyes, legs that went on for