Chapter Thirteen
H e smiled .
Not a real smile, more one side of his mouth moving in a northerly direction, but it was no less life-altering, and it made my already faltering heart fracture with a new round of erratic beats that threatened to do me in.
Sawyer Savatier, smiling.
Yesterday I was worrying about what shoes to wear to a client’s event that would say I had everything under control, but also wouldn’t kill my feet after standing for twelve hours.
Now I had no shoes.
And no purse, no wallet, no cell phone and no tablet.
But I had staples.
I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry. My head hurt so bad, I’d been leaning toward the latter, but then he’d smiled. Sawyer Savatier, amused by the girl with blood all over her dress and no shoes.
And now he was offering his hand to me like a gentleman.
Hesitant, I stared at his outstretched palm. I wasn’t wearing heels anymore, and I’d put on the grippy socks from the hospital, but still. If I took his hand, it felt like I was crossing the threshold from independent to needy, and I didn’t want to be someone’s burden. I didn’t want to be what was written all over Brian’s expression at the hospital. But right now, the man in front of me wasn’t looking at me like I was a burden.
So I took his hand.
And immediately wished I hadn’t.
Large, firm, strong, calloused.
He was everything Brian wasn’t. He was everything every man I’d ever been around wasn’t.
Awareness shot up my arm and almost made me forget about the incessant pounding in my head. Almost. But then my feet hit the cold concrete garage floor and vertigo hit me.
I swayed as I reached behind my neck to gingerly feel my wound. I wanted to know how many staples the nurse had put in, but I also wanted to distract myself from the fact that not only was I in a garage that had a cleaner floor than my apartment, but that I was in a zip code that outranked my salary by multiples of a thousand. Not to mention a man more austere than anyone I’d ever met was holding my hand.
“Leave your staples alone.” His large hand squeezed mine. “We’ll clean you up when we get upstairs.”
I practically choked. “ We? ” I wasn’t sure I could handle much more we.
As if he brought home girls with bloody dresses and staples holding them together every night, he didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”
“I don’t think I can handle a we,” I blurted.
He didn’t comment. He glanced at the driver. “As soon Preston shows up, you’re clear.”
“Copy that.” The driver smiled at me. “Take it easy, sweetheart.”
Sawyer’s eyebrows drew together as he shut the door, then the Escalade disappeared up the ramp and into the night.
Leading us to one of two elevators that didn’t have a call button, but had a keypad, Sawyer entered a code and the doors immediately slid open.
I glanced up at him. “Private elevator?”
“Penthouse,” he clipped, ushering me inside and briefly holding his wallet against a small black pad. A ding sounded and the light for thirty lit up as the doors slid shut.
Thirtieth floor.
Penthouse .
The elevator shot up as the last of my confidence plummeted. Staring straight ahead, my dress stuck to my back with blood, my feet in hospital socks, I didn’t feel like I should be next to a man who lived in the sky.
I felt like a woman with no dignity left.
The elevator doors opened to a small vestibule with a round table in the middle with mail on it, and straight ahead were two large, heavy-looking doors. Sawyer walked to the right and pressed his thumb against a small screen on a keypad and a click sounded.
He pushed one of the doors open, then looked expectantly at me.
No turning back now, I stepped across the threshold.
Taking in the opulence in front of me, I immediately wished I’d done every single thing differently tonight. I wished I hadn’t peppered him with questions at the party. I wished I’d never gone to dinner with him, I wished I’d never seen the woman he used to date, and I wished like hell I wasn’t standing next to him in a ruined dress with staples in the back of my head.
I wasn’t completely ignorant of wealth. I’d had famous clients and rich clients. Hell, my last client lived in practically a palace on the intracoastal. I’d seen all kinds of wealth.
But this?
Shiny, white, polished stone floors, a restaurant-quality kitchen gleaming with stainless steel and high-gloss cabinets, two-story-tall windows looking out on the ocean, leather furniture that looked butter soft….
He was a Savatier, all right.
And I was… a foster kid. “I, um, wow .”
His hand landed on the small of my back. “Let’s get you cleaned up, then you can sleep.”
I didn’t want to sleep. My head was spinning, and I wanted to run away from every perfectly placed piece of furniture and lack of clutter as much as I wanted to crawl on his couch and stare out at the stars that looked close enough to touch until the sun came up. Every single thing about his home was different than mine.
There were no throw pillows on the furniture, no blankets, no discarded sweater or shoes or coffee mugs left out. No nail polish spilled on the carpet, no interesting fabric hung on the wall as art because it was pretty. No, he had real paintings and lamps without scarves over the shades and floors so clean you could eat off them.
I didn’t belong here.
I didn’t belong anywhere even remotely close to here.
But I didn’t have time to tell him that. He’d already led me past the stunningly perfect living room and kitchen and formal dining room with seating for ten. His touch on my back generating waves of heated awareness that spread over my entire body, he led me down a corridor with half a dozen doors before ushering me into a room that I knew was his before he’d turned on a single light.
The smell of sandalwood and musk and shoe polish and fresh laundry hit me so strongly, my conscience betrayed me and completely gave up on the notion that I didn’t belong here. My senses on overload, my body aching for comfort, I wanted to breathe in this scent for the rest of my life. More, I wanted to lose myself in the very man attached to that scent who was leading me to the edge of a giant bathtub with jets.
“Sit,” he commanded.
God help me, I fell victim to his commanding presence. Like an addict, I wanted to forget every single thing about my life and get drunk off his bossy orders, because I was quickly realizing that every time he told me to do something, I didn’t have to think.
Oh God, I didn’t have to think .
There were no decisions to be made about what kind of wine went best with what food, or what color invitation conveyed understated excitement. I didn’t have to figure out how to seat warring divorced parents of the groom next to each other.
Except it wasn’t just work that slipped my mind as I did exactly what he’d told me to do.
My ass landed on the edge of the tub, and I was already awaiting further instruction. I wasn’t mired in worry about my next car payment, or rent, or wondering where the next client would come from. I wasn’t even freaking out about my stolen purse and everything in it anymore.
Because when he spoke to me like that, when he gave me his intense stare and issued a command, I felt like I was the only person in his universe.
And I’d never been someone’s world.
Not Brian’s, not my birth mom’s, not any of my foster parents’, not anyone’s.
I was alone.
I always had been. Even when I was married, and it had taken me to this very second to fully understand that, because not one thing Sawyer was doing for me would have ever been anything Brian would have done for me.
Not that I would, or could, ever compare the two men, because they were night and day, but Brian would’ve been yelling at me about my missing wallet before he would’ve helped me get cleaned up.
And that right there, the thought of my old reality, it was enough to kick some sense back into me. “I’m going to need to borrow your phone to cancel my credit card and close my bank account card.”
A billionaire bodyguard in a custom-made suit bent over me and gently pulled my blood-stuck hair off my shoulders after turning on the faucet to fill the giant bathtub. “We’ll take care of it after we get you cleaned up,” he reassured, fingering the zipper on the back of my dress.
I jerked away. “I, um….” Oh God . “I can do that.” Suddenly ashamed at myself for my wayward thoughts of letting him order me around and take care of me as if I were helpless, I had to remind myself that I wasn’t helpless. I’d taken care of myself my whole life.
His hand landed on my shoulder. “Relax. I’m only unzipping it for you. It needs to come off.”
My emotions in whiplash overload, a shiver went up my spine. “I can do it myself.”
“Stand,” he ordered, reaching for a towel and ignoring me.
No resolve behind my previous declaration to do it for myself, I did exactly as he said. I stood, but apparently my submission was only relegated to my body, because words spilled out of my mouth. “Are you always like this?”
“Like what?” He handed me the towel as the bathroom filled up with steam.
I didn’t hold back. “Disregardful of what people say to you. Hearing only what you want to hear.”
“I am neither ignoring you nor being disrespectful.” Holding my gaze, he put his arms around me.
I sucked in a sharp breath. “What are you doing?”
“Helping you.” My zipper slid down my back. He dropped his hands and turned around, giving me the illusion of privacy. “Take the dress off, wrap the towel around yourself and sit back down on the edge of the tub. I’ll wash the blood out of your hair.”
“I….” I was going to say I could do it myself, but I couldn’t, not really, not without getting my head wet, and the doctor had said not to get the wound wet for twenty-four hours. And if I was being honest with myself, I didn’t even want to attempt to do this myself. I didn’t want to touch it anymore. It was throbbing and sore and felt hot, and I just wanted the pain to go away.
“Fine,” I relented, shoving the straps of my dress off my shoulders. “But you can’t get the stitches wet.” I wrapped the towel around me.
“I know.” He slid his jacket off, tossed it on the counter, and turned back around. His holster with the very large gun looked even more imposing than when I’d first gotten a glance of it when he was helping me stack chairs.
Tired, uncomfortable with his gun hanging out, and at my limit, I snapped at him. “What if I hadn’t had the towel around me?”
He removed his cuff links, tossed them on the counter and rolled his sleeves up. “I heard your dress hit the floor.” His hands landed on my bare shoulders, and he gently shoved me down to the edge of the tub. “And it wouldn’t have been anything I haven’t seen before.”
“You haven’t seen me,” I protested, feeling both insolent and jarringly jealous at his rude statement.
His eyes on me, intense and unreadable, he dropped to a squat. “You’re right.”
I pressed my legs together, and my voice came out a whisper. “What are you doing?”
“Taking care of you.” He pulled my hospital socks off, and thoughts bled out of my mouth.
“I’m uncomfortable.” More uncomfortable than I’d ever been. But I was also fighting an urge to fall into his arms. An urge so strong, it eclipsed every feeling I’d ever had for Brian, even if you shoved them all together and bundled them up like a messy armful of yanked weeds.
“I can sympathize,” he stated quietly.
That took me off guard. “When have you ever been uncomfortable?” He was gorgeous, rich and commanding.
He stood and grabbed a washcloth and the handheld faucet. “When I had staples.”
My mouth opened but no words came out. I was an idiot. He’d served our country, and no part of being deployed sounded comfortable. “I’m sorry.”
He wet the washcloth. “Not as sorry as the man who pushed his wife, strapped with explosives, in front of our convoy.”
Oh God . “Were you injured?”
He wiped the warm washcloth across the back of my neck. “Yes.” Rinsing it, he did it again.
“What happened?” I dared to ask.
“I got lucky.” He wiped the back of my neck one more time before setting the bloodstained washcloth on the edge of the tub. “Hold on to my waist and lean back.” One of his hands gathered up my hair while the other held the showerhead.
I stared at the washcloth with my blood on it as we skirted the subject of his bloodshed. The irony wasn’t lost on me as I avoided his holstered gun and tentatively grasped his lean, hard waist before leaning back only a couple of inches. The movement made the throbbing intensify at the same time as my hands on him made me wish I was touching him for any other reason.
More than all that, I wanted to ask what had happened to him, but I was afraid. Part of me didn’t want to know the gruesome details, but another, selfish part of me was concerned he wouldn’t tell me if I did ask. And I didn’t want to be that to him—another person who gawked at him for his injuries, only to exploit the bad parts of his service then give platitudes about bravery and valor.
So I didn’t ask.
I just held on to him.