CHAPTER TWO #4
Also, what kind of nightmare day was this? So much had happened already. But now I had not only spilled Jack Lancaster’s precious soup all over him, I’d also smashed and soaked his grilled cheese sandwich. I had thought it was going to be bad to have to tell him there were no croutons.
This was way, way worse.
I looked up into his crazy beautiful hazel eyes and sucked in a breath. The pictures in the magazines I’d seen didn’t do him justice. In person? He was the hottest guy I’d ever seen. I swallowed hard. “Um, so about your order,” I started, soup dripping off both of us.
“Don’t even worry about it.” His eyes held mine. And he smiled.
I blinked. This didn’t match the stories I’d heard of the obsessively picky rich asshole everyone at Dinardo’s talked about.
“Let me head back and get you another order,” I said turning too fast, slipping, and almost falling in the soup that coated the beautifully tiled elevator floor.
He hauled me against his broad chest with a heavily muscled forearm.
“Oh,” I breathed as he pulled me up and into his arms, bride-style.
“You can’t go anywhere,” he said. I could feel his deep voice rumbling in his chest.
“I can’t?”
“No.” His eyes were still locked on mine, practically hypnotizing me.
“Why not?”
“Your shirt.”
I looked down and groaned with embarrassment. I might as well be naked. It was like a tomato soup version of a wet T-shirt contest. My eyes shot to his again, and there was no mistaking the heat in his eyes as he stared at my breasts.
“I think I have an extra CaveSphere T-shirt in my office you could wear.”
Someone started to get on the elevator.
“No,” he barked in their direction, barely looking at them as he pressed the ‘door close’ button.
I turned to him again. “But your lunch…”
“Will wait. My grandma has protein bars in her desk.”
“Your… grandma?”
“Yeah, Cynthia. She’s my secretary.” He made a face. “That sounds bad. She’s not really my secretary. She just… gets me. So, she takes care of everything. Runs everything, really.” He was still staring into my eyes.
He was intense. I could feel his energy practically vibrating through his body. I wondered if he was always like this or if it had something to do with getting doused with hot soup.
“She worked for NASA.”
I blinked.
“My grandma.” He flushed a bit, and I almost grinned.
The bit of embarrassed color in his cheeks took him from being this huge, handsome, intimidating man and turned him into someone human.
“I didn’t want you to think she was just a secretary.
I mean, not that there’s anything wrong with being a secretary, it’s just…
well, she helped design the international space station, so…
” he shrugged, the movement bringing me even tighter against his chest.
“Oh. Okay.” I didn’t know what to say to that. “She sounds like a badass.”
He grinned, and I swear my heart lurched in my chest at the sight of a smile on that gorgeous face. “Total badass,” he agreed.
I realized we weren’t moving. “The elevator…” I started.
“Oh, yeah.” He moved to the front, still holding me tightly in his arms, and punched the button to the top floor. “We’ll be up there in a minute.”
I nodded. “Listen, I’m really sorry. I’ll just change into that T-shirt you talked about and head back to Dinardo’s to get you a new lunch.”
He shook his head. “Don’t even worry about it. Seriously.”
The doors opened, and he carried me into the lobby of the executive suite. There were only two people inside, a tiny, dark-haired woman, and a tall, handsome Black man in a suit. They both stared at the two of us, mouths gaping open.
“We need help,” Jack Lancaster said.
“My God. What happened?” The woman I assumed was his grandma, though she didn’t really look like a grandma, jumped up from the desk where she was sitting and hurried over. “Have you both been attacked? Stabbed?” Tears were swimming in her eyes.
Eyes, I thought, that were the exact color of Jack’s.
She turned to the man in the suit. “Tallon, call the police.”
The handsome Black man, who must be Tallon, almost dropped his phone in his rush to do as she said.
“No, no, no,” Jack said quickly. “It’s my soup. The tomato soup.”
Tallon stopped dialing and looked up. He stared at Jack. “Soup,” he said, eyes roving over the two of us.
The tiny woman put her hands on her hips, and stared up at her grandson, her eyes flashing. “What the hell, Jack? You can’t come in here covered in tomato soup, that looks a lot like dried fucking blood, and expect us to act normal and calm.”
“Grandma,” he choked out, shocked. “You cussed.”
“Oh, get over it,” she waved a hand in the air. “Studies have shown smart people cuss more than normal.”
“But… you always said…”
“Are we really going to stand here while the two of you are covered in tomato soup and talk about my use of curse words?”
“No,” he said. “No, of course not.” He looked down at me. “She needs a fresh shirt. The one she’s wearing is ruined.”
I noticed he was looking at it a lot, and I knew he was checking out my breasts because his cheeks were still a little pink.
“Of course.” Jack’s grandma hurried down a hall and disappeared.
Tallon was also staring at my shirt. “What’s your name?” he asked, a flirty smile on his handsome face.
Before I could answer, Jack tightened his grip on me and narrowed his eyes at the man. “Quit staring at her, man.”
Tallon’s eyes widened, then he got a big grin on his face. “Why, Jack?”
Jack ignored him. “What’s your name?” he whispered down at me.
“Daisy,” I said. “Daisy Tiller.”
“Daisy,” he repeated to himself quietly. “That’s perfect.”
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing.” He kind of shook his head before smiling at me. “And you work at Dinardo’s?”
“Yes.”
He nodded, taking this in as if I’d just told him something really important, some answer to the universe. “That’s… well, that’s great.”
“It is?”
“Yes. That means I get to see you again.”
I heard a sharp intake of breath and turned my head to see that Jack’s grandma had come back into the lobby.
She was holding an enormous shirt in her hand and staring at the two of us, an interested expression on her unusually pretty face.
Tallon also stared, looking completely shocked and more than a little amused.
Jack Lancaster wanted to see me again.
Me. Daisy Tiller. The woman who’d ruined the lunch he obsessively craved and covered him in tomato soup in the process. I couldn’t wrap my head around that.
“She needs to change, Jack,” his grandma said, gently. “You can put her down now.”
Jack looked down at me, jaw clenched. He didn’t say anything, but I could practically feel that he didn’t want to put me down.
He did, though.
“Yeah,” he said, slowly putting me down and holding onto me until he knew I was steady on my feet. “Yeah, okay.” He held my arms for a couple of more beats before finally dropping his large hands to his sides.
“Thanks,” I said. “For you know, the carrying and the not getting mad at me and the shirt and all.” I was self-conscious and whenever that happened, I tended to blurt things out or talk too much. I turned away from him. “Is there a place I can change?” I asked.
“Sure, honey.” Jack’s grandma gestured for me to follow her. “You can call me Cynthia,” she said over her shoulder.
“Okay.” I followed her.
This had been one of the strangest days of my life so far.
And I’d had a lot of strange days.