Chapter 3 #2
Her pulse leapt at the deep timbre of that voice.
It was low enough that she felt it more than heard it, a vibration that seemed to travel up through the steel of the ladder, up through the soles of her feet and straight to her clit.
Her nipples pebbled. Hard. Sweet. Frickity.
Shiznit. She wanted to hear him say her name.
She wanted to turn around and look at whatever could put that much weight into the air with a single hello.
Don’t look. Don’t look. Don’t look. Get the tag, she ordered herself. Get the tag, climb down, do your job. She stretched another inch toward Crate 47.
“And this is Veronica Sokolov,” Margaret said behind her. “Our cataloger on the Crowe lot — the colleague I mentioned, the one fluent in — Veronica, please come down from the ladder, dear.”
“One second,” Nica mumbled around the pencil. “Almost — got it —”
Her fingertips brushed the corner of the tag. She hooked her index finger around it.
The ladder shifted beneath her.
A tiny movement. Barely anything. But her body reacted before her mind did, some instinct turning toward the man behind her. Her weight drifted a fraction sideways, her hip following without permission.
The ladder rocked.
No. No, ladders weren't supposed to move like that.
She jerked to correct herself. Her foot, shoved too quickly back into the flat she'd only half slipped on, skidded across the rung instead of finding it. The sole caught nothing.
The world lurched.
She tipped backward. The pencil flew out of her mouth.
The clipboard fell. The tag tore in her fist as she dropped into open air, and she had one clear moment to think oh no, and half a moment to think Margaret is going to be so mad, and a third moment to think nothing at all — because she did not hit the floor.
She hit him.
His arms came around her, one beneath her shoulders and one beneath her knees, and the world rearranged itself in a single heartbeat.
For several seconds she couldn’t move, couldn’t make herself believe it had happened.
There had been no scramble to catch her, no grunt of effort, no stagger.
One instant she was falling and the next she was simply, impossibly, gathered — as though he’d known she would fall before she did, and had already been there, waiting to keep her.
She inhaled. She couldn’t help herself. He smelled like cedar.
Cedar and man and something hotter beneath both — something that was all him and had no business in a dusty old warehouse.
His scent filled her lungs and spread, and she felt it in her chest, in her belly, lower.
He was all iron and steel over silk. And he was warm.
His forearm heated the backs of her thighs like her own personal heater. She went hot as an August sunburn.
She looked up at him, and the apology she’d meant to offer died on her lips.
She knew exactly what she ought to do — swing her feet to the floor, step back, laugh away her clumsiness, and get on with the day.
She did none of those things. She couldn’t.
She looked up into a pair of dark eyes too beautiful to be real, eyes that seemed to shift between dark steel gray and the deep brown of charred wood, and she could not move.
Could not, for one long suspended moment, remember anything.
Then her brain engaged. Catalogued. He was tall. He held her against his chest as though she weighed nothing —a fantastic lie she would cherish forever—and pulled her a fraction closer when she stiffened, as if to comfort her. That alone made her melt.
Everything about him was masculine. Everything feminine inside her wanted to rub up against it.
His face was smooth and cool as granite, his dark hair rich and thick.
A day’s worth of stubble shadowed his jaw, and she wanted, with a suddenness that alarmed her, to know how it would feel under her palm.
Against her thigh. Anywhere. Everywhere.
He didn’t smile, and it looked as if he didn’t smile often. He had perfect lips. Lips she suddenly, very badly, wanted to kiss.
But it was his eyes that truly undid her.
His wasn’t the gaze of a man holding a stranger he’d caught by reflex; it was the focused gaze of a man looking at her — seeing all of her, the slip of hair against her cheek, the ink on her forearm, the missing button, the fact that her heart was slamming against his chest hard enough that he could surely feel it.
He could probably feel every one of the things happening to her body pressed this close to his.
His mouth parted, very slightly. His pupils nearly swallowed the cool gray as he stared at her, and for the space of one impossible instant, she could swear they glowed. His breath stilled, held, as though he’d caught her scent and wanted to memorize it for all eternity.
And through her very improper inspection, he hadn’t put her down. It was almost like a moment outside of time. He didn’t seem to notice he was still holding her. He wasn’t even breathing hard.
She needed to get away from him. She couldn’t think with so much of him pressed against so much of her.
That wasn’t quite true — she could think perfectly well.
The problem was that every thought she had was about how fast she could get him out of that suit.
About kissing him. Touching him. Dragging her hands over that iron chest until she found bare skin.
Begging him to put his hot mouth between her thighs until she forgot her own name.
Which is not good. Which is wildly unprofessional. Stop.
“I think — I think I can stand.” Her voice came out rough. Not breathy — rough. A voice she didn’t recognize as her own, low and wanting, a voice that gave away everything the professional smile was trying to hide.
“Of course.” His voice rolled through the inches between them, closer to a growl than to speech, and the sound moved through her like a live wire.
Her body answered with a flash of heat that took her from interested to soaking wet and ready to beg for it before he could finish the sentence.
She had never in her life responded to a man this way.
Never once. Of course. Of course I don’t lose my mind over some nice, ordinary guy at the gym.
My body waits for a gorgeous billionaire so far out of my league that dreaming about him should be a misdemeanor.
He set her down with extraordinary care, his palm sliding the length of her ribs through her blouse until her feet found the floor and she was, technically, standing on her own.
Every inch of that slow descent dragged her body down the front of his, and she felt all of it — the heat, the hardness, the silk, the strength — and had to lock her knees to keep them under her.
His hand had not left her waist. He seemed to register that at the same moment she did; he looked down at his own hand on her as though he hadn’t, until that second, known it was there.
His palm nearly encircled her — she felt the breadth of his fingers, the pad of his thumb resting against her lowest rib, the heat of him bleeding through the fabric into her skin, and every nerve in her side lit up and reported directly to parts of her that had no business being consulted at ten in the morning.
Margaret cleared her throat.
He pulled away slowly, his thumb leaving her ribs first, then the heel of his hand, then the long line of his fingers, drawing back across her side one at a time, each a loss keenly felt. And in the gray glow of sunlight, Nica saw, clearly, that he was as deeply affected by the moment as she.
The moment passed, and he turned to Margaret. “Forgive me, Ms. Lin. Your colleague was falling.”
His voice had reassembled itself in the time it took to turn his head — a pleasant voice now, cultured, a voice that could read out the legal language of a forty-million-dollar acquisition without anyone catching the rough timbre beneath it.
Nica caught it. Under the courtesy, that low banked heat was still there, aimed at her even when his face was turned away, and her nipples drew tight again inside her bra as though he’d spoken the words against her skin.
She put a hand on the ladder rail to steady herself and set her clipboard against it — the clipboard he had apparently retrieved without her seeing, along with her pencil, both lined up neatly on the rail, though she had no memory of him placing them there.
He’d caught her and tidied the wreckage of her, in the same handful of seconds, without ever seeming to move fast.
Margaret recovered her professional smile. “Mr. Vasiliev. Thank you. That ladder is — well, bay protocol does not — Veronica. Are you all right?”