1. Sofia
Sofia
One Year Later
My move back to Golden had been less of a “triumphant return” and more of a “stealth mission.” I spent the first few days cramming my entire existence into a studio apartment so small that I could practically cook dinner while sitting on my bed.
Still, the rent was low, and it was less than two blocks from my new full-time job.
There was another plus. One of my windows looked out directly onto Clear Creek. There was even a small balcony where I could sit and watch the kayakers load up in the river, just by the bridge.
Of course, James Mylonas had excitedly agreed to bring both Nova and me on full time.
Nova hadn’t quite made CMO, but she’d been put in a position directly under another friend of ours, Jax Mylonas.
Jax was the boy Nova had always crushed on.
He hadn’t gone to the same school as us, but since he was friends of her family, they had known one another for years.
I had only met Jax a handful of times before we’d come back to Golden. After that, anytime we hung out with friends, Nova had invited Jax along.
Nova swore they were only friends, but after being around them for just five seconds, I knew that they both wanted something more but were too afraid to move on it.
I usually dreaded Monday mornings, but today the crisp mountain air had invigorated me.
I stood in the lobby of the five-story brick building that held Gold Standard Media, smoothing down my top.
I was trying to channel a version of Sofia Ferreira that didn’t exist—one who was perfectly happy to head up the elevator, smile, and act like this was her dream job.
My boss had called a surprise meeting for first thing this morning, and I wanted to make sure I was dressed for success. After all, I wanted everyone to realize that I knew what I was doing and could handle a client on my own. Without Leonard Whistler hovering over me.
The man was… an asshole. To put it short and sweet.
I couldn’t type an email without him looking over my shoulder and dictating every word. He took credit for any of my designs that were approved and blamed me for anything that needed changes.
I did enjoy the work, but god, I really needed to get a real goal for my life.
Something I could get one-hundred-percent behind forever and not lose interest in a year down the road.
I had thrown my whole existence into the job, but the excitement that always comes with something new was already starting to wear off.
Like with everything else I’d ever thrown myself into.
Maybe that was Leonard’s fault, like Nova had suggested.
Still, I was hoping that this morning’s meeting would change things up. It was possible that today was the day I would be taking the lead on a suspected new client I had been working on ideas for over the past few weeks.
Clear Creek Brewery, or CCB, was a large local brewery that had taken off in the past year.
They were looking to revamp everything from their website to their can designs.
I’d given Leonard several of my preliminary sketches and had heard through the grapevine that James and the board had liked them.
Nova had hinted that James wanted someone new to spearhead the account.
The idea of taking charge on an account like this excited me. I liked my job well enough. I was typically free to express my creative side. My only real grievance so far working here was working under Leonard.
But even so, most of the time I was just messing around with fonts, colors, and graphics for clients’ websites or marketing material.
The thought of being in charge of a whole account thrilled me.
Website, marketing, scheduled adverts, business cards, can designs, the whole works. That excited me but also scared me.
Is this what I wanted for my life? At least I could give it a try, right?
God, why was I so nervous?
As I approached the elevator bank, a tall figure stepped up and pressed the button.
He was built like a tailored-suit advertisement—broad shoulders and longish sandy-dark hair that was perfectly styled.
He carried himself with the kind of effortless confidence that usually belonged to people who didn’t have a negative balance in their checking account. Definitely a client. A big one.
The elevator doors slid open with a metallic groan that sounded like a dying whale. The stranger stepped inside.
I scrambled in right behind him, my heart doing a nervous little flutter. Be professional, I told myself. Impress the client. Look like a leader.
The doors began to slide shut, and that’s when the man reached his hand out toward the control panel. His finger hovered directly over the button for the top floor.
My internal alarm bells didn’t just ring; they went off like a nuclear siren.
No, no, no.
He was going to press it. Straight up. Without the secret handshake the old elevator demanded.
He didn’t know. How could he? He didn’t work here.
He didn’t know that if you didn’t press the lobby button first to reset the internal relay before hitting your actual floor, the ancient electrical grid would short out and trap you between floors three and four for a minimum of ten minutes. Eight if you were lucky.
Normally, clients were warned of the situation normally ahead of any meetings set up in the building. Apparently, Mr. Tall, Dark, and Sexy hadn’t gotten the memo.
I had that meeting with James that I absolutely could not miss. I could not be stuck in a metal box with a gorgeous stranger while my new career aspirations died a quiet, claustrophobic death.
“Wait, don’t—!” I gasped.
Panic overrode every single ounce of my brain power. I didn’t just reach out to stop him; I launched myself across the small enclosure. My hand slapped his wrist away from the panel with a loud crack, but my momentum was already totally shot. Then, my heel caught on the edge of the floor mat.
Of course, I was too late. He had already grazed the button, and I watched in horror as the light lit up. When the car started moving up quickly, the motion knocked me off balance and I fell against the elevator’s glass-paneled wall.
Groaning with embarrassment, I closed my eyes. “Why did you do that?” I mumbled, more to myself than to him.
At that exact moment, the elevator passed the third floor. Right on cue, the entire car violently dropped six inches before jolting to a dead stop.
The sudden drop threw the man off balance and caused me to go temporarily airborne.
My shoulder slammed into his chest, knocking the wind out of him with a choked oof.
My briefcase flew out of my hands and hit the floor with a thud, spewing out all the things I’d crammed in it before leaving home, including a squashed peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a bag of crushed chips, and all the papers I had stashed inside.
The sheer force of my panic-fueled trajectory sent us both crashing hard against the back wall.
Then we slid down to the floor in a tangled, undignified heap.
For a three-second eternity, the only sounds were the heavy, dead hum of a stalled elevator and the frantic thudding of my own heart.
Now, I was sprawled on top of the man. My face was buried in the crook of his neck, inhaling a ridiculously expensive and sexy scent of sandalwood and cedar. One of my legs was hooked over his thigh, and my hand was gripping his crisp white shirt like a lifeline.
Slowly, the man beneath me exhaled a long, shaky breath.
“Are you… all right?” His deep, gritty voice rumbled right against my ear.
Why did my entire body respond to that sexy baritone? If I wasn’t already fully aware of him, his voice had every single nerve standing at immediate attention.
Horrified, I scrambled to get off him, but the elevator floor was a slick minefield of my own marketing pitches and food.
My knee slipped on a glossy page, sending me face-planting right back into his chest. My knee was extremely close to, well, a part of him I tried not to imagine at this point in our relationship. Another breathless “oof” escaped him.
“I am so sorry,” I squeaked, my face burning so hot I was pretty sure I was setting off the building’s thermal sensors. “The paper. It has a high-gloss finish. Zero traction,” I joked, wishing the floor would just open up and swallow me whole.
“Clearly,” he wheezed, his hands coming up to gently but firmly grasp my waist to steady me. His grip was warm, solid, and entirely too distracting for a Monday morning. “How about we try a coordinated extraction? On three?”
Somehow, through a deeply uncoordinated dance of flailing limbs and mutual apologizing, I managed to untangle myself and slide backward until my spine hit the opposite wall.
I pulled my knees to my chest, desperately trying to pull the frayed edges of my dignity back together.
Then I realized my tight pencil skirt wasn’t very modest in this position and quickly stood up.
He looked like a man who had just been ambushed by a stray woodland animal in a business suit.
“I—” I choked out, my face instantly bursting into flames. “The buttons. If you don’t hit the lobby one first, the elevator jams. I was… trying to save us from being stuck.”
His brow furrowed. “By tackling me to the ground?” His eyes dropped to the stacks of papers I’d spilled.
“It’s a very temperamental elevator,” I whispered, realizing a little too late that this was definitely not the way to win over a new client.
He stared at me for a beat, his blue eyes tracking the absolute panic radiating off my face.
“Right,” he said slowly, his voice vibrating right through my ribcage. “Well, your rescue mission was a soaring success. Except for the part where we are, in fact, still trapped.”
“But at least we didn’t drop an entire floor like last time this happened,” I pointed out defensively, as if that minor mathematical victory excused the fact that I had used a multi-million-dollar client as a mattress.
“I still have bruises,” I said, then bit my lip to stop myself from saying anything else.
“That’s a possibility?” he asked, glancing toward the doors.
Elevator guy—or ‘The Man Who Should Sue Me,’ as I had started thinking of him—sat up, brushing a stray piece of paper off his knee. It was a mock-up logo for a lawn care company that I had worked half the night on a week ago and should probably have thrown away, as Leonard had rejected it.
Still, I held still as the man looked at it, then looked at me, an amused, slightly bewildered smile tugging at the corner of his lips.
“So,” he said once he was standing upright, “does this happen every Monday, or did I just get the VIP experience?” He leaned his head back against the wall, completely unfazed by the darkness or the dead silence of the shaft.
“It’s usually a Tuesday thing,” I mumbled, wanting to bury my flaming face in my hands as I began shuffling my things into my bag. “And really, if you had just let me slap your hand away, we’d be on the right floor by now.”
“Ah. My apologies for resisting an unexplained workplace assault.” He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a sleek, impossibly expensive phone. He tapped the screen. “No service. Figures.”
“Oh, you won’t get a signal in here,” I said, glancing up, glad to finally be the expert on something, even if that something was a mechanical death trap.
“The elevator car is basically a Faraday cage made of repurposed steel. But don’t worry.
All we have to do is wait for Ernie.” I returned to shuffling my papers, trying to get them back in some sort of order for my meeting.
“Ernie?”
“The building superintendent. He’s seventy-two, walks with a slight limp, and usually hears the relay short out from his break room.
” I wanted to add that he was without a doubt enjoying his morning coffee with a splash of rum, but I held that back.
“He’ll hit the manual override switch with a broom handle in about ten minutes.
” I glanced down at my watch. 9:05 a.m. “Which means I might miss this morning’s meeting.
” I had unintentionally said that part out loud.
I let out a miserable groan and slumped sideways against the wall. Goodbye, brewery account. Goodbye, proving to James that I could actually stick with something and succeed. I was going to be stuck in this box, and Leonard would volunteer to take the lead in my absence.
The stranger watched me, his expression softening slightly. “Was it an important meeting?” He bent down and, to my horror, picked up my very squished sandwich and handed it to me.
I quickly shoved it in my case and closed the whole thing, not caring any longer if things were in order or if I had gotten everything.
Standing and straightening my jacket, I took a deep breath.
“Pretty important,” I finally answered, staring at a stray scuff on the wall.
“I’ve been working all weekend on something I think would have impressed my boss, and now I’m just…
going to be stuck as a web designer and data-entry clerk, under a man who takes all my ideas for his own, for the rest of my life. ”
“Don’t count yourself out just yet,” he said, his voice surprisingly gentle. He walked over to the elevator buttons and hit the alarm, but nothing happened.
“I could have warned you,” I said dryly. “It’s been disconnected for two months.”
“I’m sure if you tell your boss that you were held hostage by the infrastructure, he’ll understand,” he said, hitting a few other buttons, without any luck.
“I’ve used that excuse a half-dozen times this month alone,” I sighed, rolling my eyes. “And I fear that my boss is running out of patience with me. I’ll just have to go with one of my backup excuses.”
The stranger arched a perfectly groomed eyebrow, looking thoroughly amused. “You have backup excuses for being late?”
“Of course I do. When you live my life, you keep a rotating catalog.” I ticked them off on my fingers.
“Option A: I was temporarily recruited to join a search-and-rescue team for a missing kayak on Clear Creek. Option B: A rogue mountain goat barricaded my front door and demanded my breakfast burrito as ransom. And my favorite, Option C: I was attacked by a feral Yeti on my way to work.”
“A Yeti? In Golden, Colorado?”
“They migrate for the craft beer and bagels,” I said deadpan as I lifted my chin slightly.
The stranger gave a slow, devastatingly handsome smile that suddenly made the air in the stalled elevator feel very, very thin.
“Well, if you need a character witness for the Yeti attack, I’m happy to volunteer,” he joked back at me.
At that very moment, I think I fell in love, just a little.