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She reached up and traced the backs of her knuckles along the hollow of his cheek. Ran a thumb softly over his bottom lip. Smoothed a stray hair in his eyebrow. And he let her. His eyes gave nothing away, but his nostrils flared at her quiet touch.
When the feeling inside her began to swell so large she struggled to find a full breath Paige curled her fingers into her palm and pressed herself against the wall so that they could disentangle themselves. Gabe fixed his pants, she fixed her dress, both of them flickering sly glances at each other, before they both burst out laughing.
‘You, Miss Danforth, are a revelation,’ he said.
‘Would you believe before you came along I was a bit of a good girl?’
His dark eyes connected long and hard with hers for long enough that her breath caught in her throat. Then, as he reached for the emergency button, he said, ‘Nah.’
And Paige laughed again, light, free. Happy. Even as she revelled in the feeling, she knew it was dangerous.
Gabe didn’t notice as he was jabbing and jiggling the emergency button. Yet the lift refused to budge.
Giving her dress a last fix, she joined him. ‘You’re kidding me, right?’
Gabe spared her a flat glance, before reaching into his jacket pocket for his mobile to call for help. Only to find it was missing.
‘The flamingo,’ they said as one, and Paige laughed so hard she clutched her stomach.
‘This isn’t funny. There are over a hundred people stuck up there.’
‘And it’ll only take one to leave early to notice the lift’s not working.’ Paige put a finger to her bottom lip. ‘If not for the fact that the lift is a total diva at the best of times.’
A muscle jumped in Gabe’s cheek and she realised he was beginning to look kind of stressed. Poor love.
‘Here,’ she said, pressing him aside to pop the hatch to find the lift’s emergency phone. It was busted. Seriously, at the next tenants’ meeting she was bringing out a whole bag of whoop on Sam the Super’s ass.
Gabe ran a hand through his hair as his gaze shot up, down, and at the seam in the lift’s doors.
And something occurred to Paige. ‘Gabe. Are you claustrophobic?’
He tugged at the V of his sweater. ‘Of course not. But neither am I keen on feeling trapped in a small space for an extended period of time. This rotten, stinking, no good—’ Gabe said, his voice now not much more than a growl as he banged at the control panel with enough force to bruise. Still the lift didn’t budge.
Paige lost it. Laughing so hard now she hiccuped. ‘See!’ she managed to get out. ‘It’s not just me. This is fantastic. And I was so sure he’d fallen under your spell.’
‘He?’
Paige blinked up at Gabe, whose eyes were narrowed dangerously in her direction. She was the one who’d hit the button in the first place after all.
Her bottom lip slid straight between her teeth and his gaze slid straight to her mouth, his eyes darkening, his breath lengthening, as she said, ‘Rock Hudson, of course.’
Then his eyes shot back to hers, and the corner of his mouth lifted in a dangerous smile.
Silence stretched between them, only broken by the occasional creak of the lift. They were left with nothing to do but wait.
‘So,’ Paige said, crossing her arms, cocking her hip, ‘what now?’
‘What kind of name is Gabe?’
Gabe’s thighs burned from being on his haunches the past ten minutes as he tried to rewire the phone and get them the hell out of the box. He could sniff out creative accounting in a company report from a mile away, but he knew less than nothing about electrical engineering.
‘Just Gabe? Or short for Gabriel?’ Paige added when it became clear he wasn’t about to answer.
‘Short,’ he said.
‘That’s sweet,’ she said, clearly not as concerned as he was about the thinning of the air. ‘Like the angel.’
Gabe’s knees creaked as he pulled himself to standing. He turned to find Paige standing in the far corner of the lift, one bare foot on top of the other, her hair now up in a makeshift knot, the ends of his sports coat rolled up at her wrists. Despite the stale air all sorts of parts of him stirred for her again. He shot them down. He was conserving air. ‘You having fun over there while I try to get us out of here?’
‘Tonnes. I’m used to being the one swearing under my breath at this thing. It’s nice to watch someone else have a turn.’
‘Nice ain’t the word I’d use.’ Gabe looked around the small space. No way was he something so pansy-assed as claustrophobic. Though time spent in parts of the world with less than exemplary examples of modern vertical architecture had left him with an ever so slight discordance with elevator travel.
‘Now back to your name—’
‘It’s a family name,’ he said, rubbing his fingers across the stiff back of his neck.
‘Mother’s side? Father’s?’
‘Aren’t you hot?’
Paige blinked her big blue bedroom eyes at him and wrapped herself tighter in the cosy warmth of his jacket. Then she slowly shook her head.
‘The air-con’s been turned off,’ he said. ‘When did that happen?’
‘I haven’t been paying attention. But we’ll be fine here for hours. I read a book about a guy in Brussels who was stuck in a lift for like a week. Lived off detritus he dug up from the carpet. Hugh Jackman was going to play him in the movie.’ She seemed to go far away for a second before she snapped back. ‘Compared with him we have it pretty good.’
‘Hugh Jackman, or the guy in Brussels?’ Gabe asked, trying his best not to imagine being stuck in what amounted to a luxury coffin for days. ‘Don’t answer that. In fact no more talk.’
Her cheek lifted as she held back a smile. He hadn’t realised she was a sadist but she was enjoying his discomfort way too much. Proving it, she slid one foot to the wall, cocking a sexy knee in his direction, drawing her tight dress right up her thigh. Then she took a big deep breath before saying, ‘So, Nate seems like a good guy. Great hair. And that dimple? Adorable!’
Gabe clenched his teeth so hard he was sure he heard something crack. ‘Are you kidding me?’
She blinked several times over. ‘I’m sorry, did you want me to stop asking questions about you, or to stop talking altogether?’
He raised one telling eyebrow.
She did the same, and began to swing her knee side to side, drawing his gaze to those legs. Legs that could make a grown man get on his knees and thank God he’d been born. She asked, ‘Is Nate single?’
‘My father’s,’ Gabe ground out.
She cupped a hand to her ear. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘My name comes from my father’s side.’ He checked the ceiling, wondering at what point he should kick out a panel, climb onto the roof, and shimmy up the metal cord—
‘He was a Gabriel?’
Gabe shook his head. ‘Frank.’
‘His father, then?’ Paige pressed. ‘No? His father’s best friend’s war buddy’s pet llama?’
And whether it was the fact that she was apparently willing to suffocate them both before giving up, or the way she looked so soft and smudged in her pretty bare feet and his big jacket, Gabe gave up something he’d never even shared with Nate. ‘My father’s mother was a Gabriella.’
It was a small confidence, but the surrendering of it was felt. He was more than surprised when places inside him seemed to shift to accommodate the newfound space.
Paige’s knee stopped mid-swing and her bottom lip tucked between her teeth, probably to stop herself from grinning at his namesake, but he didn’t much care. The sheen her teeth left in their wake brought on a blood rush of attraction with a vengeance. Screw it. If he was going to die here, he might as well die smiling. Eyes locked onto her mouth, he ambled her way.
She asked, ‘This was the grandmother who made sure your Doris Day knowledge was up to snuff?’
‘Amongst other things. Gabriel had come through several generations, and Gran had no brothers, so …’
‘So not a girlie name, then.’
‘Not.’ He lifted his eyes to hers, to find them darkened. As if she knew exactly what she did to his blood. And his nerves. And the tempo of his breaths. So long as she never realised she had the ability to shake things loose inside him as well.
She shook a lock of hair from her face and the knot tumbled free over one shoulder. ‘Well, I think it’s … sweet.’
‘Do you, now?’
‘Sweet as pie. Sweeter than how my name came about.’ She laughed, but there was no humour in it. And when she frowned and looked down at her bare toes curling and uncurling against the floor Gabe stopped in his tracks.
He wasn’t adept at deep and meaningfuls. In fact they had the tendency to bring him out in hives. But stuck in the lift, their personal space overlapping, it simply felt decent to ask. ‘How’s that?’
Several beats pulsed between them before she flicked her hair from her eyes again and said, ‘Dad was a cricketer. International. Away eighty per cent of the year. Mum figured he’d be away when I was born—which he was. So, in an effort to include him in my birth, she gave him the job of naming me. Carte blanche.’
Her voice was even, but he felt the cool in her as she spoke. Saw the chips of ice in her warm blue eyes. They echoed inside him, banging painfully against the raw edges of the new space there.
‘Want to know who I was named after?’ Paige’s shoulders lifted as she wrapped her arms tighter around herself, and flicked her hair again.
‘More than life itself.’
She laughed even as she frowned at herself for doing so, the husky sound washing over his skin like waves of warmth. ‘The maid who’d turned down his bed at the hotel when he’d got the phone call.’
God. What a prick. Instinct had Gabe wanting to run his thumb across the vertical lines above her nose. Circumspection had him pressing his feet hard into the floor.
She tucked the wayward lock behind her ear. ‘I think Mum had been hoping to rouse some kind of connection in him. Hoping it would encourage him home more. To us.’
‘Did it work?’
Her smile remained, only now it was bittersweet. ‘Not so much. He cheated any chance he got, and she scrubbed the kitchen till it shone. Until one day she had enough, and asked for a divorce. He had the gall to be shocked. And even while she took him for plenty, he left her broken.’ She shook out her shoulders, and scraped her teeth along her tongue as if trying to get rid of a bad taste in her mouth. ‘Anyway. Bygones.’
Bygones, Gabe thought. Things we pretend don’t matter any more. But sweeping them under the rug only creates a lump to be tripped over time and again. He pushed the thought away.
‘Do you see him much? Your dad?’
‘Never. Mum and I are pretty close, though. She’s a good woman, way more forgiving than I could ever be. Yours?’
He should have seen it coming, but he’d been concentrating so hard on Paige the question came out of left field. And he was caught, looking into her big blue bedroom eyes, all liquid, hurting, wanting, patient.
He could practically feel his heart beating in his neck as the words spilled from his lips. ‘They died when I was young. My gran raised me.’
‘Gran Gabriella,’ she said, nodding, even smiling a little, as if the pieces of him slipped into place.
‘She was an amazing woman. Tough. Stubborn. Thank God too. I was a wild kid. Impatient. First to climb the tree. Fastest to the top of the hill. She had a choice to either let me go feral or guide me with a firm hand. All of my focus I owe to her.’
‘Is she in Melbourne still?’
‘She passed several years back. Right about the time my career took off. It broke my heart that she wasn’t around to see it.’ As he breathed out he felt another shift, this one so significant he could practically feel air swirling inside him in the place where he’d harboured that regret for so long.
Paige’s next breath out was long and slow, as if she too was letting things go. He could have kissed her for leaving it there. Hell, he could have kissed her either way. Her hair falling in wisps about her face. Her lips pink from the nibbling.
‘Paige—’ he said, but that was all that came as he wasn’t sure what he wanted to say.
He actually shook his head at the realisation that she’d rendered him speechless. The rainmaker. The silver-tongued seducer of innocent creatives.
No matter the mistakes he’d made in his life, he’d done something right for her to have come into his life at the right moment. This woman who’d looked so relieved earlier when he’d reiterated that he’d be leaving soon, that their affair had a use-by date, even he’d been a little taken aback. Until he’d given himself a swift mental slap.
Paige was warm, sexy, astute, and gorgeous as all get out, but there was a limit to what he could offer. It was a good thing that he’d been forced to remember what a destructive illusion feeling for someone could be. He’d remember with even more biting clarity once he was no longer surrounded by air that smelled so thickly of warm, soft, edible, feminine skin.
He stepped forward and placed his hands on her upper arms. Her warmth seeped from the fabric of his too-big jacket into his skin. Her delicious scent curled beneath his nose. Her big blue eyes looked unblinking into his as her chest rose high and fell hard.
Yes, he thought. That. The touchy-feely stuff had made him feel unexpectedly raw, but it had nothing on pure and simple sexual hunger.
He placed a hand on the wall above her head, and heat arched through him as her lips parted, soft and moist and practically begging for his kiss.
When she licked her lips, and tilted her head, the wanting that swept through him was thick and consuming. Unrelenting. And limitless, filling all the newly shifted places inside him. He closed his eyes on that thought. Gritted his teeth against the insinuation.
Then at the slide of her hand into the back of his hair, the press of her hips to his groin, the sweet shuddering sigh as her breath whispered across his neck, he thought, Oh, to hell with it—
Then the lights flickered. And the lift began to move.
The lift binged, the doors opened, and Paige knew that if she snapped her eyes left she’d see the silver wallpaper of the eighth floor. But she couldn’t snap her eyes any which way, not for all the coffee in Brazil.
Not with Gabe looking at her that way. As if he was looking not at her, but into the very heart of her. She wondered what he saw. If it was a disappointment, all cold and uninviting. Or if it flickered with any of the heat freefalling through her body. If he had any inkling any warmth glowing inside her had been put there by him. She looked away then, and hoped she hadn’t left it too late.
‘We should probably get out of here before the thing changes it mind,’ she said. ‘You’re way too big for me to carry out of here if your claustrophobia gets the better of you.’
‘Funny woman,’ said Gabe, though it was apparently enough to get him to move, as he grabbed a door and ushered her through. Without all that concentrated heat burning a hole right through her, Paige somehow managed to put one foot in front of the other to scoop up her heels and purse and exit the lift.
The recessed lighting made the hallway overly bright to Paige’s eyes, as if she’d spent a year in a cave, not an hour in a perfectly well-lit lift. As if the confidences she and Gabe had shared had all been a crazy dream. She shucked his jacket from her back and held it out to him on the end of a finger. He took it and tucked it over his crooked elbow.
He angled his head towards the ceiling. ‘I’d better head back up, check everyone’s okay. Make sure Nate hasn’t invited everyone to sleep over.’
‘You’re braver than I am.’
‘You kidding? I’m taking the stairs. You?’
She wrapped her arms about herself, missing Gabe’s jacket, missing his nearness. It was enough to have her take a step back as she shook her head. ‘I think I’ve tempted fate enough tonight.’
