She rolled her shoulders, wincing. “I’ve used a few of my nine lives today, but I’ll survive. You seem to know a lot about elevators.”
“My brother.” I waved toward the doors. “He’s a structural engineer. We work together. He babbles a lot.”
“What do you do?”
“Architect,” I said. “You?”
“Mmm, well, a bit of everything. I’m in grad school at Berklee, and teach a few undergrad classes. Give music lessons.”
I returned my device to my pocket, and the movement edged me away from Tiel. Gaining some space was necessary and appropriate and healthy, but without thinking, I shifted back immediately. I wanted to crawl into the opposite corner, wrap my arms around myself and breathe—alone—for several minutes, and I couldn’t explain why I didn’t. She’d already seen me fall apart. She knew about the thin tubing that snaked from my abdomen to the device in my pocket, and had a sense of how it worked. I could think of fewer than ten people on this planet with that much information about me.
“And don’t forget about band camp,” I said.
Grinning, she handed me an earbud and shuffled her playlist. We sat in the stifling heat, our backs to the wall and shoulders pressed together, enjoying the most random compilation of songs ever conceived. She hummed along with most, and sang with the others.
And it wasn’t awkward.
It should have been awkward.
We were strangers in an admittedly perilous situation, but I was getting the sense Tiel was immune to the awkward.
Perhaps she was immune to me, and that was rather intriguing. No one was immune to me. Even my elderly office assistant, Theresa, would cheerily dissect the mess that was my calendar when I asked with a hot, lingering smile.
Nine songs slipped by, and my attention shifted from controlling my breathing to the pins and needles in my leg. When the emergency lights flashed on again, I rotated my foot tentatively, and groaned at the sensation coursing through my muscles.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
Squeezing my upper thigh, I hissed at the discomfort. “My leg’s asleep.”
Tiel shifted, baring a long swatch of inner thigh before righting her skirt and kneeling beside me. Black panties. Maybe navy.
Panties were my concern only when I was in the process of tearing them off, and I was too busy keeping my crazy in check to acknowledge Tiel’s panties. But I did find that expanse of skin fascinating.
She wrapped her hands around my leg and kneaded, gradually restoring the circulation. It was kind, and it seemed Tiel was unabashedly generous, but her hands were vigorously rubbing less than four inches from my cock. I didn’t think she intendedthattype of blood flow.
“Hey,” she said. “Look at that.”
Oh, Jesus. Please don’t call out the tent in my pants.
I opened my eyes, and glanced to my lap. She pointed to my left hand and her right, and the birthmarks just below our thumbs. They were fingerprint-sized and nearly the same coffee shade.
“Huh,” I murmured.
“You’re my freckle twin,” she said. The pad of her thumb swept over my hand, touching the dark spot. “I’ve never met anyone with my exact same birthmark.”
“And I’ve never been stuck in an elevator before. Seems like we’re murdering statistics this afternoon.”
In that position, I could see straight down her shirt and admire the full breasts gazing back at me.
Pink.A pink, lacy bra that made me wonder whether her nipples would be the same shade.
I could spot silicone from across a busy street, but these were as organic as they came. They were lovely, all golden and ripe, and bursting out of that lace. There was some sort of ripened fruit metaphor waiting to be made but I was too preoccupied to think that far ahead.
“Ahem.” I glanced up to meet her bent eyebrow. “See something you like?”
The smile came to me easily, reflexively. “You have sensational tits.”
I was familiar with only two reactions to that comment: insult and interest. Either I was being slapped across the face or dragged to a private corner, and years of experience taught me the odds always ran close to fifty-fifty.
