1
Madeline
I was having a bad day before the power went out and the elevator froze mid-air and everything went pitch black. It took about one minute before the instant panic hit.
“I—I can’t—” My breath hitched. “We’re going to fall. We’re going to fall and I can’t?—”
“We’re not falling.” A warm hand closed around my wrist. My worse nightmare. In the dark with a random stranger comforting me.
God. Hates. Me.
He lifted my hand and pressed it to his chest. Of course he is toned. Oh. Great. A hot stranger comforting me in the dark. That’s just worse.
“Feel that?” he said. “Match me.” His heartbeat thudded slow, under my hand. I tried to breathe, but the panic clawed up the back of my throat.
“I can’t—I can’t breathe.”
“Yes, you can.” He pressed my hand tighter to him. “Follow my breath. In… and out.”
I shut my eyes, not that it made a difference in the pitch black, and focused on the rise and fall beneath my hand.
“There you go,” he murmured.
“What if we drop?” The words slipped out before I could swallow them. “What if this is it?”
“It isn’t,”
“How do you know?”
“Because this is my building.”
My fingers twitched against him. “…What?”
“Storm hit the grid. Backup system’s kicking in.” His chest rose under my palm as he took another slow breath for me to follow. “Two minutes and the emergency lighting comes on. We’re suspended. Locked. We’re not going anywhere.”
“That sounds like something someone says right before we plummet.”
“If we were going to drop sweetheart, we would’ve done it already.”
The pet name shouldn’t have hit me the way it did. But God, his voice. The elevator let out a quiet mechanical click, and I flinched.
“Easy. That’s the generator. Not gravity.”
My forehead dropped lightly against his chest because it felt safer than the rest of the world. A faint red glow pulsed overhead, emergency lighting exactly when he said it would.
I looked up. And finally saw the man holding me together.
Broad shoulders. Handsome in a way that felt like a warning. Dark hair, darker eyes. Six-foot-something with a body carved out of gym hours, bad decisions and heavily tattooed. For a second, I forgot how to breathe for an entirely different reason.
The lights flickered again. A sharp jolt ran through the elevator.
“Jesus—” My hand fisted into his shirt before I could think, practically yanking myself against him. “Okay, that felt like death. That was a death wobble. We’re absolutely plummeting. I knew it. I knew it.”
“That was a generator surge,” his other hand came to my waist.
“It felt like gravity testing how dramatic it wants to be.”
“You’re very dramatic.”
