Not everyone has the capacity for love, Eli.
“No. What about you? You wrote ‘no repeats’ on your profile.”
“I did,” she confirmed, and damn her for this habit of hers not to offer any explanations. Damn her for not living farther away. There it was, her apartment complex. He gripped the steering wheel, aware that he couldn’t go any slower without getting pulled over.
“Is it a rule of yours?”
She nodded, unperturbed.
“Seems arbitrary,” he said casually while parking. Seems like what’s standing between me and you having a fucking spectacular time.
“All rules exist for a reason.”
He killed the engine and ordered himself to let it go. It wasn’t good for either of them, talking about something that wasn’t going to happen. “Come on. I’ll walk you inside, just in case your brother’s waiting around.”
But Vincent had given up on her, at least for the night. No car had followed them.
It was late May and it was Texas, which meant instant, oppressive heat, even at night. Eli was pleased to see a doorman in the lobby, one who didn’t look just burly and alert, but also highly suspicious of Eli. That’s the attitude, he thought, nodding at him, making a mental note to let him know the situation on his way back.
“You know I’m not going to invite you inside, right?” she asked when they stopped in front of her apartment.
Eli had had a myriad of highly inappropriate thoughts in the past twenty minutes, but this specific one hadn’t even grazed his brain. “I’ll leave once you’re inside and I hear you lock your door. And you should put your phone in rice,” he added, wondering what the fuck had come over him. Among his friends, he was famous for being the easygoing one. Laid back. Never like this, intrusive, commanding—not even with his sister. Probably because Maya would have guillotined him.
But this woman only seemed faintly amused. She regarded him with that placid, sphinxlike expression that Eli was already getting used to, and took a step closer—one that had his heart pumping louder and faster for no reason, since all she said was “Thank you. I really appreciate what you did for me tonight.”
“It was the bare minimum.” Not a good time to tell her he was considering sleeping outside in his car just to intercept her idiot brother.
Fucking nuts. Was he developing a crush? He hadn’t even known he was capable of it.
“It was not.” Her key chains jingled in her palm. A sparkly ice skate shoe, one of those flashlight and pen combinations, a supermarket loyalty card with H-E-B printed on the back. He had the very same one. “You are kind. And I find you very attractive.”
Eli’s brain blanked for a split second. He wasn’t shy, not by any means, but he couldn’t remember the last time someone had complimented him that matter-of-factly. She had that somber look in her eyes and no guile whatsoever, and he was half-smitten.
He needed to get the hell home.
“That seems beside the point,” he said, not liking the gravel of his voice.
“Does it?”
“Since you never do repeats. Isn’t that your rule?”
She was pensive for a moment. “You’re right. Then, it’s farewell.”
It was. Unavoidably. But before Eli could remind her once more to be safe, she did something as simple as it was unexpected: she took another step in to him, rose on tiptoes, and placed a soft kiss on his cheek.
Of its own volition, Eli’s hand rose to hold her waist, and that near imperceptible touch blossomed into something exponential.
Possibilities.
Current.
Warmth.
Her scent enveloped him. The world shrank to them and nothing else. Eli turned his head, curious to see what he’d find on her face in response to all this electricity. She briefly held his eyes, then closed the distance between their mouths.
It barely constituted a kiss. Her lips pressed against his in the slightest of contacts, but his body was aflame. A surge of heat coursed through him, violent and sudden. Eli tried to remember the last time he’d felt anything approaching this, and came up empty handed. But it didn’t matter, because her fingers found his, and he was dizzy, lightheaded with all the things he was imagining.
He could take her. Abscond with her. Press her back against the door of her home, tucked under his bigger body. He could show her how beautiful she was to him and—
“Although, it occurs to me,” she murmured against his mouth, breaking the spiral of his thoughts, “that rules exist for a reason.”
She took a step back. Eli was entranced. Her servant. Spellbound. He considered begging her to let him touch her. To let him go down on her here in the hallway. He would go grocery shopping and make her dinner off a YouTube recipe of her choice. He’d wash her car, read her a book, sit here outside her door and just make sure she was safe and protected. They could hold hands all night. They could play Scrabble. He was very close to imploring for something, everything, anything, when she added, “And sometimes the reason is that they should be broken.”
Her fingers were still around his, thumb stroking his palm, but Eli could not tear his eyes from hers. That warm, sinking blue. Her hands, cool against his. Her damn skin, he thought. It was soft. He could do a lot to her skin. Her skin could do a lot for him. He wanted to see it flush and redden and bruise for a million different reasons. He wanted to defile it.
“Good night, Eli.” Her full, beautiful, obscene lips curved into one last smile, and before any amount of oxygenated blood could return to his brain, she was gone. The dull gray of her door closed in Eli’s face, and all that was left in the dimly lit hallway was her clean scent, the heat of her lips on his flesh, and his raging hard-on.
He heard the click of the lock and took a vacillating step back, disoriented, wondering what the fuck this woman had done to him. Then the cool air of the night hit his hand, and he finally lowered his eyes.
While he’d been drowning in her, busy unspooling the filthiest of thoughts, she must have been at work, because there were ten digits written on his palm—just enough for a phone number.
And underneath, three letters that knocked the breath out of his chest.
Rue.
4
NOT ENEMIES
RUE
There are two main reasons I called this meeting,” Florence
Kline said, and if she was in the grip of even a tenth of the panic her employees seemed to be experiencing, no one would have been able to guess.
Then again, Florence was like that. Steel nerved. Yes-can-do. Indomitable. A rising tide. I’d never seen her doubt herself, and no private equity firm could force her to start.
“The first is to reassure all of you that your jobs are safe.”
Murmurs of relief scrambled around the room like ants in sugar, but many remained unconvinced.
“There are no plans of reshuffling. I am still the CEO of this company, the board remains unchanged, and so does your employment situation. If you’re not pocketing printer ink, you can expect your professional life to remain constant.”
That had most people laughing. And it was, in a nutshell, the reason Florence Kline had built a successful company in just a few years. Being the inventor of a promising biofuel made her an outstanding scientist, but Florence was more than that. Florence was a leader.