Chapter Eleven
A tense silence filled the elevator as the doors closed, chimed, and the elevator was rising once more. Adelaide stayed facing those closed doors and squeezed her eyes shut. Her breathing was shallow, her heart pounding a waterfall in her ears.
“You seem troubled,” came that beautiful voice from behind her. It was deep and lilted, a sound like the difference between typed words and those written in calligraphy. More importantly, somehow it sounded… capable. All of a sudden, she wanted to tell him everything, confide in him. His presence at her back was literally warm in temperature, as if he were radiating a heat brighter and more powerful than that of a normal man.
She heard the leather sole of his shoe strike closer.
Oh, Christ.
“Is there by any chance,” he began as he closed the distance between them in two easy steps, “anything I can do to help?” He was right beside her, only inches away. A sensation of pleasure washed over her, raising her flesh in goose bumps. Her toes tingled and her fingers zapped. It felt a little like the beginnings of hyperventilation. Was she about to have a panic attack?
“No,” she squeaked.
The elevator slowed rapidly and the doors dinged once more. Someone had called it to the fifth floor. I’m getting off here, she thought. I’ll take the stairs the rest of the way up. She had to get away from the man at her back. His presence felt hard and hot, like a blacksmith’s forge. She was playing with fire.
Open faster! she mentally screamed as she watched the space between the doors open at a snail’s pace. Time had literally slowed down. She was sure of it.
She looked up, her gaze refocusing on the hallway beyond the doors. And just as suddenly as they’d begun to open, she wanted them to close again. Three men and one woman, all dressed in what looked like the same dark blue, almost-black suit were moving down the hallway toward her. A fifth suit was standing beside the doors, his finger on the elevator button.
She knew instantly who and what they were. They found me, she thought.
That was fast.
“Close the doors!” she cried.
But her gorgeous companion was already moving, stepping around her like a shadow. He placed his hands on the sides of the elevator doors and pressed them inward, pulling them impossibly against their mechanisms. The doors made a grinding sound. There was a cranking and a whine, and the man out in the hall with his finger on the button suddenly snapped into action.
“Stop!” he demanded, but of course no one ever would.
Don’t stop, Addie thought crazily as instinct forced her to step back and retreat to the far corner of the elevator. Don’t stop!
The handsome stranger’s strength was unnatural. When the doors were nearly shut, the agent in the hall pulled a gun from a shoulder holster beneath his suit jacket and shoved it hastily through the remaining opening. The stranger released the doors, moving like rapid fire. He grabbed the man’s hand with one tight grip, and yanked the agent forward so hard and fast that the man’s face hit the metal, and his head snapped back. The stranger released the agent’s wrist and took the weapon from his fingers as the man fell unconscious to the floor.
Her companion stepped back as the elevator doors closed.
“Are you still certain there’s nothing I can do to help you?” the stranger calmly asked without even glancing at her. He held the gun down at his side and used his other hand to run his room card through the card reader, pressing the button for the top floor of the hotel. It was the floor with the presidential suite.
Addie put her face in her hands and tried to think. Her life was a 5,000 piece puzzle that someone had just knocked off the table. The picture was broken now, scattered and chaotic. She’d be lucky to find all the pieces, much less put herself back together.
“I don’t know!” she shouted through her hands. It came out muffled, but she couldn’t have cared less. It was all happening too fast. It was too much.
She couldn’t think!
“Right,” came his simple, still calm reply. She peeked through a gap in her fingers to see him pull a cell phone from a pocket in his tailored suit. He did it gracefully, like a man taking charge.
You’re an idiot, her brain told her.
But her cheeks grew warm, and her belly hot, and longing snaked through her fast and unexpected, and she internally swore.
I’m losing my marbles.
“Andros, we’ve got unwanted guests. Get in touch with D’Angelo and let him know we’re coming in hot,” he spoke into the phone. He looked up with those silver eyes at the numbers flashing slowly across the floor monitor. Silver! His eyes were no longer gray, but melted mercury silver! She’d never seen anything so stunning!
“So you saw them too,” he said into the phone. “They’re here for her. We have more of a mess to clean than we thought.”
Say what? her brain chirped.
His eyes remained trained on the slowly changing floor numbers. “We aren’t moving fast enough,” he muttered next, not really speaking into the phone, but thinking out loud. Addie watched him in silent fascination. What else was she supposed to do? At the moment, she was as useful as a slightly low IQ toddler fresh from a nap.
At the thought of toddlers, Addie pictured babies. Then she pictured kittens. And then she pictured puppies – and that made her think of Hastings, who was still alone, helpless, and injured in her suite on the seventh floor.
Oh no!
She looked at the floor display and noticed they passed floor seven and kept on rising. And the feds are probably on that floor already anyway, she thought hopelessly. Hell, they were probably already in her room. Did they have Hastings?
No, she thought. She couldn’t handle that. For some reason, despite the asinine insanity of the situation and the fact that her life had just been flushed down the proverbial toilet, it was the thought of Hastings in someone else’s less-than-caring hands that was going to do her in.
As panic started to set in and her heart rate went into overdrive and her breathing became too rapid and her fingers and toes began to go numb, the stranger’s eyes turned on her.
And those eyes… Jesus, she thought. They were hard. Hard and sharp. They reminded her of the folded sword blade just after the blacksmith pulled it from the flames and drove it into his bucket of water. They were the memory of hellfire and the power of a swift killing blade.
Then they began to glow.
“Sit down,” he commanded.
Addie fell back on her rump.
“Bend your knees and breathe.”
But Addie was already doing so. And even as she drew in deep air and slowly blew it out, she couldn’t look away. Those glowing silver eyes held her gaze as if with chains.
I’m seeing things. Maybe I’m going to faint. Maybe I’m dying.
As if in sharp contrast to the illumination of his eyes, his entire form seemed to darken there in that elevator. The light faded and the shadows lengthened. The stranger seemed to grow taller. He appeared to get bigger. And there were edges to him now, like thorns, scales, fangs and claws.
Her thoughts gave a helpless and surrendering sigh.
Addie’s will gave out and she let her head drop to her knees. The world was turning upside down as above her, the stranger reached out one dark hand and touched the elevator wall. The huge metal box suddenly shot upward with tremendous force. Addie was glad she was already on the floor, because she was absolutely certain they would break through the ceiling and eject into the stratosphere like Willie Wonka’s Great Glass Elevator.