One dark eyebrow slid up his forehead. “You just go on thinking that, Miss Nadia,” he said, his voice gruff as he pressed her back against the shelves, dust and papers raining down upon their heads. “If it helps you sleep at night.”
Her heart kicked like a wild thing as his eyes dropped back to her mouth, eyes filled with desire and defiance, and she knew that she wouldn’t be sleeping much that night, if at all.
It’s sex. Just sex. Delicious, exquisite, earth-moving sex. He’s been your port in a storm. A little night comfort in a far-off land. Nothing new there; that’s totally your MO.
Yeah, she thought, you just keep telling yourself that, as his mouth descended on hers, sensation took over and all thought fled.
* * *
Ryder ran a hand over his neck. It ached from too many hours at the computer in his office atop a giant Collins Street edifice.
And yet it hadn’t been a skyscraper keeping him locked to his chair. It had been sketch after sketch of a large space filled with arched windows and high beams and old wooden floors. A building with a broken lift, lights that appeared on the verge of burning the whole place down. With strips of red silk floating from one discreet corner.
He’d been thinking about the place so much of late, to the detriment of his real work. His only option as he saw it was to get the thing out of his head. The sheaths of paper curled up on the carpet beside his shoes proved it hadn’t worked.
Ryder stood, stretched his arms over his head, and felt his spine crick and crack. Then, remembering the posture Nadia had shown him, pressed his feet into the floor from his hips down, and pulled himself as tall as possible from his hips up, as if his body were squashed between two panes of glass... His muscles sang with the relief and release of it, until he caught sight of how ridiculous he looked in the window.
He could have kissed his mobile when it rang.
“Hey, kiddo,” he said, after seeing Sam’s number on the display, “just the distraction I needed.”
“We got married!” her crackly voice exclaimed.
“Say again?” Ryder stuck his finger in his other ear and headed to the window to make sure he had the best reception possible. Because she could not possibly have just said—
“We eloped! I am now officially Mrs Ben Johnson!”
“It sure as hell sounded like you just said that you eloped.”
A pause, then, “That’s because I did. I told Ben everything. About Dad, and the other wives, and the panic attacks. And he was a rock, Ryder. He was beautiful, and perfect, and strong, and wonderful. And we’re in Las Vegas right now. And it’s gorgeous. We flew in at night and the lights—”
But Ryder hadn’t heard much past Vegas. The bloody place was fast turning out to be his arch enemy. “Did Nadia put you up to it?”
After a long pause, Sam shot back, “In what possible way?” her voice tight. When he was the only one with any right to be pissed.
“She’s from Vegas. And don’t try to say you didn’t know.”
“She’s not from here. She’s from there.”
“Well, she’s moving back there any day now.” He knew he was pulling at straws, but he was struggling to get his head around it all.
“Oh.” Sam’s suddenly soft voice broke through. “Has she heard when?”
She hadn’t. Not when he’d left her soft and warm and naked in her bed at five that morning. When he’d actually toyed with the thought of doing the walk of shame into work in the same suit and tie he’d worn the day before, just to get another hour in her arms.
“That’s not the point,” he growled. “What the hell possessed you guys?”
“It had all just spun so far out of control, Ryder. It was meant to have been small, just us and Ben’s family, and you giving me away. And then all that stuff happened with Dad, and on Ben’s side a fight had erupted over what flavour cake might offend Great-Auntie Wallace. In the end we realised we just wanted to look one another in the eye and say, It’s you. You’re it. You’re the one who makes my heart race and my bed warm and I’ll take that for ever, thank you very much.”
Ryder closed his eyes and rubbed his thumb and forefinger over the bridge of his nose. What the hell could he possibly say to that? “And Vegas was your only option?”
“It was quickest,” she said, and he could all but hear her grin. “A sixty-dollar licence and a five-minute ceremony and you’re done. You should have seen the line-up at the courthouse. Picture women in full bridal regalia, their limos waiting at the kerb. Men in Elvis wigs, their luggage at their feet as they’d come straight from the airport.”