Total pages in book: 56
Estimated words: 53725 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 269(@200wpm)___ 215(@250wpm)___ 179(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 53725 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 269(@200wpm)___ 215(@250wpm)___ 179(@300wpm)
My spirit lifts with this idea. The truth is I tend to downplay opportunities until they prove worthy of celebration. It’s a jinx thing. Every time I’m sure of something, it’s not sure at all. Suddenly this job might feel more important to me, and that’s when I really see things go south. I scold myself, Don’t get excited. This car means nothing.
The window between me and the driver probably means more.
A few minutes later, the driver of my fancy limousine has yet to lower the glass between us, and the car halts next to a high-rise. I don’t know the building though I’ve most likely walked past it at some point. I might have grown up in Jersey where my parents tried to shelter me from the city, but my parents always had Manhattan offices. I was always here, then and now.
The car door opens and I exit. The same broody, grumpy guy who’d led me to the car motions me forward. You know how this goes. He opens the door and I enter the ritzy lobby with glossy floors and fancy lighting dangling from silver poles. He doesn’t talk. I don’t talk. He waves at security and then punches the elevator button. When the door opens, I step inside and he leans in and punches floor thirty. It’s high. Not that I’m afraid of heights, but I could get nervous about the drop going down if I let myself. It’s the whole, everything falls from the bottom, no matter how hard you pull up thing.
It’s a thing my father says. It means—well it means nothing good.
I glance at my watch to find it’s nearly six-thirty pm. Ooh, I’ve also done my ten thousand steps, thank you, New York City and the walk or die in the subway mentality. I’m not really sure what the late hour means for a studio office as far as busyness goes. I’d think most of the office staff would be gone by now. I’d speculate—translated as worry—about some weird casting couch thing, but I already have the job and the program manager is a little old lady. A tough little old lady, but not the casting couch type.
I think. Who knows these days.
The elevator dings and I draw in a breath. I step into the foyer and I glance left and right only to discover there is only one set of double wooden doors. After closer inspection, I realize there is also no bell. I attempt to knock, but it’s a solid door. No one is going to hear me. This is weird, I think, and there’s a warning bee buzzing about in my belly. This feels off. Am I at the wrong place?
I open the doors and step inside a lobby that smells of new leather and I sniff—spice. It smells like winter spice. I don’t really know why I know what winter spice smells like, but I do. It must be my mother’s obsession with all things holiday. The room is a lobby with a secretary’s desk and a seating area, which is decorated in, of course, leather couches and chairs, hence the leather scent. No one is at the desk.
“Hello?” I call out several times, but it’s crickets in return. My options include one door to the left of the desk or the one behind me I came in through. The bee in my belly is buzzing again, but I ignore it and walk toward the door.
It’s open and I step just inside the entryway.
There’s a man standing at the window and my heart begins a pitter patter in my chest. He’s tall, and dark, and familiar.
A rush of awareness floods me, a full body experience that might as well be me being swept into an icy ocean and pulled under. I can’t breathe. This isn’t happening. This isn’t him. I suck in a breath when I finally discover a bit of air, and he turns. God, he turns to face me. Then he’s all out there, we’re all out there, in a room, together, aware of each other. So. Very. Aware. His jaw is a perfect line, so very handsomely straight, his cheekbones a perfect angle, and the dimple in his chin just as adorable and sexy as I remember, but somehow brutal. Yes, a dimple can be brutal if on this man. And of course, his silk tie is a royal blue that matches his eyes perfectly. The coldest of all eyes, because they always feel warm when the heat in their depths is nothing but a lie.
Lies hurt.
Deception hurts.
He. Hurt. Me.
I blink and he’s around the desk standing on this side of his visitor’s chairs. I don’t even remember him moving. His eyes travel over me, intimate in a way he has no right to look at me. “Alana,” he says softly, and his voice is silk and seduction, but somehow all demand. So much demand.