by Jill Shalvis
The couch was comfortable but she couldn’t find her zone. The room was a good temperature but she was at turns hot and then cold. Her pillow wasn’t working.
Morgan had started snoring again in less than two minutes and Elle forced herself to relax. She wasn’t sure exactly when her fantasies became dreams, dreams of how Archer’s hands had felt skimming over her body, the touch of his mouth on her skin. The way he’d murmured hot, sexy things while he’d stroked and kissed her . . .
She woke up and blinked blearily at the low light of dawn peeking in the bedroom windows. Wait—What? She sat straight up and stared down at Archer. His eyes were closed and he looked quite relaxed and comfortable.
And shirtless.
She peeked under the covers and found him in knit boxers.
“If you wanted to look at me, all you had to do was say so,” came his sleep roughened voice.
“Why am I in your bed? How am I in your bed?” she demanded.
“You were tossing and turning and muttering and getting no real sleep. Which means I was getting no sleep either, so I brought you in here.”
Where clearly she’d proceeded to sleep like the living dead.
“And that wasn’t me rescuing you,” he was quick to point out. “Or butting in on your life either. It was me doing Morgan a favor because you were keeping her up too.”
She met his gaze, which wasn’t amused. Wasn’t sardonic. Wasn’t anything but dark, warm, and concerned. For her. Because she was probably having a mental breakdown and also maybe pregnant . . .
“You okay?” he asked softly.
“Yes.” It was her ready-made answer but she paused and drew a deep breath. “Maybe.” She paused again. “Archer?”
“Yeah?”
“If I admit I’m not okay, just this once, you’ve got me, right?”
“Yeah, babe. I’ve got you.” He tugged her into him and she snuggled close, closing her eyes as his arms closed around her.
“What is it with us?” she murmured.
He laughed softly.
“How is that a funny question?”
“Because I try very hard to always know what I’m doing,” he said. “But I’m winging it here, Elle. I have no idea what we’re doing but one thing I’m sure as hell not doing is walking away from you. Not ever again.”
She waited for her heart to hit her toes but it didn’t happen. There was no panic. No anxiety. In fact, she felt . . . warm. Safe.
Secure. “This is just another of those temporary breaks from you staying the hell away from me,” she said. “Don’t forget.”
“I wouldn’t think of it.”
Archer loved waking up with Elle in his arms. It was the second night that he’d held her close with an intimacy born of something far deeper than physical wanting and he thought he wouldn’t mind sharing his space with her every single day of his life.
All he had to do was convince her of that, but he was working on it, one brick of the wall around her heart at a time.
The morning was a serious eye opener in other ways too. Turned out that sharing a bathroom with two females was an experience.
Or rather, not sharing.
They spent forty-five minutes in there. Each. By the time they finally cleared it for him, he was late to his own office meeting for the first time in his life.
When he walked in, the only one who dared say anything was Joe, who had refused to stay home any longer and was on light office duty. “Got the time, boss?” he asked with a smirk.
“You got something to say?” Archer asked him.
“Nothing you’d want me to say.”
“How about ‘I’d love to stay on light duty for another few weeks’?” Archer asked mildly. “Would you like to say that?”
Joe swore beneath his breath. They all hated light duty.
Max snickered.
Joe reached out and shoved Max into the wall.
Carl jumped up and started barking, excited that there was going to be roughhousing. Carl loved roughhousing.
Max put Joe into a headlock.
Carl completely lost his shit and jumped on both of them, trying to get in on the action.
“Hey,” Mollie yelled from down the hall. “We just replaced that wall from the last time you two got playful. Knock it off!”
Archer turned to Trev. “What did you get off the phone?”
“It was a burner, but we’re still working on it.”
“Work faster.”
“Yes, sir.”
The rest of the meeting was finished without further damage to any property.
Even though Mollie was back, Morgan stuck around to help her catch up, which was probably an impossible feat. At the end of the day, she offered to stay late with Mollie, and since Max and Carl were staying late as well, Archer let it happen, assigning Max to bring Morgan to Archer’s place when she was done for the night.
This left just the other troublesome female in his life. He went down the hallway and gathered Elle to go home.
“I need to stop by my apartment,” she said.
“For what?”
“Stuff.”
He thought of the huge duffle bag she already had at his place but decided that pressing further would be a hazard to his health. At her apartment, he walked her in.
“Most likely, the only thing I’m in danger from is you,” she noted, but she humored him, letting him prowl through the rooms, flicking on lights and taking a look around while she stood at the front door, waiting.
When they got to his place, he did a wash and repeat of the safety check.
“You chase away all the scary things that go bump in the night then?” she asked from the foyer when he was finished.
“All but one.” He stepped into her, gratified to notice the hitch in her breath.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
He figured it was self-explanatory when he backed her to the wall.
She allowed it, that small wry smile still in place. “You think you’re scary, Archer?”
Christ, he loved when she said his name. She could convey an entire volume of things in the one word. Irritation, amusement, temper, frustration . . . and then there was his favorite—arousal. Right now it was good humor as she allowed him to press up against her and kiss her, and then keep on kissing her until they were definitely no longer amused but something else entirely, something that called to the very heart of him. “Elle?”
“Yeah?”
“Are we in one of those time-outs from you being mad at me?”
Slowly Elle lifted her head and met his gaze. “No.” She paused, killing him. “But as you’ve mentioned before, we do some of our best work when I’m mad at you.”
With heat and need and something much stronger barreling through his veins, he lifted her up against him and then turned to head to his bedroom.
Her arms came around his neck, her fingers sliding into his hair to fist it, and she nibbled on his lower lip.
Still walking, palming her sweet ass, he let his fingers dip and play, making her gasp. He swallowed the sound with his mouth and then pulled back a fraction to meet her hot gaze. “Elle—”
The knock at the front door was loud and important. “Hey,” Morgan said through the door. “Max is here with me and he’s in a hurry to get home to his girlfriend, Rory. You two doing it or are you going to let me in?”
“I blame you for her,” Elle said to Archer, who reluctantly let her go. Elle vanished into his bathroom and into his shower, leaving him to let Morgan in.
“So?” Morgan asked Elle when she came out of the shower. “Were you two going hog wild?”
“No!” Elle said.
And to Archer’s eternal frustration, they didn’t go hog wild at all because Elle stubbornly took the couch for the night.
Elle spent the next afternoon with a set of new tenants who were moving into the empty space on the ground floor between the coffee shop and Reclaimed Wood. They were going to put in a bakery, and Ell
e, fond of any baking that she didn’t have to do on her own, thought it would be a great addition to the building.
By the time she was finished with them, she needed a caffeine hit so she made her way up to Spence’s penthouse apartment, where he kept some of the good stuff for her. She found him in his huge, sprawling living room working on . . . something. There were parts and pieces everywhere, of what she had no idea. Spence could take anything apart and put it back together. He could also build whatever he could imagine.
“What are you working on?” she asked.
The only word she understood of his answer was prototype.
“Trudy’s going to be pissed at the mess,” she said.
He was head deep in whatever that thing was on his coffee table, which looked like it could fly to Mars and back. “I asked her not to come clean this week,” he said distractedly.
“You trying to break her heart? She loves to clean for you.”
“Yeah, but yesterday she came in without knocking and—”
“Caught you getting laid?” Elle asked hopefully.
Spence snorted. “I wish, but no. I was flying a drone and it nearly hit her in the face. She left here screaming about the zombie apocalypse arriving early.”
Elle went into his kitchen and pulled out the tin of tea he’d ordered for her from England. “I think I’m all screwed up over Archer,” she said, bringing him a cup. “Emotionally.”
He sniffed at the tea suspiciously, like she was trying to poison him. “Why am I always the one to get roped into conversations about people’s feelings?”
“Because you’re so sweet and sensitive?” she asked dryly.
“Exactly, I’m none of those things so why do you all enjoy making me discuss your love lives?” He downed the cup she’d brought him and made a face because it was unsweetened. Shaking his head again, he went back to work.
“Well excuse me,” she said. “Next time I’ll come up here to discuss more important stuff, like how big our dicks are.”
He was laughing when she left him. She’d been back at her desk for an hour when two men let themselves into her office. Big. Mean-looking. Mouth-breathing knuckle draggers.
“We’re looking for your sister,” Thing One said, expression blank, mouth grim, beefy body tensed for trouble.
“I don’t have a sister,” she said.
The two men looked at each other and some silent communication happened. Thing One went to her window and looked out. Thing Two, just as nasty-looking as his buddy, stood between her and the door.
Okay, so they weren’t here about the vacancies in the building . . . She started to rise out of her chair but Thing One at the window turned and shook his head at her, like don’t even think about it.
Fine. She had her laptop open and within reach. She could get an SOS email out, possibly even a text message if she had that screen up. But before she could get her fingers on the keyboard, Thing One lunged close and slammed her laptop shut.
She dove for her cell phone but Thing Two was faster, shoving her hard as he wrapped his fingers around the phone.
Off balance, she spun, but not fast enough to avoid crashing into the credenza behind her desk and stumbling on her heels. Unfortunately for her, she’d left a drawer open and she hit it going down.
With her face.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out she was in trouble. But her phone was on the floor and she stretched for it, just barely grabbing it with the very tips of her fingers, hitting Archer on speed dial.
Two legs came into view as she scrambled up to her knees, hopefully leaving the phone connecting to Archer. She put a hand to her throbbing temple and cheek, hoping, praying she’d diverted his attention from the phone.
“Let’s start over,” Thing One said, hauling her up to her feet. “We’re looking for your sister.”
“I already told you, I don’t have a sister.”
He put his hands in his front pockets, the casual gesture revealing the big gun at his hip. “Try again.”
Oh boy.
“Look, our beef isn’t with you,” he said, clearly the talker of the group since Thing Two had done nothing but grunt. “Just tell us where Morgan’s at and we’ll leave you alone.”
If they knew things like Morgan’s name and where Elle worked, the gig really was up and she was in bigger trouble than she’d thought. “What do you want her for?” she asked, hoping like hell Archer was listening to this and on his way.
“She cut us out of a deal and our boss isn’t happy,” Thing One said. “He wants to talk to her.”
“Who’s ‘he’?”
“Lars Maddox.”
Only half feigning dizziness now, Elle leaned on her desk and let one of her hands fall onto her heavy-duty stapler. Lars had been Morgan’s boyfriend a lifetime ago and he wasn’t a nice guy. He was the opposite of a nice guy. Back when she and Morgan had been teens, he’d had Morgan doing some grifter work for him. In fact, he’d been the one Elle had been attempting to return the stolen Russian brooch to the night their lives had all imploded. The night Archer had saved her. If Lars was still in Morgan’s life, Morgan had been lying about getting her life together.
Which sucked.
“I’m losing patience,” Thing One said. “Where the fuck is she?”
“Under my desk,” she said, and Thing One laughed.
When Elle didn’t, he sighed. “Shit. You’re just crazy enough to be telling the truth.” He peered around her desk and when he dropped his gaze from hers for a second to take a peek, she hit him over the head with the stapler as hard as she could, connecting with a gratifying thunk.
He went down like a stone.
Thing Two narrowed his eyes. “Hey! You can’t do that.”
She readjusted her now sweaty grip on the stapler, preparing for a round with this guy as he started toward her all good and pissed off. That made two of them, she thought, just as her office door flew open with enough force to bang against the wall and embed the handle in the drywall. Damn. That was going to be costly to fix.
There was a blur of movement and Thing Two took a roundhouse kick from Archer and flew back eight feet, hitting the far wall of the office with a satisfying splat before sliding down to the floor.
“Stay down,” Archer told him, and he turned to Thing One, his eyes flat and hard and scary as hell as he gave the guy a “come here” gesture with his hands.
Thing One rushed him but Archer did a quick, sharp movement with a bent arm and an elbow. Thing One expelled a breath of air and hit the floor.
He didn’t get up.
Archer turned back to Thing Two, kicking him over so that he was facedown, putting a knee in his back to cuff him with some plexicuffs he pulled from one of the pockets in his cargos.
Thing One got the same treatment, and then Archer rose to his feet and leveled that sharp, intense gaze on her. “You okay?”
Here was the thing. She’d been born okay, and she’d had things under control. Mostly. Her point being that she’d made it through relatively unscathed, but at Archer’s three words uttered with calm steel, are you okay, she felt her throat close up.
With the same swiftness he’d used to take in her office with one sweeping glance when he’d first crashed into it during her fight, he grasped her impending meltdown. Reaching out, he snagged her by the front of her dress and hauled her into his very capable arms.
And although she was her own woman who stood on her own two feet, who fought her battles for herself and usually won them too, sometimes being alone wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. So she fisted her hands in his shirt, buried her face in his throat, and held on tight.
