by Sierra Rose
I pulled my hand back in surprise, shocked by his answer. “When and where?”
A ghost of a smile flickered across his face as he gazed down into my eyes. “When and where I died.”
Speechless, I just stared at the scar again, then darted my eyes back up to his, begging for an explanation.
There was a beat of silence before his face brightened into a smile. “More coffee?”
Chapter 13
I WAS THE NEWEST EMPLOYEE at the top corporate firm in the entire British Empire. More than that, I was a woman working a man’s job, a woman who was recently conscripted into a competition that could fundamentally change my entire career. Of course, in order to accomplish that, I had to actually go to work.
I understood that. I really did. Nevertheless, I’d reached one of those milestones I just couldn’t walk away from them, one of those pivotal moments that required my attention. His “when I died” left me gobsmacked, (learned that word from Madison) and I had to know what he was talking about, especially because he was anything but dead the night before. “I’m sorry. What was that?” I demanded, looking at him the way Madison often looked at me, as if he was speaking in some ancient alien tongue I couldn’t possibly decipher.
James glanced over his shoulder as he held the balcony door open, seemingly surprised that I was still stuck on the subject when he’d obviously moved on to other things. His wet hair clung to the sides of his neck, dangling along the edge of his angular jaw, and the second we stepped back into the air-conditioned penthouse, the hairs on his arms rose atop goosebump peaks. “Coffee,” he repeated, heading toward the machine. “Do you want another—”
I stepped in front of him, forcing him to stop in his tracks and too halt his offer. “Uh...when you died?”
His face lightened with surprise at the seriousness of my tone before an intentionally distracting smile curled his mouth. “Sounds worse than it really was,” he said with a grin I found as unsettling as his nonchalance.
Sure, I was under the man’s spell, but a brush with his morality wasn’t something I was willing to sweep under the rug. “What happened?” I coaxed. Then, instead of following him to the kitchen, I headed to the living room and sank down on the couch, waiting for an explanation.
He hesitated uncertainly before settling down beside me. “A car accident, like I told you,” he said, his expression twisting a bit. “It was a long time ago, Della, almost seven years. I barely recall it anymore.”
“Were you driving?” I asked quietly, all the while scouring my memory banks for any story I might have read about a tragic accident that had thrown him on life support. When I realized I’d never seen a word about it, I could only imagine how much money the Cross family had spent to keep something like that out of the papers.
James’s eyes tightened for a second before they dropped to his lap. “Worse,” he said softly. “I was racing. A loading truck pulled out of nowhere, and I swerved to avoid it and lost control. I went over the side of a dried-up canal.”
My eyes darted down to my leg.
He followed my curious gaze. He flexed his calf involuntarily before his shoulders fell. “It took the rescue workers three hours to pry the car off me,” he said after a quiet sigh. “An hour after that, they finally airlifted me to a hospital. When I woke up in recovery, they told me I technically died for two minutes. If not for an emergency blood transfusion at the scene, that would have been it.”
That would have been it?
I was sure I would never forget the sound of his voice when he said those words. It was like something out of a nightmare, those gruesome images as playing out behind his lovely eyes that flickered with belated fear and a deep sadness he didn’t seem completely aware of himself.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, reaching out to absentmindedly take his hand. “I know you act as if it’s nothing, but seven years ago or not, something like that... Well, I’m sure it never really goes away.”
James glanced down at our hands, then cleared his face and shrugged more deliberately this time. “I really don’t remember much, just flashes of light, the heat, the pain...” Clouds brewed in his eyes for a moment before they resumed their usual radiance. “By the time I came to, the surgery was already done, and Nick had set up headquarters in my hospital room.”
“Nick? As in Nick Hunter?” I asked. It was not lost on me the way his eyes lit up when he mentioned his friend.
“The one and only,” he said with a nod, breaking into a smile.
“That wouldn’t happen to be the same Nick Hunter who escaped his own engagement party in a seaside helicopter, would it?”
James glanced up with a look of surprise, but his expression quickly morphed to one of innocence as he shook his head. “I heard about that guy. What a crazy bastard,” he said.
I folded my arms across my chest and leaned back with a grin. “Yeah? Well, I heard that that was you.”
Just like that, his innocence went right out the window. “Do me a favor,” he said, shooting me a rueful grin. “Try to stay off the internet, okay?”
My smile faded again when I lifted my hands and looked down once more at the crescent moon scar. At first glance, it wasn’t easy to see, because it was smooth and blended perfectly with the contours of his muscles. What really gave it away was the color, as it contrasted his normal complexion in some inhuman hue of white, as if someone had taken a can of paint and brushed it up the side of his knee.
“What happened after that, when you woke up?” I prodded. I was late for work, and I was obviously prying, but I couldn’t help myself. We’d spent hours upon hours talking about me, uncovering every last mindless detail and every random fact about my years on Earth. Now, I wanted to hear about him, the real James Cross—not the man in the internet articles, the jet-setting sex god of Google legend. I wanted to know about him, and I wanted to hear it from his own lips.
There was a restless shift on the sofa, and I suddenly realized he was just as uncomfortable as I was when it came to talking about himself. In a way, it made sense that he was so private. The second he stepped outside every day, he was swarmed by millions of people asking millions of questions. Over time, he’d learned to deflect. It was his defense mechanism, his way of protecting himself and keeping his stories in their own private nook in his mind, secrets he always guarded with a centerfold smile. That kind of secrecy didn’t lend itself well to whatever was going on between us, though, so he seemed okay with divulging things to me.
“I was in the hospital for five weeks, went through another surgery. I survived on take-away, because the hospital food is atrocious. I tried to escape twice in broad daylight,” he added with a wink. “Nocturnal escape attempts were a regular occurrence.”
I laughed aloud but found myself hanging on every word. There was something mesmerizing about the way he talked, something that went beyond the hypnotic rhythm of his voice. It was as if with every line, he cracked open another window, offered another fleeting glimpse at what was happening on the other side.
“Nick was with me every step of the way,” he said, his carefree smile fading as his eyes gazed back on that time almost a decade ago. “He never left, not for a single moment, even when... Well, I can’t say I always made things easy on him.” He silenced then, worlds away and seeing things I couldn’t, lost in visions of the past.
“How so?” I asked gently.
He looked up in surprise, almost as if he’d forgotten I was there.
“What do you mean, you didn’t make things easy on him?”
James paused a moment more, opened his mouth, then thought better of it and paused again. After a second, he looked up at me with a very peculiar expression, one so guarded that it had no place on his lovely face. “Why must you hear all this?”
I leaned abruptly back, caught off guard by his sudden change in tone. It wasn’t unfriendly, but it was brusque and wary, almost accusatory. I was just about to answer, but he beat me to the punch.
“I
t’s nothing flashy, nothing sexy.” His eyes cooled for a moment before he fixed them resolutely on the wall. “Certainly not one of your scandalous stories.”
Whoa there! Where the hell did that come from?!
I understood that in a lot of ways, his limitless world far more prohibitive than mine, but at the same time, I couldn’t keep the sarcasm from my voice as I folded my arms across my chest and flattened my smile. “James, I told you about the time I fell asleep with my window open, only to be peed upon by the neighbor’s cat, my worst Tuesday ever. Why would I be after your salacious stories? I have plenty of my own, thank you very much.”
There was a heavy pause, during which the cat urine story seemed to echo around the room, till it felt like the walls themselves were laughing at me.
“You might be right,” James said, softening with an involuntary grin.
“Gee, ya think?” I shot back, smacking him upside the head with a pillow.
He grinned again and adorably raked his wet hair away from his eyes before growing abruptly pensive once more. “I was in a deep depression when I left the hospital. I couldn’t walk, couldn’t sleep. I was tired of being indoors, tired of the pain. I had grown quite fond of my pain medication, but Nick was quick to throw all that away, for my own good. He said I was given a second chance at life and I had to make the most of it.” He bowed his head, lacing his fingers slowly together as he remembered. “One thing I could do was swim,” he said, the cold bitterness melting slowly, allowing the warm glow to return to his eyes. “The first time we went out on the lake, Nick didn’t tell me what he planned to do. We took my father’s boat to the deepest part and stayed there for a while, just listening to music, wasting time. When Nick ordered me into the water, I thought he’d gone mad. We argued about it, shouting at the top of our lungs, but then he grabbed me by the collar and threw me over the side.”
“He what?” I spat.
James shrugged. “What can I say? He’s a good friend.”
Okay, either the boy is delusional, or we have very different definitions of the word. I’m pretty sure it’s the former.
“He forced me to care about something again,” he continued, correctly interpreting the incredulous look on my face. “He pulled me out of my own head. He even built the pool for me,” he said, gesturing to the roof with a casual hand. “It was waiting for me when I got back to London.”
It was only then that I realized he was still in a towel, dripping a small but steady puddle onto the designer couch. My gaze drifted over his body, then to his leg again. “Can I touch it?”
My eyes snapped shut in humiliation as soon as the stupid question left my lips. I felt only worse when I opened them a second later and saw James staring at me with a look of disbelief.
“What are you, six, little girl?” he kidded.
Choosing to embrace the stereotype, I shrugged and jutted my chin out, donning an arrogant smirk. “What? You scared?”
“Scarred maybe but not scared.” James threw his head back and boomed a laugh, the laugh of a man who never scared easily. He cocked his eyebrows in an adorable invitation and stretched his leg out on the antique coffee table.
I flashed another grin and reached out a tentative hand. With a delicate finger, I stroked the length of the scar, curling around his knee in that white crescent moon. The skin was smooth and taut, just like the rest of his body. If not for the paleness, I never would have known it was there. I moved my hand slowly, thoughtfully, following every curve and arch with my eyes. Then, with incredible care, I leaned down and pressed my lips against it in a gentle kiss.
He released a silent gasp as his entire body stiffened in surprise. His lips parted, but no sound came out. He just sat there, holding his breath, still as a statue.
When I finally straightened my back, James was a different man. Some kind of change had overtaken him, a change I didn’t understand and was sure he didn’t either. James Cross, who could never sit still, was frozen in place, staring at me with an expression I’d never seen on any person’s face before.
“Della, I—”
A sudden burst of noise shattered the quiet, followed almost immediately by a violent vibration as my phone sprang to life on the couch between us. We looked down at the same time, then looked back up at each other.
“I’m sorry. What was that?” I asked breathlessly. “What were you going to—”
Another explosion occurred, even louder than the first.
My eyes snapped shut as James looked toward the balcony.
When he turned back a second later, whatever strange feeling had caught him in its grasp was firmly tucked away again. “Do you need to get that?” he asked.
“Do you need to go?”
Every part of me ached to say no, but on a weekday morning, it wasn’t really up to me. I suddenly regretted charging my phone the night before, almost more than I’d ever regretted anything in my life.
“Yes, I’m sorry.” I grimaced apologetically and reached down to grab it. “It’s my ringtone for work, and I can’t just—”
James held up his hands and gave me an easy smile. “I completely understand. I need to get going anyway.”
We both stood, feeling abruptly awkward about the rather strange end to our rather perfect night together. Our eyes deliberately retreated to opposite sides of the room as we both promptly busied ourselves with pouring coffee into thermoses and getting dressed to leave.
I was just about to call out to him by the door when he rounded the corner and met me by the elevators. Unlike me, he’d chosen casual attire for the day, yet he still managed to pull off dapper and sexy, like some sort of underwear model on holiday from work.
“I’m glad you came over.” He leaned down and gave me a swift but sweet kiss on the cheek, followed by a twinkling smile. “I’m even gladder that you stayed.”
“Me too.”
He pulled me closer and our lips met. I loved how he cradled my face in his hands. Heat spread across my entire body. I could feel the electric current and I knew the chemistry was there.
Damn! I never felt chemistry like that before. Never! He can kiss the hell out of me anytime he wants!
A rosy blush colored my cheeks, but I managed to hold his gaze. “Well, it didn’t have to be the first and last time,” I said coyly, swishing the skirt of my dress nervously back and forth. “Do you want to get together later, after work?”
He beamed, but then his expression dimmed into one far more serious. “I actually have something to do,” he said, with a tinge of regret in his voice. He glanced down at the floor, then looked back up at me tentatively, a new hope in his eyes. “Then again, perhaps you could join me.”
How the hell could anyone resist those dimples? I thought, putty in his hands and ready to follow him anywhere.
“Sure, I’d love to,” I said, then pressed the button for the elevator and backed into it with a flirtatious smile. “Pick me up at seven?”
He stuck his hands in his pockets and grinned. “Aren’t you even going to ask me where?”
“It couldn’t matter less,” I said with a smile, mimicking what he always said to answer my concerns.
“Good,” he said.
“Good,” I echoed, jutting my chin out victoriously, as if I’d gotten the last word.
“Fine.”
“Fine!”
It was a standoff, and neither of us was willing to back down, a connection neither one of us was willing to end, though neither of us was willing to admit it either.
His eyebrows lifted slowly, and he cocked his head toward the control panel inside the elevator. “It’s the ground floor, Della.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said, then smacked the button with a begrudging grin on my face.
He returned a look of pure innocence, flashing his most angelic smile. “See you at seven.”
“Maybe,” I mumbled as the floor lit up.”
He was still chuckling, and I couldn’t wipe the silly grin off my face. Inside the
elevator, I was prepared to overanalyze and replay every single word he’d said.
I never in my life had gotten a man like James Cross.
As the elevator fell back to the earth, I got butterflies just thinking about the next time I’d see him.
Chapter 14
“WHERE THE HELL HAVE you been?” Madison hissed the second I walked through the double-doors. “I’ve been calling and calling you!”
“I’m sorry,” I apologized as I was swept down the hall. “I’ve been having, uh...phone troubles this morning.”
“Phone troubles?” she repeated with an acidic glare. “If the damn thing didn’t die, you might, Della. We have serious work to do here.”
“Wow. Crabby much?” I muttered.
She said nothing and just kept marching, with all the rage of a drill sergeant.
“Hey,” I said, tugging her elbow to pull her to a stop. “What’s wrong?”
When she turned to glare at me, I noticed the tell-tale warning signs: her wrinkled, askew designer dress; the frazzled, messy bun instead of her usually perfectly coiffed do; and the naked lashes on one eye while the other was coated with mascara. It was even more evident in the tone of her voice when she spat, “Billings. I lost Billings.”
After a beat of silence, I exploded, “You what!?”
For possibly the first time in her life, Madison bowed her head in shame. “I know. I just... I don’t know what happened. He was onboard one minute, but in the next, I received a call to let me know he sent back the contracts unsigned, with a message that he’s taking his business to Aegis!” Her voice shook in panic, and for a split second, I honestly thought she might cry. “Della, I-I don’t know what to do. Billings was our gateway to at least three subsidiaries, and I treated that wanker like a god. I honestly have no idea what could have possible scared him away.”
By that time, her little meltdown was beginning to attract attention. People poked their heads out of their offices and cubicles to see what was going on.
