Everything I Hoped For

by Ann Christopher

  She rolled her eyes. “I wish you Brits would speak American. It’s soccer. Not football.”

  “Thank you for that crucial correction. I’ll try to remember it in these last precious minutes before we plunge to our deaths.”

  She had to laugh as she leaned back and crossed her ankles.

  Anthony yanked his bow tie loose and undid the top couple of buttons of his shirt. A closer look revealed a sheen of sweat across his forehead and a vague flare of panic in his eyes.

  “You okay?” she asked warily.

  “Never better,” he said, now taking off his jacket and slinging it over the rail.

  The cufflinks went next. He put them in his pocket and rolled up his shirtsleeves, revealing muscular arms fuzzed with that honeyed hair. He paced back and forth again, muttering something she couldn’t quite make out, then ran the back of his hand over his forehead.

  “You sure?” she asked, noting the way the color continued to leach out of his skin. Another few minutes at this rate and he’d look like her med school cadaver. “Because you’re starting to look a little pale to me.”

  “I’m sure it’s just the…” He flapped a hand at the ceiling. “Poor lighting.”

  She was about to argue the point when her cell phone buzzed. She pulled it out of her little beaded bag and checked the display. Samira.

  “Hey, Sami,” she said. “Sorry, but I’m stuck on the elevator. With, ah, Anthony.”

  Who was now leaning into the corner, bent at the waist with his hands braced on his thighs.

  “Stuck? Oh, no! Is someone coming to rescue you?” Samira asked.

  “That’s what they claim. But I haven’t seen or heard any sign of it. But don’t worry about us. You folks go on home so you can get some rest.”

  “We’ll check with the manager and make sure the cavalry’s on the way,” Samira assured her.

  “Sounds good.”

  “And you should take a minute or two to get to know Anthony better.”

  “Is now the time for that kind of nonsense?” Melody snapped.

  “Not really, but you did throw me to the wolves with Baptiste several times, so turnabout’s fair play.”

  Melody scoffed. “Yeah, okay, well, when I plummet to my death, you’ll be sorry that your last words to me were about karma.”

  “Not true. Call me when you get sprung.”

  “Bye,” Melody said gloomily, hanging up.

  By now, beads of sweat had broken out across Anthony’s forehead and he’d begun breathing through his mouth.

  “I’m so glad you’re not having a panic attack,” she told him, thinking of Baptiste, who’d freaked out on her a few weeks ago, overwhelmed by the speed with which his feelings for Samira had turned serious. “I was with a friend of mine when he had his first panic attack recently. I wouldn’t want to think it was me.”

  He raised his head and gave her a baleful look and wry smile as two bright patches of color resolved over his sharp cheekbones. “It probably… is you. What else could make a…manly man such as myself…lose my breath like this?”

  A part of her heart—a really tiny part, practically negligible—softened toward him.

  And her long years of medical training of course required that she comfort the afflicted.

  So she walked over to him and put a hand on his shoulder for a supportive squeeze.

  “Manly men such as yourself have testosterone to spare. So you’re allowed a touch of claustrophobia.”

  There.

  She’d been a nice medical professional and done her duty. No one could require anything more of her under the circumstances.

  But with him doubled up like this, there was nowhere else to look but directly in his face. Nothing else to see but his spectacular eyes, which were finally close enough for her to detect the color.

  They were blue. The unforgettable color of the earth when viewed from space.

  And the unwavering attention from those eyes caused her breath to stutter.

  “To tell you the truth,” he said, gasping, “I’m not…not that fond of closed spaces.”

  She blinked. Tried hard to view him as a patient rather than a man who made her heart thump with excitement.

  “But you ride in elevators all the time, right? And you know that nothing bad’s happening. It’s your mind playing tricks on you.”

  “Yes, well, my mind’s a… It’s a devious bastard. Because it keeps telling me that…if something bad did…if something bad did happen, I couldn’t… couldn’t escape.”

  “Shhh,” she said, now smoothing the hair at his temples, which felt like the finest spun silk, warm and somehow vibrant beneath her fingers. They hadn’t technically taught this method of patient care in med school, but she couldn’t seem to help herself. “I’m sure the elevator has an emergency brake system to prevent it from falling—”

  “I’m not…it’s not falling.”

  “Then what?”

  “Fire.” He said the word quietly, as though he knew the sound of it was enough to lock her down with fear. “I can’t stand the thought of fire.”

  She stared at him, her mind blanking out as she felt a phantom flare of pain across her cheek—

  “So, hey, uh, I’ve got some bad news for you folks.” Security Guy’s voice burst back over the intercom, startling them and thankfully snapping Melody back to the present. “You’re going to be in there for a while. At least an hour. The on-call elevator guy’s working on some issue over at the hospital, and they get priority ’cause they’re moving patients. They’ve called in the backup guy, but you might want to make yourselves comfortable.”

  4

  “At least an hour?” Anthony slid to a seated position in the corner, rested his arms across his knees and put his head on his forearms. “Christ.”

  Melody, who still had her hand on his shoulder, felt him begin to tremble.

  “Thanks for the update,” she quickly told Security Guy. “What’s your name?”

  “Roy,” said the disembodied voice.

  “Thanks, Roy. I’m Melody.” She kept an anxious eye on Anthony. “Is there any chance someone could, I don’t know, pry open the doors or something? Is that the issue?”

  “Nope. Sorry, Mel. The car’s between floors from what I can tell. Even if we could get the doors open, you’d have to muscle your way up to ceiling level and you’d only have about a foot of space to work with. Unless the guy with you’s Tom Cruise in between Mission: Impossible movies, no one’s getting out that way.”

  Melody grimaced. “Wonderful. Well, what’s the ETA on backup elevator repair guy?”

  “He’s on his way.”

  “Thank God,” Melody said.

  “From the city,” Roy added.

  “That’s two bloody hours,” Anthony said, his voice muffled.

  “Yeah. Sorry ’bout that,” Roy said. “You folks holler if you need anything.”

  “Could you get us anything?” Melody asked hopefully. “Some water, maybe?”

  “Not really, no,” Roy said. “I was mainly trying to be polite. Keep your morale up.”

  “Yeah? Well, my morale’s plummeted through the bloody floor.” Anthony raised his head, now gasping through his open mouth like a caught marlin. “Have you got anything else for us?”

  “Yeah, okay, thanks, Roy,” Melody said quickly, frowning at Anthony. “We’ll let you know if we need anything.”

  “Why would we…why would we bother?” Anthony asked her, looking incredulous.

  “Good luck to you there, Mel,” Roy said, his subtext (God bless you for being stuck in there with that asshole) coming through the line loud and clear. “Over and out.”

  Melody rounded on Anthony, which was hard to do with him slumped against the back wall down around knee level. “There you go being a jerk again. It’s not Roy’s fault we’re—Anthony? Anthony!”

  But Anthony was staring straight ahead with a fixed expression of horror, his face damp with sweat and his body shaking like a dog on
his way to the vet for shots.

  “I can’t get out.” His voice sounded scraped. Broken. Ruined. “I’m going to die like this.”

  Melody had seen this before. Many times. Especially when she did a rotation at the VA hospital back during her residency. She sank to the floor beside him and arranged her skirt as best she could with the deep slits in each side.

  “You were in the military, weren’t you?”

  A muscle in his jaw twitched. He nodded.

  “Overseas?”

  Another nod.

  “Afghanistan?”

  He stiffened and didn’t answer.

  “What happened to you?” she asked quietly, leaning against him and wrapping her arm around his back so he’d know he wasn’t alone. He blindly reached for her free hand and held it. His hand was big and warm, she discovered, with nice fingers and well-kept nails. “Anthony? What happened?”

  He shook his head.

  “You can tell me. Anthony. I’m a doctor. You can tell me anything.”

  He blinked and came out of it enough to look at her, his expression bleak.

  “I don’t want to go there. Not with you.”

  “I think you’re already there. Why not get it out of your system a little?”

  His expression turned stony, slamming the door and turning the bolt on this idea.

  She held his gaze. Waited patiently.

  He opened his mouth, surprising her. Activated his voice after a long delay and an unsteady breath.

  “Something went wrong.” He cleared his throat. “With the rotor.”

  “Your helicopter?”

  A sharp nod.

  “You crashed?”

  “I had to abort the takeoff. And there was…” He broke off, the word working in his mouth. “There was…”

  “There was a fire?”

  He hesitated. Nodded.

  “And you were trapped?”

  Another nod.

  She squeezed his shoulder and waited again.

  “I couldn’t breathe. The smoke was the blackest thing I’ve ever seen. Great clouds of it. Like it was alive. Like it was coming for me. It wanted to cover my face and get all that petrol inside my lungs.” He paused. “It was hot, you know? The smoke itself was hot. And I got my belt off, but I couldn’t work the door latch. It was…it was jammed or something.”

  She nodded.

  “People were shouting. I could hear some of my boys pounding. Screaming.”

  She nodded again.

  “And the flames were…” His laugh was humorless. Shaky. Bewildered. “You think fire is just orange, but it’s not. It’s orange and red and gold and yellow…and it’s fast. It’s over there, and you think you have a few seconds, but…” Incredulous laugh. “It’s right there, chasing you.”

  “What did you do?”

  “My…the windshield had cracked. I was able to kick through it and…once I hit the ground and I got some air, I…I had to go around to the side and help…”

  “You got your men out.”

  He swallowed hard, looking dazed. Stunned. “Yeah. The crew on the ground was there, and we did what we were trained to do. We got everyone out. Fifteen besides me.”

  “Any fatalities?”

  A sob crept up on him, making his face contract and a strangled sound escape before he mastered it with a serrated breath.

  “Burns. Broken bones. Lacerations. Concussions. Smoke inhalation.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “No fatalities.” He covered his face with his hands and let his head fall back against the wall. “No fatalities.”

  This man was a war hero, she realized. The first she’d ever met.

  He was prickly, arrogant, intermittently funny and charming, handsome, sexy and fascinating.

  And he was a war hero.

  Maybe her thoughts were louder than she’d hoped, because he dropped his hands and glowered at her, his eyes sparks of blue with black striations.

  “Don’t go looking at me like that. I did my job.”

  She tried to wipe some of the admiration off her face.

  “Great. Well, thanks for doing your job. You’re just like a plumber who unclogs a toilet before it overflows, thereby preventing a tragedy for the people on the floor below.”

  He made a sound that may have been part of a startled laugh.

  “I did what I had to do. I’m not a hero.”

  “Whatever you say,” she told him.

  “I was scared out of my fucking mind.”

  “‘The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.’”

  His jaw dropped.

  She felt a twinge of unease. “What? It’s Nelson Mandela.”

  “I know,” he said, staring at her. “Mandela’s one of my personal heroes. You know him?”

  “Of course I know him. Anyway…We’ll have to disagree about how brave you are or aren’t.”

  Anthony hastily looked away, flushing until his ears turned red.

  “America’s a free country. You’re free to have your opinion and free to be wrong about it. Only I wish you’d stop looking at me.”

  She flapped a hand at the elevator in general.

  “My options for things to look at are fairly limited at the moment. Sorry.”

  He snorted and swung his head back around to stare at her again.

  “And speaking of looking at people, maybe you could stop looking at me like that,” she said. “It’s like being glared at by a pissed-off bald eagle. And then you’ve got that whole voice thing going on. I’m afraid you’re going to launch into Richard III or something. ‘Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York.’ It’s unnerving.”

  He blinked. The corners of his mouth twitched. “I would never do anything so cruel.”

  “Well, how do I know that? I just met you. I’m not used to surly Brits.”

  He seemed taken aback.

  “You do realize that you just told me your entire story and you’re breathing fine? You’re not sweating. You’re not shaking. You’re still alive.”

  “And humiliated beyond words,” he muttered.

  “Why? Because you have bad memories of a bad thing that happened to you when you were doing your job and saving your men?”

  Something in his expression eased all the way to the outskirts of a smile.

  There was a long and delicious pause.

  “No. Because there’s this woman I’d love to impress. But I haven’t managed a decent thirty seconds with her all night.”

  “Oh,” she said faintly, all the breath whooshing out of her lungs.

  That was when she felt it again—that touch of electricity to her nape and down her spine until it radiated from her fingertips and all the way out her toes. He didn’t smile a lot, but he did such extraordinary things with those eyes of his. Freezing her out one moment, then luring her closer the next.

  And all of it with a dizzying earnestness she’d never encountered before.

  “Can I explain something to you?” he asked quietly.

  “There’s more?” she asked, trying to keep her tone light. The intensity level between them had already reached critical levels in the last minute or so, despite the fact that they were complete strangers. She wasn’t sure how much more she could take.

  “The thing is…” He swallowed hard, making his Adam’s apple bob. “The thing is…I’ve seen fire. I know what it can do. And what I said before? About your scar? It was my inelegant way of expressing that I can’t stand the thought of a fire marring this amazing face. I can’t stand the thought of you in pain. Even if it was a long time ago.”

  Melody blinked. Tried hard to keep her walls up and not lose herself in those remarkable eyes or his powerful words. Something warned it would be way too hard to find her way out again.

  “Tell me what happened to you,” he said.

  She automatically shook her head and started to slam that particular door shut the way she always did. She never talked a
bout her scar if she could help it. It was a rule.

  “I can’t—”

  “Melody. I just told you my story. Fair is fair.”

  He watched her, waiting patiently and without apparent judgment.

  And the story rose up, whether she wanted it to or not.

  “It wasn’t a fire. I was, ah, playing tag with my yellow lab one day before school. His name was Charlie.”

  She paused, taking a moment to compose herself before she crept up on the rest of the story. The way she imagined a snake charmer took his time before lifting the lid on a dancing cobra’s basket.

  “And what happened with Charlie?” Anthony asked gently.

  “We ran into the kitchen. I tagged him. Then it was his turn to chase me. My mother yelled at us to stop running. Just as he clipped my heels and tripped me. I, ah, fell into the stove. Caught a pan handle with my hand. Flipped a pot of oatmeal over. It hit the side of my face. My mother screamed. Charlie barked.”

  “Jesus,” he muttered.

  She caught herself reaching for her cheek. Put her hand down again.

  “But I didn’t burn my hands. And I didn’t burn Charlie. So I was glad about that. Mad that I couldn’t go to school, but glad about that.”

  “How old were you?” he asked, his expression bleak.

  “Six.” This was a good stopping point for her little tale of woe, but it suddenly seemed important to get it all out there. “It was a couple months before I went back to school. And the kids treated me differently after that. As you can imagine.”

  “I’m, ah…” He rubbed his forehead hard enough to make the skin peel. “I’m sorry you went through that.”

  “Don’t be,” she said crisply. “It made me who I am. That’s why I went to medical school. I wanted to help little kids and be like the doctors who helped me.”

  An unmistakable gleam of admiration lit his eyes. “I see.”

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “It’s no big deal. What else was I going to do? Shrivel up and die?”

  The gleam intensified. “Ah. So you only did what you had to do.”