“Sorry, what?”
“That call sounded kind of intense. You all right, mouse?”
My head jerked around in his direction. “Mouse?”
I caught one corner of his mouth hiking up infinitesimally in a smirk that made my heart palpitate. “Yeah,” he said on a shrug. “You’re quiet and shy. Like a cute little mouse.”
He looked over and winked right then, setting a whole mess of butterflies flapping up a hurricane in my belly.
A voice that sounded an awful lot like it belonged to a teenaged girl popped into my head, squealing, “He gave us a nickname!”
“Oh.” I ducked my head, hiding behind the curtain of my plain brown hair so he couldn’t see the battle I was waging to keep from smiling like a ridiculous schoolgirl.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
I tried to remember anything he’d said before revealing his nickname for me and the reason behind it but came up blank. “Uh . . . what was the question?”
That curve in the corner of his lips tipped up a little bit more as he tapped his long, inked fingers against the steering wheel. “You good after that call?”
“Oh. No. I mean, yeah! I’m good. Just . . . sister stuff, you know?”
He let out a deep, gravelly chuckle, the sound making my heart flip flop like a gold medal gymnast. “Yeah. I get that. I love Shane, but she can be a serious pain in the ass when she wants to be, and it feels like she wants to be more often than not.”
I tried not to let the fact that these meager few sentences were the most we’d ever shared turn me into a flustered idiot. I desperately wanted to keep the conversation going; the only problem was I couldn’t think of a damn thing to say. It was as if my brain had decided to power down like a laptop that had just run out of juice.
The silence that enveloped us was tense and awkward—at least for me. My skin started to feel tight and tingly. However, Stone was the epitome of calm, cool, and collected. I tried not to stare, but my eyes refused to follow my command and kept drifting to the side to take him in.
He had one hand braced on top of the steering wheel while his other was wrapped around the top of the stick shift that came out of the floor between us. My gaze flitted between that hand and his powerful thighs as the muscles bunched and flexed beneath the denim every time he let off the gas and pushed in the clutch. It was like watching an orchestra perform; I was transfixed.
By the time my brain came back online, and I was prepared to say anything in an attempt to initiate a conversation, the truck jerked to a stop.
“All right. Here you go.”
Momentarily confused, I looked out my window to see we were parked outside the old brick building that was used to move moonshine during prohibition, but now housed Elite Security, the company I worked for.
My shoulders sank and my expression drooped before I got control of my physical reaction. I pasted a stiff smile on my face and turned to look at him.
“Thank you for the ride,” I said as I reached for the door handle.
“Hold on. Let me come around and help you out.”
The name of the game was escape. Any longer in Stone’s presence and I was bound to say or do something so humiliating I couldn’t come back from it. “Oh, no. That’s not necessary. You’ve already been a huge help.”
“Really. It’s kind of a long drop down—”
I pushed the door open, prepared to climb out. “No worries. I got it.” Only I didn’t have it. Far from it, actually. I didn’t realize until it was too late, but apparently holding one’s body stiff as a board for more than a handful of minutes cuts the blood supply off to a person’s legs and causes them to fall asleep, something I didn’t know until I’d swung myself out of the tow truck. My ankles gave out, my knees buckled, and before I could stop it, the pavement came at me with lightning speed.
“Oh, merciful hell!” I yelled as I went down like a Jenga tower some idiot had just taken a side piece from, my arms flailing in the air like Kermit the Frog.
I landed against the unforgiving concrete with all the grace of a donkey trying to do ballet.
I bounced off the rough surface like a deflated basketball—knees, hip, wrists—before finally coming to a stop once I was flat on the ground.
“Oh, shit,” I heard Stone grunt, followed by the slam of his door. As if him seeing me swan dive onto the sidewalk wasn’t bad enough, the door to my building opened, accompanied by the sound of my boss’s voice.
“Jesus, Willow, are you okay? That looked bad.”
I rolled to my back with a groan, looking up at the blue sky dappled with fluffy white clouds, and prayed for the ground to open up and swallow me whole. “Ouch,” I wheezed once the air returned to my lungs.
Multiple faces came into view, blocking the cheerful sun.
“Willow, are you all right?” Lark, the office admin asked, her glossy dark blonde hair shimmering in the sunlight. “Are you hurt?”
Just my pride, I thought to myself. And there’s no chance in hell of it healing.
“I’m okay,” I groaned as I tried to push to sitting.
“Don’t move,” my boss, Jensen, ordered, placing his hand on my shoulders. “Did you hit your head? Christ, you slammed into the ground like a sack of bricks.”
Adding to my shame, Jensen’s partners, the other men that made up Elite Security, came rushing out to see what was going on. Just like Jensen, Gage Langdon and Laeth Harker were insanely good-looking. Not as hot as Stone, mind you, but enough so that I had to keep eye contact to a minimum, something that made working as their receptionist all the more difficult.
Fortunately, they seemed to be used to my . . . quirky nature and just let me be. However, being the center of attention for four gorgeous men made me all kinds of itchy. If I’d been a turtle, I would have ducked back into my shell forever ago.
“Maybe we should call an ambulance,” Jensen said, worry etching lines into his forehead.
Oh God, no.
Images of me in a C-collar, strapped to a backboard, and being loaded into an ambulance by paramedics while Stone watched filtered through my head. I couldn’t imagine that would be a good look for me, at all.
“I’m fine, seriously.”
Stone’s chiseled face was marred with concern. “You sure?”
“Yeah, totally.” I was sure my smile came out as more of a grimace, but it was the best I could muster given that my whole body was throbbing like one giant bruise. I bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted blood to keep from wincing as Stone and Jensen helped me up off the sidewalk. “See?” I took a step, pain like the fires of Hell shooting through my hip. “Everything’s perfectly fine.”
“You sure you don’t need an ambulance?” Stone asked dubiously.
“Nope. I’ll just head into the ladies’ room and clean up a bit, then I’ll be good as new.” All lies.
“All right,” he said hesitantly. “If you’re sure.”
“Yep. Totally sure. Sure as sure can be. Never been surer of anything in my life. Is surer even a word, or is it supposed to be more sure?”
“I think it’s surer,” Lark answered with a grin.
“Okay, then that. I’m that. The most surest.” For the love of all the bacon in the world, Willow, stop talking!