Elle’s head spun around and she realized her savior had a point. Her would-be abductor stood in the airport lobby, sunglasses off and gun twitching at his side. She’d seen those eyes before…and the scar that slid down his cheek.
Cold dread licked up her spine. She couldn’t pull her gaze away, watching as the man from the Thai alley lifted a cell phone to his ear.
Her stranger turned her focus back to him and the looming SUV half-parked on the drop-off zone’s sidewalk. “Get in the car.”
Elle’s feet screeched to a stop. “Yeah, I may be blonde, but I’m not stupid. What makes you think I’d get into a car with you any more than I would with him? Thanks for helping me back there, because I’ve obviously landed in the Twilight Zone instead of LaGuardia, but if you want me to get in there”—she gestured to the door he held open—“then you’re going to have to physically toss me in there and sit on me.”
Elle met her rescuer glare for glare, except hers was directed into his mirrored sunglasses. He was larger than he looked even from across the room, the top of her head barely reaching his shoulders.
“If you think that would be a deterrent for me, sweetness, you’re mistaken. And as for manhandling you into position, I’d be more than happy to cover your body with mine, but I sure as hell wouldn’t be sitting on you. Now get. In. The. Car. Now.”
That voice. His smell. Familiarity tugged at her memory while her body shifted into a pheromone-driven DEFCON 1. Elle’s eyes widened in recognition, but she didn’t know how it was possible. Or why. First the man from the alley and now…him.
She teetered sideways, would’ve face-planted on the sidewalk if it hadn’t been for the hands pulling her against a strong, wide chest that didn’t belong to a stranger. She didn’t need to imagine what he looked like beneath his clothes. She knew. She knew how his body felt against hers, knew that each touch felt like she’d touched an exposed electrical wire. Those hands especially had given her a lifetime’s worth of happy-place memories.
With trembling hands, Elle slid the sunglasses off her wall lounger’s nose and stared into the same green eyes in which she’d allowed herself to get lost in a dingy Thai bar.
And in the room above.
And in the bed in that room.
Elle Monroe, humanitarian nurse and ever-responsible daughter of a United States senator, stood in front of her one and only—and forty-eight-hour recent—one-night stand.