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The elevator gave another jerk and almost immediately, the phone on the wall began ringing.
With a light tap to my knee, Aiden picked me up and moved me off to the side, as if my weight was nothing to him—and it definitely wasn’t nothing. He got to his feet and reached toward the wall, picking the phone off the cradle. His gaze drifted over me in the process, those ultra-sober features making me feel like I’d done something wrong all of a sudden. “Yes… It’s about time… Yes.” Just like that, he hung up, probably in the middle of the conversation. “It’ll be about fifteen minutes.”
Drawing my legs up to my chest, I wrapped my arms around them and nodded at his comment. He didn’t sit back down; instead, Aiden leaned against the wall and crossed his arms over his chest. One ankle went over the other.
Not ten minutes later, a loud noise pierced through the elevator, and the next thing I knew, it began its ascent again. When the doors finally opened, two building employees were standing there, asking if we were fine, but Aiden walked right passed them as if they weren’t there.
“Are you okay?” one of the employees asked.
Was I okay? I hadn’t been, but I wasn’t going to say anything. Mostly, I was a little bit embarrassed I’d freaked out and uncertain what the hell the look on Aiden’s face had been about when the lights had come back on.
“Are you coming?” the big guy asked from where he was waiting.
There was the man I knew. “Hold your horses, sunshine. I’m coming.”
His lips moved in a way that told me he wasn’t particularly fond of ‘sunshine,’ but most importantly, he knew I didn’t care that he hated it. “Let’s go. He’s paid by the hour and we’re already late.”
It didn’t take long to find what we were looking for. A hardwood-framed glass door with etchings on the front and a plaque on the wall right next to it, deemed that this was the lawyer’s office.
Sleek, beautiful, hardwood furniture in warm shades of brown and green welcomed us. It hit me again right then that I looked like a fifteen-year-old hoochie mama in a giant-sized sweater that made it seem as if I didn’t have any clothes on underneath. Aiden didn’t look much better; his T-shirt was clingy, he had on long, black shorts that went past his knees, and he was in ru
Directly in front of the doors, an older woman behind a desk smiled over at us. “Can I help you?” she asked.
“Yes. We had an appointment with Jackson. I’m the one who called to say I was ru
That changed everything. “Oh, Mr. Graves. Right. One moment please. The lighting issue pushed his meeting late.”
The lighting issue. Aiden and I looked at each other.
I couldn’t freaking help it, especially now that we were out of the elevator of terror, I snickered and let the uncontrollable smile take over.
Those underused corners of his mouth tipped up just a little—just a freaking little—but it was what it was. He’d smiled. He’d fucking smiled at me. Again. And it was just as magnificent as it had been the first time.
When we took a seat to wait, he turned that big body to the side and pi
I reached up and touched the sides of my mouth and cheeks, finding that, yeah, I was mooning. Not smiling. I was mooning.
He’d smiled at me. Was there any other way in the world to react?
“No reason.”
His lids dropped low. “You look like you’re on drugs.”
That wiped my not-smile off my face. “I like your smile. That’s all.”
The big guy shot me a sour look. “You make me feel like a Grinch.”
“I don’t mean to. It’s a nice smile. You should do it more often.”
The grumpy expression on his face didn’t assure me of anything. Eventually, when I sat up straight, he draped his arm over the back of my chair. Waiting until the woman at the desk was on the phone, I whispered, “What exactly are we doing here?”
“He wants to go over some information with me,” he explained.
Couldn’t the lawyer just have e-mailed it to us, I wondered, but kept my question to myself. “So I can’t wait here?”
“No.”
I fidgeted and lowered my voice even more. “The lawyer thinks this is real, doesn’t he?”
“It’s fraud otherwise.”
Damn. I slunk in my seat, the bare heat of his forearm grazing the top of my neck. That damn word sent fear coursing through my spine. I didn’t want to go to prison.
As if he was reading my mind, Aiden whispered, “Nothing is going to happen. No one’s going to believe this isn’t real.”
I didn’t know where he got his confidence from, but I needed to find some.
Luckily it didn’t take too long for the door leading from the waiting room to the office to open. A couple came out, too busy speaking in a language that sounded like German to pay attention to us.
It was show time apparently.
The second after we stood up, the receptionist waved us forward. I slipped my hand into Aiden’s and gave it a faint squeeze.
He squeezed mine right back.