Need You Now (1001 Dark Nights) Read Free

customers, so I fend for myself and find an open computer and look up rocker boyfriend’s room number. Glancing at the time on my cell phone, I note the late hour. It’s nearly eleven and I really need to hurry or the train I take will be shut down.
    Quickly, I cross the room, bypassing several sitting areas and a number of expensive paintings, to step into the enclave housing six elevators. Punching the nearest button, I wait. Alone. It’s the theme of the night I think. Alone. Alone. Alone. I have no idea why that word is bugging me. Or really, it’s not the word. It’s the implications behind it that I never think about and I swear it’s the tequila. Silently, I decide right then, no more tequila now or ever. I don’t like what it does to me.
    The doors to the car farthest from me open and I rush forward, wishing my four-inch black strappy heels were about four inches shorter as I step inside. I lean against the wall, letting it hold my tired body when a man suddenly steps inside moments before the doors seal. Instantly, I’m alert, aware in ways I would not be with most strangers. But then, this isn’t just a stranger, any more than he is just a man. It’s Jensen, and I push off the wall, turning to face him. He faces me as well and in mere moments we are sealed inside.
    Time stands still as he reaches over and punches in a floor and I realize I have not done so at all, and I can’t even seem to care. Instead, I drink in just how beautiful this man is, how tall, broad and leanly athletic he is in his finely fitted suit. Not one of the powerful, even good-looking men my job has bestowed upon me have created this kind of burn in me. And none of them made me want to climb under his jacket and wear them like a glove the way I seem to with this one.
    I blink with that warm, wonderful thought, and in that instant, he moves, advancing on me. Before I know his intent, his hands are slicing into my hair, his big body pressed to mine, walking me against the wall. Another instant and he is kissing me. Oh God, he is kissing me like I have never been kissed before. Deep, passionate, drugging strokes of his tongue that are more a claiming than a seduction. I am his in that moment and I don’t even fight it. Me. Good girl, the boss’s secretary who doesn’t color out of the lines, is so out of the lines right now, I’m about to fall off the page. And I like it. Oh yes, I like it a lot.
    The elevator dings and he pulls back, staring down at me. “That’s our floor.”
    I feel the blood drain from my face. “What? No. I can’t—”
    “You can. We can.” He grabs the door.
    “I don’t know you.”
    “I plan to fix that,” he assures me.
    Doubt bites through the haze of tequila and desire, creating uncertainty, threatening to ruin this with good, logic, safe thoughts that will lead me away from this man, not to him.
    “Now or never,” he challenges.
    My throat restricts but the good girl in me, the sane one who protects herself because no one else will, utters the only acceptable answer. “I can’t.”
    His eyes, that I now know are a deep beautiful sea green, fill with regret. “Understood. My loss.” He releases me and begins to move, leaving me cold where I was warm only seconds before. I don’t think. I react, grabbing his arm. His leg pins the door, his gaze colliding with mine, his eyes darkening with a mix of what I think is satisfaction and conquest, but smartly he doesn’t speak, as if he knows that if he says the wrong thing, I’ll bolt.
    He draws my hand into his, his fingers lacing with mine in what feels far more intimate than it logically is, but then I’ve just proven logic has no room in encounter number two with this man. I am lost to him and in the promise lacing the air with something unfamiliar and wicked, something I have never experienced before. Nerves flutter in my stomach, but they do not win, not when heat licks at all the places I want to feel this man. And not when I crave the