After-Hours Negotiation: Can't Get Enough / An Offer She Can't Refuse

“Who am I talking to?” she demanded.

He resumed his lounging position against the wall. He was all for making a little noise if it was going to get them rescued sooner, but he wished her the best of luck up against the remarkably prosaic Ted.

Jack inspected his fingernails as Claire quizzed the security guard, trying to suppress the swell of satisfaction he felt when she returned the receiver to its cradle a few minutes later, her shoulders slumped: she hadn’t gotten any further than he had.

“Could be worse. Could be ten people in here,” he said lightly, taking in her white face.

She was silent as she crossed back to her side of the space, but he could see her hands were shaking as she brushed her hair back from her face.

Damn. He took a deep breath, then let it out. She was scared. Anyone could see that. And as much as she probably deserved for him to simply ignore her, he couldn’t turn his back on her distress.

“Listen, I’m sure they’ll have us out of here soon. I think I remember reading somewhere that elevators have manual override functions where they can just winch us down.”

He kept an eye on her, noticing her chest was heaving a little now.

“Ah, Claire, you wouldn’t happen to be a little claustrophobic at all, would you?” he asked.

She was concentrating fiercely on the carpet in front of her toes, completely unresponsive now.

Okay. He tried to think of something to say or do to help her out. Not being afraid of anything himself, he found it difficult to understand this sort of thing.

“I learned this meditation technique once at a temple in India—” he began to say tentatively, but then Claire slumped against the wall and began sliding down it and he realized she’d fainted.

He leaped across the distance between them, catching her before her head hit the ground. Her hair was soft and silky against his hands, and he could smell her shampoo as he gently guided her onto the carpet. Vanilla. Nice.

A quick once-over revealed that her skirt had ridden up a little, and that her legs were skewed awkwardly, but her eyelids were flickering now and he decided he’d rather stick his head in a crocodile’s mouth than be caught adjusting Claire Marsden’s clothing while she was semiconscious. Still, he couldn’t help noticing that the shortened skirt length belied his previous impression of her legs. Not bad. As a rule, he preferred tall, slim, modelesque women, but Claire’s legs were really something of a surprise. Almost as though she could read his mind, Claire made a disgusted noise in the back of her throat, and then her eyes popped open.

* * *

CLAIRE CAME OUT of the empty darkness and opened her eyes, blinking rapidly as she tried to reorient herself. Where was she? What had happened? She felt the ground under her back. And why was she lying on the carpet? And then Jack’s face loomed over her and she found herself staring into his concerned blue eyes.

“You okay?” he asked, and it all came flooding back.

They were trapped in an elevator. With no hope of escape for hours. A dizzying tide of fear rushed back up at her and she clamped down on it fiercely. It had been years since she’d allowed this childish terror of enclosed spaces to master her. But while she could suppress it for the short trip up to the fifteenth floor each day, being stuck in a tiny elevator car for several hours was more than her powers of self-control could manage. She’d been grimly hanging on to her calm ever since they’d ground to a halt, but the news that they were going to have to settle in for a long wait had been too much.

“Claire? You all right?” Jack asked again.

He looked funny upside down, she noted, feeling a little detached as she tried to keep her fear at arm’s length. Like an alien, his mouth where his eyes should be…

“Hello? Are you in there?” he asked, waving a hand in front of her face.

At last she snapped her attention back.

“I’m okay,” she said. “I think.”

“Afraid of small spaces?” he asked simply.

“Since I was a kid,” she admitted, hating telling him, of all people.

“Ever fainted before?” he asked, clearly trying to ascertain the extent of her phobia.

“No. But this is the first time I’ve been stuck in an elevator,” she said, managing to dredge up a small smile.

He blinked at her, and she realized that this was probably the first time she’d ever done anything except glare at Jack.

“You have lips.”

Her turn to blink. “I beg your pardon?”

He shook his head, made a forget-it gesture in the air with his hand. “Nothing.”

She narrowed her eyes. Nothing? She didn’t think so. “You said I have lips. What exactly is that supposed to mean?”

He sighed, scanned the roof as though looking for inspiration, then shrugged. All of this upside down, him hovering over her prone body.

“It’s just that most of the time when you see me you have no lips,” he said.

She stared at him. “I assure you, these are not detachable,” she said.

He looked skeptical. “Except when you see me. Then they disappear. Like this.” He gave an example, thinning his lips into a prim, ungenerous line.

“I do not do that,” she said, even as she felt her mouth assuming the usual tense expression she wore around him.

Damn him.

“You’re doing it right now.”

She stretched her mouth wide and forced her lips to assume a more relaxed expression.

“Happy?”

“That’s better,” he said approvingly.

She could feel her lips thinning again at his smug response.

“And there we go again,” he observed.

She closed her eyes for a moment. This was insane. She was trapped in an elevator with the company’s number-one playboy having a conversation about her lip posture while lying flat on her back.

“Feeling faint again?”

She blinked, recognizing that the fear that had been lapping around her knees had receded to toe-height.

“No. I feel…better.”

He looked pleased and a little proud. He’s been distracting me, she suddenly realized. With that thought came an abrupt awareness that her legs were sprawled out inelegantly and her skirt hiked up on one side. She reached a hand down to rearrange her skirt even as she moved to sit up. A heavy male hand landed in the middle of her chest.

“Take it slow,” Jack warned, and even though he’d taken his hand away she could still feel the heat and weight of it as she slowly sat upright.