Unwrapping Her Perfect Match: A London Legends Christmas Novella (17 page)

She shoved her feet into her sandals, crossed
her arms over her chest and rushed through the hotel’s beach
entrance.
Please let everyone be in bed.

No such luck. As she entered the lobby, the
receptionist was handing a man his room key.
Bugger.
She’d
have to walk right past them to get to the stairs. Fortunately the
lift was right here. She ducked her head and pressed the up arrow,
muttering, “Come on, come on.”

“We hope you enjoy your stay, Señor Jones,”
the receptionist said.

“Cheers, Maria.”

Come on come on come on!
The lift
whirred, dinged and opened.
Yes!
Tess hurried into it and
hit the button for the third floor a thousand times, like a
hyperactive child on a sugar rush—the kind of child she used to
be.

A deep voice called out across the lobby.
“Hold the lift!”

Oh, hell no.
She pressed the
door-close button and let out a sigh as it worked its magic—

A foot jammed itself between the closing
doors, followed swiftly by a deep-throated “Fucking hell!” when the
doors didn’t bounce open automatically but clamped together
instead.

No!
Tess swallowed her cry of defeat
as a pair of very big, very masculine hands braced themselves on
the edge of one of the doors and pushed. Hard. Like, Superman hard.
Within seconds, the man created enough space to squeeze himself and
his travelers’ backpack through the gap. When he leaped away from
the doors as if they might bite him again, Tess had to press
herself against the wall to avoid being flattened.

“Are you crazy?” she yelled as the lift’s
doors bounced closed behind him. Her voice reverberated around the
small space, making the thin walls vibrate behind her back. “You
could’ve been killed!”

A niggle of familiarity passed through her at
her first glance at him, but then she noticed he was glaring at her
hand. She followed his gaze to find she was still pressing the
door-close button. Drawing back her arm, she crossed it with the
other one over her chest. “Oops. Wrong button.”

“Mentalist,” he muttered. He pressed the
button for the fourth floor and turned his back to her, dropping
the weathered blue backpack from his shoulders. The lift shook from
its weight.

Holy mother…
his shoulders took up
nearly half the airspace in the lift. Tess breathed a silent sigh
of relief as the lift jerked and started its ascent. Only a few
seconds from now, the doors would reopen and this awkward moment
would be behind her—literally, since she was getting off on the
floor below his and would have to walk away with her wet T-shirt
plastered to her skinny arse. He was so much bigger than her. Why
the hell had she yelled at him when he first got into the lift?

Impulse-control: never one of her strong
points.

Fortunately, he didn’t say anything more.
She’d caught his accent. British, like her, he’d probably grown up
well versed in how to ignore awkward situations.

The lift chugged, its erratic ascent making
her imagine it was a bucket being hoisted upward by monkeys working
a rope pulley hand-over-hand. She kept her attention on the
buttons, counting them as they lit up, as if they were items on a
to-do list that she had to get through before she could escape.
First floor—done. Second floor—done. Nearly there—

The lift jerked to a hard halt, making her
gasp and brace her hand against the faux wooden wall.

“What the hell?” her companion muttered.

The second- and third-floor buttons were both
lit, but the doors didn’t open. The man banged his fist on them, as
though they were a vending machine that had kept hold of his
Snickers bar. “Open up.”

“Don’t think it can hear you,” she said.

Mistake. Her sarky comment brought his
attention back to her. She could feel it, even though she kept her
gaze firmly trained on the opposite wall, not eager to see whether
he was ready to throttle or jump her. For several long seconds, she
shivered under his silent scrutiny. The water hadn’t been as warm
as she’d expected. Fine when you were in it, but stepping into the
slight breeze had left her covered in goose pimples…and a couple of
pointy parts she was desperately trying to cover with her arms, as
if he might not have noticed that she’d left her bikini top in her
room.

Damn it. One thing she’d learned from working
in a male-dominated office was that she had to stand up for
herself. She lifted her head to glare up at him, and the niggle of
familiarity exploded into awareness.

No way. No
way.

Liam Callaghan? Liam Callaghan, rugby’s
all-time leading points scorer? Captain of London Legends and, more
recently, of the England squad? Liam bloody Callaghan? Her father
would shit a brick when she told him.

She’d leave out the wet T-shirt part, of
course.

He was staring at her too. Or, at least, at
her hair. She just barely managed to keep from touching it
self-consciously. She’d had a lot of funny looks the past couple of
days—not surprising since her hair was currently bubblegum pink.
After a second in which he seemed fixated on the horror covering
the top of her head, Liam Callaghan turned away as if she wasn’t
worth acknowledging—a posture she’d got used to during her years
working in an industry dripping with testosterone—and banged on the
door again, this time shouting for anyone who might be able to hear
them. “Hello? We’re stuck in here!”

She tried pushing the third-floor button
again. And again. Her finger became more frantic as the doors
stayed solidly closed.

“Will you stop that?” he snapped. “That’ll
make it worse. We’re probably stuck in here because you jammed the
buttons in the first place.”

“Wait, are you accusing me of breaking the
lift? Me? When you were the one who forced the doors open?”

His eyes went wide in patent disbelief. “Are
you having a laugh? I wouldn’t have had to if you’d held the lift
like any decent human being would do.”

She stuffed down her annoyance. He obviously
had a point, though she would quibble with that
decent human
being
bit if she weren’t half-naked and locked in a lift with a
man who made his living knocking seventeen-stone men to the ground.
“Look, let’s not waste our time arguing about this. How do we get
out of here?”

The question was more to herself than him,
and she’d already started scanning the doors, walls and ceiling for
any indication of what to do in an emergency. No escape hatch in
the ceiling, the way there always was in films. Not that she’d know
what to do if he did boost her up there. Maybe convince the monkeys
to get back to work? No telephone or emergency call button. No
security camera.

“Shit. We’re fucked.”

“Maybe there’s a call button,” he said,
clearly a few mental steps behind her as he peered closer at the
panel.

“There isn’t. There’s nothing. We’re well and
truly stuck.”

He scanned the ceiling and the corners, then
ran his hands down the seam of the closed doors. She waited
silently for him to catch up with her. “There’s nothing. We’re
stuck.”

Echo much?
Saying the words aloud
would be a bad idea. Another situation she’d learned how to deal
with from working with sexist pigs for seven years. Don’t
antagonize, and try not to respond. They harassed you because they
wanted to see you lose your shit. If you didn’t, they’d realize it
wasn’t much fun and stop doing it.

He beat the doors, and the whole lift shook
from the pounding. Without thinking, she grabbed his arm to stop
him, immediately tugging her hand back when she felt the power in
his biceps. She would need three hands to wrap around them. “Please
don’t do that. I’d rather be stuck between floors than plummet down
to the ground floor.”

“The receptionist said she was going home
after she checked me in. Maybe she hasn’t left yet. Hello! Maria!”
He pounded and yelled some more before giving up with a curse.
“Fan-bloody-tastic.”

They stood in awkward silence for a few
tension-filled moments. Her shivers grew more pronounced. The cool
dip had felt invigorating after sweltering all day, but now her
body registered not only the slight drop in temperature but also
the fact that she might be trapped for hours in this lift with a
strange man. A frustrated man. A man she didn’t know, and she was
quite exposed. More than a chill was making her teeth chatter.

“Are you cold?”

“Mmm-hmm.” She rubbed her hands up and down
her arms as best she could without exposing her breasts. Her
shoulders hunched over, both to hide from him and because the more
she thought about it the colder she got.

“Are you kidding? It’s sweltering in
here.”

She gave him a look of pure disbelief. “You
might not have noticed, but I’m wearing a little less than
you.”

One corner of his mouth kicked up. He clearly
had noticed.

Find out what happens
next!