Page 27 of No, You Hang Up

That brings me up short. I stop tripping around my living room, instead staring at him with a perplexed expression that causes him to stop as well. “What?” Hux asks, confusion in his voice.

“Paramedic?” I repeat. “Like, an EMT? Like, rides in an ambulance, saving people?”

“Uh, yeah?” He reaches up to pull the mask off of his face, dropping it to the coffee table a bit carelessly. “You got a problem with that?” Again he tilts his head to the side, brows raised, and I swear I can see his attitude bubbling to the surface. He looks almost indignant, and a bit offended, like I’ve really ruffled his feathers with this question.

“No. Nope.” I raise my hands in surrender, studying his face now that I can see it. He’s just as attractive as I remember, with tousled dark brown hair and a scarred mouth that only adds to his appeal. His dark brown eyes are almost sweet, rather than malicious. Though right now he’s giving me a look that tells me he’s definitely unhappy with my disbelief about his profession. “But come on. You can’t be surprised that I’m, uh, shocked?”

He tilts his head the other way, eyes on mine and very unimpressed. “What? You think I can’t save lives if I also take them? I’ll have you know I’ve never, ever murdered anyone I saved. That would be against, like, the universal moral code.”

Right, because murder itself isn’t.

“I’m not defending my life choices to you.”

“I’m not asking you to!”

“And what the hell isyourjob, anyway?”

“I’m an assistant.” God, I feel so defensive when I snap the words at him. “I’m a personal assistant to three public companies. Specifically, their CEOs?—”

“So you don’t save people.”

“Well, I save theirimage.”

That makes him just look at me, and now it’s my turn to roll my eyes. “Yeah, okay. Moving on. I was just asking about the drugs, okay? I wasn’t passing judgment on your life choices.”

“You really still can’t say it, can you? Midazolam.”

I can’t, but I really don’t want to admit it. For some reason, no matter how many times he says the word out loud, and even though he wrote it down for me, my brain only hears a jumbled mess of words. Instead, I glance toward my front door, which is locked at this time of night, and Hux’s gaze follows my eyes. He groans, one hand on his hip.

“You’re really going to make this harder than it needs to be, aren’t you?”

“You’re the one who told me to run.” Without waiting for whatever reply I’m sure he has ready, I bolt toward the front door, hand out for the knob.

I don’t really expect to make it. But it’s still a surprise when Huxley snarls and grabs me around the waist, jerking me off of my feet and throwing me over his shoulder. A yelp leaves me, especially when my body hits his, and the air is knocked out of my lungs. “Nope.” He pins my legs together against his chest before I can kick him, and I can hear his boots on the floor as he walks across the living room toward the hallway.

“You’re such a problem, you know that? It really would’ve been so much easier for me to just kill you.” He flips off the lights as he goes, including the hall light, but when he gets to my room, he turns on the fairy lights I prefer instead of the overhead light that I’m definitely emotionally allergic to.

“Why didn’t you?” The words are out of my mouth before I can stop them, and he doesn’t answer. At least, not right away. Instead, he tosses me down onto my bed so hard that I bounce a little, and when I catch myself with my hands to stare up at him, Hux is just…standing there.

Just looking at me with surprise on his face, as if that’s not the question he expected. But then again, it’s not the question I really thought would come out of my mouth either.

“Should you really ask that?” As I watch, he prowls over to my desk, where he peels off his gloves and then kicks off his boots. “Isn’t that a conversation you should stay away from—Little bunny, if you get up I’ll pin you there with my fucking knife through your hands.”

His words hit just as I start shifting toward the end of the mattress, and they make me freeze. The cold, sharp vitriol sends a tremble through me, and all I can do is glare up at him instead.

“Good girl.” His shirt comes off next, but not his dark jeans. Instead, once he’s peeled off his shirt to expose his toned, smooth chest, Huxley strides back over to the edge of the bed where I’m sitting with my fingers clenched in the comforter.

“Such a gorgeous girl, aren’t you?” he coos. His hand comes out to cup my chin, pulling my face up to his. “Terrible survival instincts, by the way. If I wanted you dead, you’d be bleeding out on your floor right now. No offense.”

“Full offense taken,” I manage to murmur, making him snort. His fingers tighten around my jaw, and he leans forward to brush his lips to mine.

“Oh, little bunny…you have no idea how much I want to wreck you.” Without warning, he shoves me back on the bed once more, and a feral grin spreads across his lips when a gasp leaves me.

“And I’m looking forward to you learning how much you’ll love it when you let me.”

thirteen

There’s no slow, graceful fall to the bed from Hux. No build up of tension like in some romance movie where he kneels on the bed with his eyes on mine and honeyed words on his lips. No, he’s too much of a predator for that.

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