Chapter 1: The Wrong Door, The Right Disaster

Arc 1: The Wrong Room

My keycard said 412.

I pressed four in the elevator. I counted the doors in the hallway. I did everything right and somehow I am standing in the wrong room staring at the most beautiful bare back I have ever seen in my twenty-six years of life.

In a room that looks absolutely nothing like mine even though the card felt right.

He hasn't heard me come in.

He's on the phone, one hand braced against the window, the city glittering forty floors below him like someone scattered diamonds across black velvet. Broad shoulders. Dark tattoos scattered across pale skin, ink bleeding into muscle. Water still trailing down his spine from the shower, catching the light as it goes. A towel on the floor at his feet.

Not around his waist.

On the floor.

He is completely, entirely, magnificently naked and I am standing in his doorway with my mouth open and my brain running approximately four seconds behind reality.

My hand is still on the door handle. The sensible part of my brain, the part that files taxes early and keeps emergency contacts updated and has never once in her life walked into a stranger's hotel room uninvited, is screaming at me to step backward into the hallway and let the door close and pretend none of this ever happened.

That part of my brain is losing badly.

He turns around.

And God.

God.

Everything. All of him. Thick and heavy and not even fully hard and my mouth actually waters. Like my body made a decision completely independent of my personality and my morals and my general sense of what constitutes appropriate behaviour in hotel corridors.

He pulls the phone from his ear.

Looks at me.

Looks down at himself.

Looks back at me.

"Hi," I say. It comes out smaller than I intend.

He doesn't scramble for the towel, doesn't cover himself. Just stands there in his own skin completely unbothered while I stand in his doorway completely destroyed and tilts his head slightly.

"Wrong room?" he asks.

His voice is low. Unhurried. The kind of voice that does things to the backs of knees. The kind of voice you feel in places you shouldn't feel a stranger's voice.

"My card opened it," I manage.

He looks at the keycard in my hand. He looks at me. His eyes drag down my body slow and shameless, from my face to my throat to my dress to my legs, and they come back up dark and interested and he still hasn't reached for the towel.

"Front desk gives out duplicates sometimes." He puts the phone down on the dresser. Whoever was on the other end of that call just got abandoned without a goodbye and he doesn't seem remotely concerned about it. "You should probably go sort that out."

"Probably," I agree.

Neither of us moves.

The air between us has a specific quality. Charged and heavy, the kind of air that exists in the two seconds before lightning. I have been in rooms with attractive men before. I have been looked at before. This is not that, this is something else entirely. Something that has a weight and a texture and a warmth that I can feel pressing against my skin from six feet away.

"I'm Dara," I say.

I have no idea why I say it. I should be leaving. I should already be gone. But something in me wants him to know my name before I disappear back into my sensible, organised, predictable life and I'm not examining that impulse too closely right now.

Something shifts in his face. It is almost a smile, just not quite. It is the suggestion of one, sitting at the corner of his mouth like he's deciding whether I've earned the full version yet.

"Garry," he replies.

He bends down and picks up the towel and I watch him do it, watch every muscle in his back and his ass shift with the movement, and he straightens up and holds it in his hand and looks at me.

Not wrapped around his waist.

Just held.

In his hand.

Like he's offering me the choice.

"You planning on leaving?" he asks quietly. "Or are you going to keep standing in my doorway?"

My bag slides off my shoulder.

Completely involuntary. The strap just gives up and the bag hits the floor and I crouch down to grab it and he moves at exactly the same moment, crossing the room in three long strides, crouching right in front of me, and suddenly we are very close. His face level with mine, close enough that I can see the specific shade of his eyes, grey with something warm underneath, and the water still caught in his eyelashes and smell the warm clean soap smell of his shower and something underneath that, something warmer, something that makes my thighs press together hard enough that I feel it in my pulse.

He picks up my bag.

Holds it out.

Our fingers touch taking it and it's not accidental, the way his fingers curl just slightly over mine for one extra second, and the contact goes straight through me like a wire conducting something hot and reckless and I think about how long it's been since someone touched me and meant it and I hate that I'm thinking that right now in a stranger's hotel room at whatever time this is.

He stands. I stand. We are too close and the door is still open behind me and the smart thing, the obvious thing, the thing that twenty-six years of being responsible and careful and good has trained me to do, is to take my bag and my keycard and my dignity and go find the front desk.

"Do you actually want to leave?" he asks. His voice has dropped. Lower and private, like it's not for the hallway anymore. His eyes are on my mouth.

My pulse is an absolute catastrophe.

I think about my room three floors up, my suitcase packed neatly, my alarm set for seven, my train ticket for nine. I think about every sensible choice I have ever made in a life built entirely on sensible choices and I think about how none of those choices ever once made my hands shake the way they are shaking right now.

"I don't know what I want," I say honestly.

His hand reaches past my shoulder.

Slow, giving me every opportunity to step aside or step back or say literally anything that would constitute a decision.

He pushes the door shut.

The click of the latch is the only sound in the universe.

He looks at me and the towel drops from his hand for the second time and this time it's deliberate, this time it's a question, and I look at him, all of him, the full devastating length of him hardening while I watch, thickening while I stand here and stare with my underwear already embarrassingly wet and my heart doing something medically concerning.

"Come here," he says.

Two words.

My feet move.

His hand curls around the back of my neck and tilts my face up and he kisses me.

And I have been kissed before. I have been kissed plenty of times by men who were perfectly fine at it. But I have never been kissed by someone who kisses like this, deep and certain and slow, like he has already decided exactly how this night goes and he is in absolutely no rush to get there, like my mouth is the only destination that matters and the journey is half the point, and I make a sound against his mouth that I will be thinking about at three in the morning for the rest of my adult life.

His other hand finds the zipper at the back of my dress.

"Yeah?" he murmurs against my lips.

Every alarm in my head fires at once. Every sensible instinct I own lines up and presents its case... a stranger's hotel room, a man I've known for four minutes, a zipper that once it goes down takes the last of my good judgment with it.

"Yes," I breathe. "God, yes."

The zipper goes down.

Arc 1: The Wrong Room continues in Chapter 2...