Her shoes dangled from his fingertips and with his free hand, he pressed his palm to her back and ushered her to the stairs.
“What on earth are you doing?” she asked in a strangled tone, finally managing to find her voice.
“You’ll break your damn neck climbing six flights of stairs in those toothpicks you call shoes,” he growled.
She rolled her eyes as they began their climb. “I’m very used to wearing heels like these.”
He cocked a mocking eyebrow at her. “Can’t say I’m convinced after tonight’s fiasco. You damn near killed yourself.”
She uttered a growl of her own and pinned him with her most ferocious frown. “Well gee, excuse me all to heck. I was a little more concerned with getting out of the way of a fist trying to make contact with my face than I was about staying upright in my shoes.”
It was the wrong thing to remind him of. His expression went utterly glacial and a murderous look entered his eyes.
“He won’t fuck with you again.”
The conviction in his voice made her uneasy. She used sarcasm to avoid thinking too hard about the certainty with which he’d made that particular statement.
She lifted one eyebrow. “So you have a magic ball? You can see into the future and you know he’ll never come at me again?”
“Trust me. He will never come within a mile of you.”
Her stomach quivered and she swallowed the fear quickly forming a knot in her throat. He wasn’t joking and she did not want to know how he knew this and why he was convinced that Eddie would never be a problem for her again. Some things were just left better unsaid. Ignorance was bliss, and it was a motto she’d adhered to her entire life. No reason to make any drastic changes now. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, her mama always said.
“This is it,” she said in a hushed voice when they reached the end of the hallway. Her apartment number was 716, but the six was turned sideways and the seven dangled precariously upside down. It would fall any time and she’d been meaning to fix it herself since her landlord was a useless piece of crap who never bothered to grace the building with his presence unless someone was late on rent. Then he was Johnny-on-the-spot and pounding on their door, threatening immediate eviction, even though it wasn’t legal.
“Jesus,” Maddox muttered again.
Knowing that if he walked into her apartment with his badass protective routine, her roommates would never let her go to sleep until they pried out the entire soap opera that had been her night, she unlocked the door and opened it just enough so she could slide through. Then she turned back, putting her entire weight against the flimsy door, as if he’d have any problem pushing past her. For that matter, he could kick it down without breaking a sweat.
“Seven. Tomorrow,” Maddox said crisply, suddenly all business. “Don’t come down. I don’t want you waiting on the street. Stay inside until I come up for you.”
She barely managed to control her flinch. Barely. Even so, she was certain she’d gone completely pale.
After giving her the best sexual experience of her life, Drake had calmly told her that his driver would be at her apartment the next night at seven and she was going to spend the evening with him. Just like that. He didn’t ask. He planned without consulting her about . . . anything . . . and she was supposed to just meet his driver and go God only knew where with a scary-as-hell man who also happened to have a positively sinful mouth and an equally sinful body.
She’d been too shattered by her orgasm to do anything but nod dumbly when he’d given her his crisp instructions, and then she’d been herded out of the club and into the car that drove her home.
“Seven,” she answered, nodding to reinforce the lie.
And then she shut the door, thanking God the girls weren’t all waiting in the tiny living room for all the gory details of her evening. She leaned back against it, closing her eyes, her control finally breaking, and she began shaking from head to toe. Even her teeth chattered as she relived every sinfully decadent moment of being sprawled across Drake’s desk as he went down on her like a starving man.
There was no way in hell she would be here at seven tomorrow. She had work, rent to pay and money to send home to her mother. And nothing, not even a very scary, very sexy man who made her tingle in places she’d never tingled in before was going to prevent her from taking care of her responsibilities.
She hadn’t moved so far away from her tiny southern town to a city with a bigger population than her home state to be a party girl or even to have fun. She’d come to the city because her family needed her, and she wasn’t going to let them down.