Adrienne Giordano - The Rebel

The phone rang a third time and Amanda grunted. “He never answers when I call.” She left a voice mail explaining the situation, then disconnected. “I’m calling the building department.”

“You can try, but it’s after five. They’re probably gone for the day.”

She’d try anyway. Couldn’t hurt. Not wanting to deal with searching for the number on her phone, she dialed information and was connected to the city’s building department, where—yes—she received a recorded message telling her the office was indeed closed.

Terrific. She tapped the screen and scrunched her eyes closed. Stay calm. Just a mix-up.

Opening her eyes, she once again read the sign as her thoughts raced. Work. Clothes. Checkbook. Her damned allergy medicine. Everything was inside.

Forget calm.

Forget not panicking.

All at once, her body buzzed and throbbed and itched and all this emotional garbage was so not good for her, the woman who kept her life in a constant state of neither ups nor downs. Well, this was one heck of a down. “I don’t know what to do. My clothes are all in there!” She flapped her arms. “My work is in there.”

“Hang tight.” David retreated a few steps and stared up at the darkened building, obviously formulating some kind of plan. “There’s a back door, right?”

“Yes.”

“We’re going in the back.”

“The sign says...”

“Yeah, but you just said you don’t have any clothes. We’ll sneak in the back door, hope we don’t get caught and you pack up whatever you need for a few days until this gets hashed out.”

Without the studio, she couldn’t work. Without work, she couldn’t earn. Her draining checkbook—the one inside the no-access building—filled her mind. “I lease a storage unit, but there’s not enough room for me to work in there. I have a sculpture to finish!”

David slid the tote and her briefcase off her shoulders, walked back to his SUV and stowed them. “I’ve got this. My condo is still being renovated. You can use one of the bedrooms that’s not being worked on. I’ll put you in the guest room.”

Amanda’s head dipped forward. “You’re letting me turn your condo into a studio?”

“Why not? The place is empty. You might as well use it until I can move in.” He waved his hand at the building. “This’ll get straightened out in a few days and you can move back here. No problem.” He inched closer and grabbed both her hands. “We’ve got this. We’ll load as much as we can and take it over to the condo.”

The idea might not be a bad one. It might, in fact, be a short-term solution. “We can use my car also.”

“Good. Then we’ll get you set up in a hotel for the night. Is that a plan?”

“David Hennings, I could love you.”

He threw his hands up, grinning at her. “Let’s not get crazy now or you might be stuck with me.”

At the moment, as she thought about every minute she’d spent with this man since he’d walked into her studio earlier that day, being stuck with him might not be a bad thing. She grabbed hold of his jacket, the leather Belstaff she loved so much, and dragged him closer. Going up on tiptoes, she kissed him. And it wasn’t one those tentative let’s-test-this kisses where they sort of eased into it. This one left nothing on the table. Tongues were involved.

And she’d started it. Total insanity.

But he certainly wasn’t rejecting her. He made it worth her while by wrapping his arm around her and pulling her right up against him. A few seconds later a bulge at his crotch area announced itself in a truly obvious way, and her heart slammed. What he wanted couldn’t have been clearer. No doubt. At all.

“Dude,” a guy passing by said. “Lucky dog.”

David pulled back and his amazing lips tilted into a wicked grin. “Dude,” he said, “don’t I know it?”

* * *

DAVID SET THE last box of supplies they’d taken from Amanda’s in his extra bedroom and did a quick survey of the place. The walls were still unpainted and the drywall dust left a weird coating on the floors. For what she needed, it would do. If the dust didn’t give her an asthma attack. “We’ll run out tonight and get you a couple of tables to set up. It won’t be perfect, but this is triage.”

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