At twelve thirty, Sabrina stepped onto the sidewalk, pulled up the hood of her jacket and peered through the driving rain up the avenue. The curtain of rain and the glare of oncoming headlights blinded her as she searched for the familiar black sedan. Yuck! Her feet were already clammy from the water seeping through the thin soles of her boots. Why was the car service always so late during a storm?
She’d finally finished the fifth and final version of the safety manual with visions of that gorgeous guy dancing in her head like the proverbial sugarplums.
It grieved her no end to realize she’d chanced to meet such a hot guy, no doubt called in on some emergency by one of the head honchos at VGI, while she was in the throes of a monumental meltdown. He must’ve thought he happened on a maniac, complete with tragic hair and bootless feet, when he saw her raving over her missing Red Bull. She was lucky he hadn’t called security.
But then again, he wouldn’t’ve had to. He had the physique of a boxer; he looked like a victorious veteran of countless skirmishes and capable of handling a room full of crazies. He was big, with ham-sized fists, and what had surely once been a broken nose. With short hair the color of blacktop and a stubbled jaw to match, he was so overwhelmingly male and so close to her ideal, Sabrina might have conjured him up out of a surfeit of loneliness and exhaustion.
When she heard his low laugh, something dangerous and sweet shivered down her spine. She looked at him, and the message in his eyes had been as primitive as ‘me Tarzan, you Sabrina’. And she thought, yes. Just for a second, she thought yes, finally, she was going to find out. At last, she would know what her girlfriends were talking about. It was about time anyway. She was twenty-three years old, for crying out loud. With her life and schedule, the odds of meeting a gorgeous guy were as improbable as nabbing a seat on the D train. Their five-minute encounter had left her so rattled, so hyped up; it was a good thing she hadn’t found her Red Bull, because she’d been bouncing off the walls of her small cubicle for the past hour anyhow. Just her luck, he’d pulled back at the last second,
and was that really so surprising? Guys like that didn’t go in for encounters, no matter how brief, with girls who lost it over a power drink. Besides, if he knew she had a child, he’d run faster than a scalded dog. It happened every time. Alex’s existence had turned out to be a foolproof way to gauge the interest of guys who were looking for one night of fun as opposed to anything more lasting.
He’d seen her let out the crazy and the moment ended before it began. Sabrina knew that if she were crazy, she had no one to blame but herself. From the date of that last rent increase, she’d morphed into the go-to overtime word processor in her department. She’d asked for that extra work and boy, she’d gotten it because at VGI, overtime assignments were as relentless as the traffic rumbling down Seventh Avenue.
Especially now, in late summer, when so many of the staff were off on vacation.
Not that Sabrina ever opted to take vacation. She always took the cash, along with a side helping of guilt because it meant more time away from Alex.
Take tonight. Lacey had just about convinced her to join them at Duffy’s for a long overdue birthday drink. Sabrina said definitely she’d try to meet them for an hour after work. Alex would be long asleep under Mrs. Egan’s watchful eye by that time. But in a depressing repetition of a now familiar routine, Sabrina texted Lacey the news: Diabolical as she was, Gert Bordon, must have sensed that tonight Sabrina wanted to get out of work on time. So, her supervisor sent Sabrina yet another revision of the latest safety manual for the liquefied natural gas carriers. And yeah, that stuff was so dull only a Red Bull could keep Sabrina’s eyes from shutting and her fingers tapping the keyboard as the clock ticked toward midnight. Anyway, who was kidding who? She was so exhausted right now, that even if she joined them at Duffy’s, she’d likely do a face-plant at the bar.
Between work and Alex’s teething, she hadn’t gotten a decent night’s sleep in weeks. What she really needed was a month in Hawaii. But with a bank balance hovering near disaster, she wouldn’t dare take a day off, even with VGI’s generous vacation policy for low-level staff.
Where was that car service? Her feet were now officially soaked; the soles of her boots disintegrated like the cardboard fakes they were. Sabrina was seriously considering just peeling off the useless footwear and tossing the boots in the trash when a bulky shadow materialized out of the overhang of the building and moved toward her. Remembering too late she was on an empty street well after midnight, Sabrina’s hands flew out of her pockets to clutch the strap of her purse.
It was the guy. She wasn’t about to be mugged. She was about to be mortified. The hottest guy on the planet was about to see her impersonate a drowned rat. With a couple of long strides, he reached her side and opened a golf umbrella over both their heads.
“I’m waiting for the company car service.” Nerves made her blurt out the obvious.
“As am I.”
Something in his formal tone made her wonder if, in spite of his perfect diction, English was not his first language. The company car finally appeared, and Sabrina hurried forward, dodging the mushrooming puddles. She scooted into the backseat and turned to thank him for the shelter of his umbrella only to watch him settle in beside her and pull the door closed.
“This is my car.” No way was she standing out in the rain for another second.
“Yours?” He raised a skeptical black brow and tossed the umbrella onto the floor. “We must have the same one.”
“No, that’s never happened; you must be mistaken,” she said in her best Gert Bordon frosty supervisor tone.
His mouth quirked up, but he wasn’t making a move to get out and who knew how long it would be before another car would arrive? So Sabrina wasn’t going anywhere either. She slid further along the seat, but couldn’t resist taking another look at him. His eyes, crinkled in the corners with amusement and fatigue, made her damp places warm and her inner places damp. This was not good. She was seriously out of her comfort zone. Just the sight of him rolling his shirtsleeves over his brawny arms stole her oxygen and her concentration.
“It’s VGI ride sharing, a green concept, don’t you think?” His voice was grave, but amusement sparked silver in his eyes.
Sabrina let out a belly laugh at his serious tone. So the man had a sense of humor to go along with the stubble. Dangerous.
“Only a concept, if you ask me. VGI owns practically half of Manhattan and no doubt the entire fleet of these cars. Green isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when I think VGI.”
“No doubt VGI is guilty of all of those capitalist crimes.” He lifted his massive shoulders in an unconcerned shrug. “I’m headed downtown, you?”
She fidgeted with her humidity challenged hair, which flowed all over the leather back of the seat. Why hadn’t she bothered to re-braid it? Why hadn’t she taken Lacey up on her offer to trim the uncontrollable mass? She nodded, suddenly out of breath, all of her smart-alecky comebacks forgotten.
“Brooklyn.”
Feeling his scrutiny, she tugged at her skirt. This morning’s smallish tear in her fishnets had turned into a huge rip over the course of the day.
Jolted by the familiar rattle and whine of tires on the steel-girded surface of the Brooklyn Bridge, Sabrina looked out the window.
“Woops, did we pass your block? We’re in Brooklyn.”
“I thought I’d see your home first.”
His gaze drifted down again, settled on her lips.