someone else could see it, too.
My phone rang as I took the last bite, and I answered it with my chocolatey thumb, talking with my mouth full. “Hello?”
“Miss Maple?” said the man on the other end of the line. “Miss Mina Maple?”
“Yes, that’s me.” It really was, I promise. Mina Maple was my real, named-as-a-baby name. You can see why I was destined for Broadway. “Who are you?”
“My name is Bradley MacKinnock, and I’m a supervisor at the elevator company. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said, swallowing my bite of chocolate bar so I could talk and licking my fingers.
“Are you panicking?”
I was about to say no, but what kind of question was that? If I wasn’t panicking, were they planning to leave me here longer? Fuggetaboutit, she’s not panicking. We’ll get her tomorrow. “I am a little,” I said, putting a tremor in my voice like the good actress I was. “It’s so stuffy in here, and the lights are so dim.”
“We’ll get you out of there soon, I promise.”
“How soon?” My tremor was pretty convincing. In fact, it was starting to make me feel shaky. I really would like to get out of here.
“We have a technician on the way. If he can’t get the elevator going in the next hour, we’ll send an emergency crew in.”
“An hour?” What if I had to go to the bathroom? That sounded like a long time to hold pee. “That long?”
“We’ll go as fast as we can, Miss Maple.”
I sighed and hung up. Then, trying not to think about the fact that I was alone in an enclosed space for the next hour, I pulled out the other secret weapon of the commuter: my Kindle. I leaned back against the elevator wall, crossed my bare feet at the ankles, and opened it up.
I loved to read. That made me sound like an intellectual, but I wasn’t exactly. Because I liked to read only one thing: smut. Dirty, dirty smut. I’d discovered ebook smut five years ago, and I’d never looked back. It was everything I needed, everything I’d ever wanted, and people’s opinions could be damned, because I liked it and I wasn’t going to read anything else.
The book I was currently reading was about a woman who goes to a job interview and ends up getting bent over the desk by her hot, dirty new boss. It was perfect except I kept picturing the offices at Morgan Financial Holdings and Graham Morgan himself, who was hot and possibly dirty but also very, very terrifying. I couldn’t imagine a mortal woman going near him and surviving. He wasn’t going to bend me, or any other woman, over a desk that I could tell.
Still, I finished the book, because of course the hot dirty boss had a lonely, softer side and only his new employee could bring it out. They had sex in an elevator—another weird echo of my real life right now—and in front of the window of his penthouse, with the lights on so people could look in. Not something I would ever do, but it was fun to read about. They broke up for a while because they lived in different worlds, and then they decided they belonged together and had more sex. The end.
Perfect.
I finished the last chapter and checked my phone. Fifty minutes had sped by while those two had banged their heads off, thank God. I went back to my Kindle, flipping through all of the hot covers of the books I’d downloaded, my eyes glazing in pleasure like I was picking candy. The one with the gorgeous man on the front with hot abs? Or the one with the gorgeous man in the expensive suit? How about the one with the gorgeous man about to kiss a beautiful woman, his hand wound in her hair? I went ebook shopping every payday, spending my allotted budget on books for the week so I could have moments exactly like this one. Picking the next book to read was almost as fun as the actual reading. Almost.
I paged through more covers, looking for something that jumped out at me, and—oh. A hot fireman, his bare chest wet and his abs on display. A gritty fireman’s helmet and a hose over his shoulder. Just a small smear of ash on his gorgeous cheekbone. The title was More Than One Fireman, and I was freaking sold. I’d like more than one fireman, please, I thought as I settled back and