registering me. I can sit down here and wait until Rob comes down. He’ll have to eventually.
“Here you are, Miss Wilson,” the clerk says, handing me a folder with two keycards and a room number scrawled across the front. For someone so uptight, her handwriting is appalling.
I take it, then start to move to a grouping of couches near the fireplace, but I look back to see the man at the counter watching me. He seemed nice at first, but now he’s coming off a little creepy. I turn instead to the alcove where the elevators are and breathe a relieved sigh when I’m out of sight of the desk. I slip onto a velvet-covered bench between two elevator doors and rub my eyes.
“Adri?”
My head snaps toward Rob’s voice as if my neck is spring-loaded. Under his shock, he looks terrible: black leather jacket over rumpled clothes, dark rings under his eyes, and the weight of the world pressing down on his shoulders. But he’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. All I want to do is hold him and know he’s safe. But there’s something wild in his expression as he approaches that makes me stop short of throwing myself into his arms.
He snatches the key folder out of my fingers and looks at it, then grasps my arm and drags me into the elevator he just stepped out of. He stabs the button for the top floor, then spins back to me. “Jesus Christ. What are you doing here?”
It takes me a second to register that he’s angry with me. I only realize how close to losing it I am when I do. All the emotion that’s churning through me, eating me alive from the inside out, erupts out of me. “Why would you come back here if someone’s trying to kill you?” I hiss, throwing a hand at him.
His eyes scour my face. “Why would you think that?” he asks in a measured tone.
“Lee was beside herself. She was sure you were in danger.”
His eyes snap back to mine, and for the first time, I see true panic in them. “Is she okay?”
“She’s worried about you.”
His honey eyes darken as his jaw tightens. “Lee wouldn’t have sent you here.”
“Damn it, Rob!” I say shoving him. “She said someone wanted to kill you. What was I supposed to do?”
The elevator door opens on the twenty-ninth floor, and his hand clamps around my arm so hard I’m sure I’ll have a bruise. He yanks me up the hall and shoves the plastic card through the slot to my room. His jaw is tight and he doesn’t open it again until we’re behind my closed door, where he throws me on the couch in the large sitting room of my suite. “What the hell were you thinking, coming here?”
“What were you thinking, coming here?” I spit back.
He paces to the window and stares out over the city below. “I want you on the next flight home.”
“I’m not leaving without you.”
He turns from the window, his expression deadly calm. “You shouldn’t have come after me, Adri. You should have left it alone.”
“How was I supposed to do that?” I ask, desperation rising up on a wave and choking out everything else I’m feeling. “How was I supposed to let the only man I’ve ever loved go off and get himself killed?”
His eyes flare and the vein in his forehead pulses as he loses his composure. “I told you I’m dangerous!” he shouts, ripping me off the couch by the shoulders and shaking me. “I warned you to stay away from me!”
In his outburst, I see it—all the passion he’s trying so desperately to hide. He lets me go as if I’ve burned him, and my heart pulses in my throat as we stand here staring at each other. But as I watch, his eyes harden to stone as he gets himself back together.
“You’re making this something it’s not,” he says, backing away a step and moving his hand in a circle between us. “I thought I was clear in my bedroom. I don’t love you.”
My heart contracts into a tight knot. “You do. I can see it in your eyes.”
“Look closer, Adri,” he says, leaning near, his sharp gaze cutting through me, “and I’m sure you’ll discover you are mistaken.”
I stare into those honey eyes, now as hard as the topaz in his ring. “Why are you doing this?”
“I told you from the beginning that I wasn’t who you thought