Chapters (75)
Ring . . . ring . . . “Damn!” She staggered out of bed and sprinted through the darkened apartment. Following the sound of the ringtone to the kitchen. Ring . . . ring . . . She could make out the shadowy shape of the old-fashioned landline phone attached to the wall by the fridge. She lunged for the receiver; her heart was pounding and high-octane adrenaline was coursing through her veins. “Hello?” She covered the mouthpiece and puffed out a breath, trying to dispel the frenetic panic in her voice. “Hello?” Her parents were already gone, four years now. But in the dark of the night, yanked from sleep, time had morphed, played a trick on her, and it felt like she was going to get the bad news all over again.
“Need you to get over here, pronto.” The sound of her employer’s voice acted as a foghorn and tugged Sarah back into the present.
“Yes. Of course,” she said, modulating her tone. “Give me five to change out of my pajamas.”
“Don’t bother. You’re coming over to type, not participate in a fashion show. And I don’t want to hear any bellyaching. I warned you this would happen a lot.”
So, the man is back in asshole mode. Fine. “Very well,” she said, exhaling softly, trying to dispel the leftover effects of the fight-or-flight panic that had surged through her body. “I’ll be right there.”
“Thanks,” he said curtly, and the phone went dead. Sarah flipped on the light so she wouldn’t break her neck on the journey back to her bedroom. She shoved her feet in a pair of sneakers, grabbed her robe, which used to belong to her mother, and tugged it on as she sprinted across the apartment and out the front door. On the landing, she remembered her eyeglasses on the bedside table. Confound it. She whirled around and ran back into her apartment.
15
She was wearing a vintage pale-pink robe. It was a well-worn quilted satin with delicate clear pink flower petals with rhinestone pistils. When Rachel had rushed through the front door in her worn cotton pajamas and that robe, it momentarily knocked Mick on his ass. The robe was such a contradiction to the contained, constrained, almost inhuman efficient exterior that she had presented in all their prior encounters. It was as if he had stepped into the pages of an enchanted storybook, and on some cellular level, that pale-pink robe that she had wrapped around her slender body was the key.