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he should look and act so much like a savior come to rescue her. Warm-skinned, tall enough to hurt her damaged neck as she looked up into his face, and broad enough in his shoulders to block out the gray of the sky behind him from her sight. He was dressed inappropriately for such cold, and she thought she might attribute some of the sternness in his face to that.
    “My queen?”
    He was addressing her, she realized, stifling a bit of a giggle. Yet there was something thrilling and empowering to hear one so beautiful and so obviously powerful address her as though she were somehow greater than he, as if he were possibly subservient to her.
    She opened her mouth, but she honestly didn’t know how to respond— not only to such an address, but to the way he had come to her assistance overall. And then there was a moment, standing there in the golden aura of strength and hardness that was emanating from him, when she wondered if her attacker had been the fryingpan and her savior was, actually, the fire. It kind of felt that way. Just a little. Seeing as how he now stood over her with a bloody knife in his hand.
    He watched as her eyes tracked to the knife he held clutched in his hand, and suddenly he seemed to recall it was there, as if he’d forgotten he’d been stabbed and stood armed in the aftermath. He moved immediately to tuck the blade in at his belt, as though six inches of bloody metal would suddenly seem less menacing at his strong, long waist. The handle of the knife settled in relief against a tucked-in polo shirt that clung to at least a six-pack of well-heeled abs. To say nothing of the powerful pectorals and biceps.
He must live in the gym,
she observed. If so, she really needed to know which gym. She’d
really
like to go hang out there. Watching him push weights around as though he owned them would be one of the high points of her existence.
    “Docia,” she managed to say at last, sounding all squeaky and fragile when she was going for cool and confident. Crap. Oh, well. He’d have to make allowances for the situation. Maybe if she played it off right, she could come across all genteel and flirty like Scarlett O’Hara. “I … you … thank you,” she ended meekly, acknowledging that she also sucked at genteel and flirty. This lack of confidence was why she was still stuck at a desk as an office manager … with her being the only person to be managed.
    “I am ever at your service,” he said, his rich, rumbly voice falling all over her. And then he bowed. It was a slight forward tipping of his body, the most perfect debonair act she’d ever witnessed in her life. And despite his lean, athletic power, it looked comfortable and genuine on him in a way she couldn’t describe.
    Wow. For real?
Docia resisted the urge to pinch herself, though she highly suspected she was asleep … ormaybe still in a coma in the hospital and she’d just been dreaming these past few days.
    “Well, as nice as that would be,” she murmured a bit dryly, “we need to get you to a hospital. And the cops. Cops would be good here,” she noted as she observed the immediate area around her and its sense of carefully controlled chaos. An unconscious man, blood dripping into the snow from big fingertips, and battered, vulnerable little her standing toe-to-toe with a rather dangerous-feeling stranger. “I have to call my brother.”
    It was a pretty lame thing to say, considering her phone had probably ended up in the drink along with her pretty new old purse. Not to mention a far more flattering winter coat.
    Docia rolled her eyes at herself. Granted, she liked her precious pearls of fashion reacquisition well enough, but she was beginning to sound obsessive about it in her own head. Maybe it was because she hadn’t seen so much as a single reflective surface since the morning of the accident. Jackson had gone out of his way to deny them to her in a Nazi-like fashion, presumably because she looked like a hot mess that had been