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from the Stones lovefest in the corner. The big guy’s face was taking on that grayish hue under the olive skin, and in a flash Danny realized the elevator doors had closed, but they weren’t going anywhere.

    “Hey,” he broke in sharply. “Now that we’re all best girlfriends, does someone maybe want to pick a floor?”

    Suppressing his immediate guilt at the hurt that flashed across Winslow’s face, Danny turned to Beck.

    Keep him talking.

    “What floor is the kitchen on, man? Do you know?”

    From his friends in the hotel restaurant biz, Danny knew that you couldn’t count on the kitchen occupying the same floor as the dining room. Worst-case scenario, they could go down to the lobby and ask, but Beck was starting to sweat.

    “Oh, are you going down to Limestone to check out the kitchen?” Eva stepped smartly up to the elevator’s control panel and pressed the button for the second floor. “I’m on my way there, too.”

    “Small world,” Danny muttered.

    “Small hotel,” she replied, sending him a look from the corner of her almond-shaped eyes.

    The rest of the ride down to the second level took about fifteen seconds, but they were some of the longest, most tension-filled seconds of Danny’s life.

    Beck looked miserably stoic, Winslow was uncharacteristically subdued, and somehow Danny felt responsible for both.

    He tried not to hate himself for the way he couldn’t drag together enough focus to do anything about it—not with Eva Jansen standing less than three feet away from him, the only person in the elevator who appeared completely at ease.

    Every time Danny drew in a breath, the lush, complicated scent of her perfume teased his nose and kept his nerves on edge.

    When the elevator slid to a smooth halt, Beck was the first one out the doors, followed closely by Winslow.

    Cursing the manners his mother had drilled into him, Danny put an arm out to keep the doors open and stood aside to let the lady behind him pass. One heartbeat, then two, and he finally glanced back to see what the hell he was being kept waiting for this time.

    However, Eva wasn’t fixing her hair or fiddling with her cell phone or any of the other obnoxious things he’d imagined in that instantaneous flash of annoyance.

    No, nothing so mundane. Instead, she was leaning against the brass rail that ran along the back of the elevator, arms spread out to the sides, red-tipped fingers curled gracefully around the horizontal rod and mile-long legs crossed at the ankle in front of her.

    The elevator buzzed loudly, jolting Danny out of his paralyzed contemplation of the way Eva’s dark, dark hair swung against the milky paleness of her delicate jaw.

    At his jump, the corners of her candy-apple lips tilted up even more. Pushing away from the wall, she sauntered forward. Danny braced himself for the moment when she’d brush past him, her body so close and yet so untouchably far.

    But again, as if she’d made an advanced study of how not to do what Danny expected, Eva stopped just inside the elevator doors. She lifted one white hand to Danny’s tensed bicep—the thick waffle-print cotton of his sleeve did nothing to blunt the electric spark of the touch—and trailed those slender fingers along his arm until she’d managed to tug his unresisting limb away from the door.

    The elevator stopped buzzing, although Danny hardly noticed what with the buzzing in his ears, and the doors slid shut, enclosing the two of them alone in the tiny, opulent box. With a soft whir, the elevator began to ascend, called by someone on a higher floor.

    Never breaking eye contact, Eva leaned in. Danny’s heart kicked against his rib cage and his breath sped up, but she reached right past him and pressed some button that made the entire elevator jerk to an immediate stop.

    The suddenness of the maneuver woke Danny out of whatever pheromone-induced coma she’d put him in with her perfume and her dress and her wickedly curved