Page 9 of Angel In Armani

More sane than her anyway. Lucas had put his hand on her arm to steady her as they climbed the front steps after dashing through the rain and her body had responded with a good old-fashioned flash of lust-delight-more-please that had left her half dizzy.

“Two rooms,” Lucas said.

The clerk pushed his glasses up his nose a little but didn’t lift his head. “Sorry, only one left.”

Damn it. Apparently they weren’t the only two riding out the storm. Only one room. Which meant sharing with Dr. Gorgeous.

Her body did that flash-of-lust thing again while her mind went a little crazy with images of her and Lucas together in the dark.

Not going to happen. Sara somehow managed to wrestle control of her brain back, telling herself that she was only reacting to him like this because of the adrenaline rush from their near miss with the tree. So time to stop giving in to inconvenient bodily chemical responses and actually think about the situation.

And whether it was a good one. After all, she didn’t exactly know Dr. Gorgeous very well, and they were in the middle of nowhere. She was able to take care of herself if she had to, but no point being dumb. The only problem was how to ask Lucas to prove himself the good guy that her gut insisted he was.

Just in case her gut was being deceived by her apparently easily-swayed-by-a-gorgeous-face hormones.

“Do you have a business card?” she asked Lucas as he pulled out his wallet to hand over a credit card.

He nodded. “Why?”

She looked at him a moment. “Because I don’t know you very well and we’re about to share a room for the night.” This made the clerk lift his head from the card details he was taking down and waggle his eyebrows at her. She shot him a look, and he ducked his head down again—but she could still see the grin on his face.

Lucas frowned, then his face cleared. “Oh. Right.” He pulled a couple of cards from his wallet then passed one to the clerk. “These are my details.” He hesitated a moment then handed over his driver’s license as well. “Take a copy of that, too, if you have a copier.” The clerk nodded and disappeared through a door behind the desk.

He handed the other business card to Sara. “Okay, text all that to someone you trust.” He nodded in the direction of the door. “That guy knows all my information, too, now. Can pick me out of a lineup if he has to.”

“Won’t help if you’re a crazed serial killer, you could just murder us both,” Sara said with a half smile, but she took the card and snapped a picture of it with her phone. Then she sent a hurried text to Viv, with the pic and a short explanation of where she was and why, and told her she’d check in by six a.m.

If Lucas wanted to get back to the city in the morning, they’d surely be up by then. Viv was ex-army, too. She’d raise all sorts of hell if Sara didn’t call her on time.

“I’m not a serial killer,” Lucas said. “And I promise, I’m not a creep, either. You’re perfectly safe.” He sounded serious, which was good.

She nodded then tucked the business card into her purse as the clerk came back with Lucas’s license. He passed it over, along with the key, and pointed them toward the room at the very end of the long, low building.

And, because there could be no other possibility, there was only one bed in the room. One bed that looked narrower than the queen size the information sheet on the bedside table proclaimed it to be.

It was the only piece of furniture in the room other than a single wooden chair that looked like it might collapse if anyone sat on it. There was a TV bolted to the wall on a kind of shelf thing, but that hardly counted as furniture. Neither did the two low square shelves on either side of the bed that she guessed were meant to serve as nightstands.

Lucas put his laptop bag on the floor. Sara put her bag on the chair and then opened it. Her uniform pants were half soaked from the dash from the car, and she kept spare clothes in there in case she ever got stranded.

“I’m going to change,” she said and slipped into the tiny bathroom, locking the door. When she emerged, Lucas was still standing by the door, studying the bed.

“I’ll sleep on the floor,” he said.

Sara shook her head, regarding the carpet. It was a dull mottled beige shade and more than a little sticky underfoot. God only knew what might be lurking in those fibers. She wouldn’t have asked Dougal to sleep on that floor, let alone Lucas Angelo. She’d slept on hard dirt plenty of times but she didn’t think he was the kind who roughed it. Besides which, the motel carpet wasn’t covered in good clean dirt; it was kind of disgusting.

“We can share.” That woke up her hormones again, making her stomach tighten. She mentally smacked them back down.

Lucas looked at the bed. “Are you sure?”

Yes, said the hormones with enthusiasm. Stupid hormones. Even if they did share a bed, sleeping would be all that they would be doing.

She looked at Lucas, trying to see past the face to the man underneath. She’d done the smart thing back in the reception, and he’d taken no offense. He’d never treated her with anything but courtesy, he hadn’t thrown a tantrum when she’d told him she couldn’t fly him through the storm as some clients would have, and he was a surgeon who fixed teenage figure skaters, for Pete’s sake.

He didn’t set off her Spidey-sense in any way that wasn’t 100 percent good. And what with the army and working in the very male world of helicopters and life in general, she’d been around enough jerks to learn to trust her Spidey-sense when it came to detecting creeps.

True, her Spidey-sense hadn’t always gotten it right when it came to jerks, but that wasn’t an issue. She wasn’t planning to date Lucas Angelo.

Still, the fact that he did set off her Spidey-sense in the 100 percent good way made her question whether it was a good idea to climb onto a bed with him for a whole other set of reasons.

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