Page 5 of Defended By Love

Everything around me may be crumbling to dust, but this, this half-second of reprieve, is home.

It’s a nice thought, a comforting one, until a boom sounds out into the night so loudly that it whips the hair around my face. It’s followed by everything I thought I’d hear earlier: car alarms, screams, crashes, and, after a time, sirens.

I keep my head buried in the security of whoever is holding me as each sound springs up to life and cuts through whatever armor I’ve put up to insulate me from this nightmare.

Finally, after who knows how long, I lift my head to consider the scene.

Twisting towards the crash, I find the building, my office, my second home, collapsed in on itself in a heap of ruination. Oddly enough, it looks almost neat. The debris is limited to our lot and the surrounding side streets. The buildings around it are mostly unharmed—save for the damage caused by the objects that went flying by either the sound or the displaced air.

Still, it’s completely destroyed.

The place that that nurtured me during my best years, the place that I know better than my childhood home, the place where I had hoped to live out the rest of my working days, is rubble.

Gone.

It’s gone, just like I almost was.

I should have been inside the building. I should have either been cast out of the window when it all came down or been crushed inside its cascading frame. I should be dead.

Dead, not…

I tear my eyes away from my office and take stock of my surroundings. A glance around tells me that I’m floating in the air several hundred feet away from where I was and maybe a hundred off the ground. Overhead, the rain continues to beat down on me. Underneath me, ambulances and police cars zoom past as brightly coloured pricks of light against the dull haze of the city lights.

Around me are two very large, muscular arms clothed in a tight red spandex. My eyes trail (extremely slowly, like my brain worries about getting overwhelmed by taking in too much too quickly) up the arms to some broad shoulders that ripple with tension.

Then, I reach the face. Staring down at me are the warmest chocolate eyes with the brightest smile. A hard jawline is softened by the faintest blush on round, smiling cheeks. His hair’s swept back in a complicated swirl that gives new meaning to the term ‘windswept’. His face looks like the inspiration behind statues. He looks like the type of man that made people believe in the divine.

To put it succinctly, he’s beyond beautiful.

“Er, hi,” he says, his voice cracking slightly.

Finally, I start to scream.

Chapter 4

“Careful. I might drop you,” the man holding me a hundred feet in the air jokes with a wobbly smile.

It would probably be endearing if it wasn’t absolutely terrifying. I start to scream louder. It’s like a new volume has been unlocked and unleashed inside my soul. It wails out of me in a bulldozing blast that will let nothing stop it on its quest for freedom.

I scream long past the time I realize that he was joking and even deeper into realizing that he isn’t about to drop me. I’m safe, as much as someone being suspended at a height that would liquify my organs should I drop, can be. He’s got me.

I hope.

Eventually, I stop screaming, even though I have no memory of stopping. My lips blubber a mindless gibber of nonsense as I alternate between staring at the handsome stranger and at the deadly fall.

“Usually women don’t start screaming at me until the second date,” he says. His teeth dare to peek out slightly from behind his teetering smile.

My body tenses.

“Why are women screaming while you’re on a date with them?”

Suddenly, his strong arms seem less like a comforting support and more like an iron cage. I’m well out-muscled. Not to mention, hovering in the fucking air.

“Oh no, no, no…” he splutters. “I—er…”

“Is this what you do with women? You take them? You kidnap them?”

“What? No! I’m saving you. I have a cape.”

---