Page 8 of Boxed In

Chapter 2

Olivia gasped.

The whole room seemed to go cold as the white vapor enveloped Luke. He made a strangled sound and staggered back, the fingers of his right hand clamped around the chest. With his free hand, he scrabbled at the edge of the table as he tried to steady himself.

His face had turned pale as death, and a shudder raced across his skin.

“What the hell . . .?” The sentence ended in a wheeze as he tried and failed to fill his lungs.

While Olivia watched in horror, his body began to jerk, like someone having a grand mal seizure. But she was sure it wasn’t because he had any illness. It was from the white mist,

“Luke!” she screamed as he toppled forward, knocking the pitcher off the table when he fell.

The delicate china shattered, and Luke’s body continued to shake as he hit the floor.

“Oh Lord.”

Olivia dropped to her knees, quickly pushing the shards of porcelain out of the way as she knelt beside Luke.

His eyes were closed, and his body was still shaking, his muscles twitching and contracting.

Finally, the quaking stopped, and she whispered a silent prayer.

He lay deathly still, his face pale as salt and his breathing shallow. But at least he was breathing. And when she pressed her fingers to the artery in his neck, she felt his pulse beating and also the warmth of his skin.

“Luke?”

He didn’t answer. What had that awful white mist from the box done to him? Was it some kind of poison? It couldn’t be a virus or bacteria, could it? Not and put him out that fast, she told herself.

But she couldn’t help wondering if she was going to start gasping—then go unconscious.

“Luke?” she said again. She shook his shoulder gently, but he didn’t move. She glanced toward the phone on the table, thinking she should call 911. He needed medical help—help she couldn’t provide.

But when she started to get up, his hand shot out and captured her wrist, holding her in an iron grip.

Her gaze shot to his face as his eyes blinked open and focused on her. They were Luke Garner’s dark eyes, the eyes that had given her an admiring look when he’d first come strolling into the office. Yet, at the same time, they belonged to someone else. A man who was more assessing. More commanding. More dangerous than Luke Garner had ever been.

That was impossible. But she couldn’t shake the conviction that the man clamping her wrist in his hand had changed in some fundamental way when that mist had hit him.

He was staring at her mouth with an open lust that Luke would never have let her see. Or had she been fooling herself about him all along? Was he really a lot less civilized than she’d assumed?

His lips moved, and he said a bunch of syllables that made no sense to her. It was like he was suddenly speaking in a language she couldn’t understand.

“What?”

He didn’t reply.

When she tried to pull away, he kept his fingers clamped around her wrist, but his gaze had turned inward, and it looked like he was listening to some voice she couldn’t hear.

When his lips moved again, he murmured her name, although the accent was strange—as though he had spoken some other language all his life.

“Olivia.”

“You recognize me?”

“Yes.” He had switched from the foreign language to English. “You were with him when he opened the box. Part of his mind was focused on the puzzle of the box. The other part was thinking about how much he wanted to make love to you.” Again, his accent was unfamiliar.

Make love to her? She’d deal with that later.

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