Perfect Strangers

He skids to a stop in the entryway, his blazing blue eyes fixed on me. He’s beautiful and frightening, a vengeful god dressed all in black, gripping a Terminator-sized gun in his hand.

The door swings shut behind him with a clunk that seems final, like a lid closing over a crypt.

Flooded with adrenaline and pure terror, I jolt to my feet and grab the closest heavy object: a floor lamp. With a scream, I throw it like a javelin right at him.

Unfortunately, I’m as shitty at javelin throwing as I am at any other athletic endeavor, because the lamp lands with a thud on the carpet between us. The shade pops off and rolls to one side.

James looks at the lamp, then back at me.

I’ve never seen eyes glow that unholy shade of blue.

I bolt over to the small desk near the TV cabinet and rip the phone right out of the wall. I throw that at him, too, with slightly better results: the receiver grazes his hand as he bats it away, glowering.

The thick room service menu and hotel amenity binder follow the phone. One misses him by a mile, the other causes him to duck. After both are lying flat on the floor, he says, “You need to calm down.”

His voice is even, but his expression could strike fear into the heart of the devil himself.

Which means I must’ve lost my marbles once and for all, because I shriek at him like a banshee. “And you need to go fuck yourself!”

Nostrils flaring, he says very softly, “Olivia.”

It sounds like a threat. So I react the same way I’ve been reacting to threats since he walked in and start throwing things again.

“How did you find me?” I holler, hurling a desk lamp in his general direction. It crashes into an armchair instead of smashing his face.

“The phone I gave you has GPS.”

Fuck. I hate his stupid talking phone with the burning heat of a thousand suns. “Get away from me! I’ll scream!”

“You’re already screaming,” he says patiently. “And I’m not going to hurt you, so please calm down.”

I don’t know about you, but when someone tells me to calm down it has the exact opposite effect. Hysteria is injected into my bloodstream like a shot of heroin. Clenching my hands to fists, I let loose a scream of blood-curdling, biblical proportions, worse than a pestilence sent from God himself.

The only thing it does is make James look like he has indigestion.

He holds up a hand. “I get that you’re upset, but let me explain.”

I start to babble, backing up into the desk and scurrying toward the balcony windows like a frantic crab. “Yes, yes, please explain how you know my ex and why you’re a liar and the reason you own a bazillion weapons and why you’re pointing one of them at me!”

“I’m not pointing it at you, sweetheart. I’m simply holding it, which is a very different thing.”

I can tell by his tone that I’m testing his patience. I’m testing his patience! “Don’t you dare call me sweetheart! Get out! Leave me alone! I hate you!” I beseech the door. “Help! Someone please help me!”

He winces. “Don’t say you hate me. I couldn’t bear it if you hated me.”

Panting and almost collapsing from hysteria, I stare at him for a moment, wondering if maybe both of us have lost our minds.

Then I grab the vase of flowers off a side table and send it flying across the room.

He easily sidesteps it, then sighs as it crashes against the wall behind him and shatters into a million pieces. “I can see you’re not going to be reasonable about this.”

He advances a step. I flatten myself against the sliding glass balcony doors.

“Stay right where you are! I’ll throw myself off this balcony before I’ll let you get your hands on me!”

To prove my point, I try to pull the slider open, but discover it’s locked. I claw at the lock and yank at the door again, but it stays stubbornly shut.

James informs me in a matter-of-fact voice, “There’s a security lock on the rail on the bottom.”

I turn and glare at him. He shrugs. “Just saying.”

The. Fucking. Nerve.

I pick up the wooden side table the vase of flowers was on and brandish it at him. And what does he do? The son of a bitch rolls his eyes!Text property © Nôvel(D)ra/ma.Org.

“For God’s sake, woman, you know I’m not going to hurt you.”

“The feeling is not mutual! And stop calling me woman!”

I’m looking wildly around for another heavy object to throw at him after I hit him with the table when something whizzes past my head at high velocity and pierces the patio door with a loud crack. The sound is followed by the snap of a sheet of glass shattering like ice underfoot.

The glass holds for a heartbeat, then the entire door falls to the floor with a deafening crash that leaves my ears ringing.

Then everything shifts into slow motion.

James dives at me, tackling me to the carpet. He rolls on top of my body, props himself up on his elbows, and points his gun at the hotel door. He fires a few rounds in quick succession right through it. There’s a silencer on the end of the gun that spares my eardrums from destruction, so I can hear the heavy thump that follows the shots.

I understand on a cellular level that what I heard is the sound of a body hitting the floor.

My scream is the soundtrack to another volley of gunfire, but this time James isn’t the source. He rolls us over and over on the carpet away from the balcony and toward the bed. Once we’re between it and the wall, he pops up and fires three shots toward the entry using the mattress to steady his elbows. Then he drops back down to address me.

“I’m in love with you,” he says. “We should get married.”

Bullets whistle over our heads and embed themselves into the wall behind us, spraying chunks of plaster. The acrid stench of gunpowder burns my nose. I gape at him, holding my hands over my ears.

“You’re probably thinking it’s a little quick, but when you know, you know. We’ll talk about it later. In the meantime, think about where you might want to honeymoon. Just my two cents, but I’ve always thought Bora Bora is incredibly romantic. There’s a Four Seasons I’ve stayed at there that’s amazing. But if you’re not into the beach thing, I’m open to suggestions.”

He hops up onto his knees and starts firing again. Whoever is trying to kill him—us?—fires back. Between shots, I hear the distant wail of sirens.

I truly regret not drinking more of those midget bottles of liquor from the minibar.

James jumps to his feet, grabs my wrist, and hauls me up so I’m standing.

The room is thick with smoke. The hotel room door is riddled with bullet holes and hanging off two of its hinges. The bleeding bodies of four large men in tactical gear litter the entryway floor.

My trusty scream shrivels up in my throat and refuses to make an appearance.

I teeter sideways, about to slither back down to the floor, but James grabs me by the waist.

“Woah! Hey. Look at me.”

When I rip my horrified gaze from the corpses and train it on him, he’s grinning at me. “You’re doing great.” He plants a firm kiss on my lips. “But we gotta go now. Just hang onto my hand and don’t let go. Okay?”

Deep in shock, I nod like a bobblehead, planning on running away from him and finding a police station the second I get the chance.

James leads me by the hand out of the demolished hotel room, stopping only to sling my purse over his shoulder and grab my suitcase before we go.