The threat of a fall

There was no chance in hell that I was going to be late that morning.

I went to bed at eight last night and got up and ready at about five a.m. I drank enough caffeine to fuel a small jet fighter and wolfed down a breakfast for heavyweights.

Besides, I was a morning person and people did hate me for it a little. I loved getting up just before sunrise and sitting by the window, listening to the news on the radio while sipping my coffee. Even if I turned in late the night before, I would always be up before daybreak so my track record of being right on time for anything was immaculate.

It had been raining pretty steadily so I wrapped myself in my favorite trench coat. It was a bit oversized since I got it when I was about thirty pounds heavier but it was so soft and comfortable from the wear over the last few years that I couldn’t get rid of it. Besides, it was a gift from my grandfather. He couldn’t afford a lot but he thought I should have a decent coat as I worked and studied my butt off through college.

I grabbed an umbrella too, even if it were just a short walk to the bus stop at the end of my block. Even on a damp day like this, I enjoyed the quick stroll. Having lived in the city now for about four months after I moved here for my job at Hedenby Holdings, I’d fallen in love with the hustle and bustle of downtown and the morning rush hour scene was no different.

My apartment was above a small cafe called The Magnolia and it was tucked in neatly with some older buildings at the edge of downtown so everything was within walking distance. Every morning, I walked past an old but charming hotel, a row of shops and small restaurants and a tiny sitting park with an old-fashioned water fountain right at the heart of it.

I was humming a low, happy tune when suddenly, the impact of a solid, hard body hurled against me like a brick wall collapsing.

“Hey ! Watch where you’re—“

“Here’s a lot of money if you’d just give me your jacket, please. I have to run down three more blocks and I’d really like to do it without flashing the whole world my intimate bits or catching pneumonia.”

I looked up, scrambling back to catch my balance, and sucked in a deep breath.

The man—a tall, very well-built, very naked man—was standing in front of me, his hands barely holding a sock between his legs to cover what he’d fondly referred to as his intimate bits. I was too stunned that the moment froze in time and I got a good look at his damp, disheveled, dark brown hair, his stark, bright blue eyes, and his chiseled face shadowed around the jaw with a day-old stubble.

“You’re naked. Out on the sidewalk. In the rain. In rush hour Monday morning.”

He managed a crooked smile as he wrenched away my umbrella and thrust a thick wad of cash in my work tote. I was too shocked to react even as he started to push my trench coat off my shoulders.

“Very perceptive, sweetheart, which is why I really need to run off now,” he said as he waited for me to move my tote over to my other arm to slip the coat off completely. I was going through the motions, my mind not quite caught up with reality yet. “There’s a very angry woman who threw my clothes out of the window and is on her way down now to hack off whichever part of my anatomy she can get to first.”

“Probably the part that shouldn’t have been poking its head where it didn’t belong.”

I gasped the second after I blurted out the words, my eyes sweeping up to lock in with the man’s own pair which glowed a bright blue in amusement at my very blunt, double-meaning statement.

“I don’t disagree with you there,” he said with a chuckle before glancing over his shoulder. “Unfortunately, that errant part of me needs to survive this attempted mutilation first for it to have a chance at changing for the better.”

As if the naked man standing by the sidewalk, shrugging on a loose coat still much too small to cover him decently while articulating his dismemberment to a complete stranger wasn’t enough, an ear-splitting screech came from behind the hotel’s front doors.

“Thank you but I’ve got to go, sweetheart,” the man said with a wink before he bussed my cheek and took off running, weaving around the cars slowly chugging through the morning rush hour traffic until he disappeared into the crowd across the street.

“What the hell just happened ?” I muttered under my breath as I shook myself back to reality.

I bent over to pick up my umbrella which now looked awkwardly bent on one side, and stepped aside just in time as the hotel doors swung open and a very angry woman in a nothing but a robe stepped out on the sidewalk, her head snapping back and forth as she scanned the crowd.

“That son of a bitch !” she screamed before turning around and stalking back into the hotel.

Well, no wonder that man ran like he was about to be murdered.

I started to laugh until I realized that I was standing and soaking wet in the rain now and that the seven-thirty bus had just passed me.

I was no doubt going to be late for the first time in my life.

“Why in the world do you look like a soggy dinner roll that’s been dunked into a soup and left at the bottom of the bowl ?”

I stared up at the ceiling and counted mentally from one to ten so that I didn’t smack Theodora for that unnecessarily obvious, excessively insensitive comment.

Theodora was a marketing associate and the witch was unfortunate to have been given as slave to.

Don’t get me wrong, I liked most almost everyone I’ve met and worked with in the company but the one person I didn’t and the same one who nursed some secret hatred for me, it would seem, had to be my direct supervisor.

Usually, nothing she said could get under my skin. Becoming unflappable had been a precious skill to learn quickly once one was put under Theodora’s command but today was not a great day and my composure was already in shreds.

After a fifteen-minute wait for the next bus, a nasty encounter with some lewd stranger inside it who was eyeing my white blouse like a hungry rat, a mad dash up the front steps of the massive Hedenby building and a resulting contact with the ground after my heel twisted and catapulted me into mid-air, I was in no shape or form, mentally and physically, to put up with Theodora’s crappy attitude.

“You could say I’ve had a rough start to my morning,” I attempted in an even voice as I settled into my chair and slipped off my wet sling backs. “Give me ten minutes and I’ll be presentable again.”

“You don’t have ten minutes because the general meeting with the CEO is in five and I don’t want you wading in there, dripping all over the floor and making me look bad so stay here and get decent,” she scolded as she straightened her impeccable gray suit and skirt ensemble.