enough) that flashed every time he smiled was downright criminal. But he was A) a cocky jerk, B) one of her immediate superiors, and C) she was here to become a doctor, not play doctor.
Her career was all that mattered. No matter how spectacular Emmett Mallory’s ass was.
She’d promised her father she’d be the best doctor in Remington, and she was damn sure going to keep that oath.
Rounding the corner by the elevator bay, Sofia finally caught a break. The doors to the middle car were open, and if she hustled, she’d be able to hop on and escape a run-in with Mallory, for sure. If he caught sight of her, even without the suggestion from either Dr. Drake, he’d surely pin her down and ask all sorts of obscure questions about how to recognize congenital hand deformities, and honestly, she really did want to dig into those surgical case studies Charlie had promised to review with her.
“Hold the elevator!” she called out, lunging into the open space.
And bumped smack into Dr. Cocky himself.
“Dr. Vasquez. What a surprise.” The corners of Mallory’s mouth curved up into a borderline smirk that said he wasn’t surprised at all, and damn it, how could any one person’s luck be so craptastic?
“Dr. Mallory.” Since she had no choice but to get on the elevator or make it really freaking obvious that she was avoiding him—which would probably only tempt him to park himself in her line of sight for their entire shift—she stepped inside. Pressing the button for the third floor, she crossed her arms over her chest and prayed for the next thirty seconds to pass quickly.
No dice. “Kind of lucky that we’re both on shift tonight,” he said as the doors trundled shut, and Sofia barely bit back her shock.
“Lucky? How’s that?”
He arched an inky black brow. “I’ve got to prep for an ACL reconstruction scheduled for tomorrow afternoon. Since knee injuries often require surgery, I’m sure you could use the review.”
Before Sofia could launch one of the half dozen gee-I-couldn’t-possibly excuses she’d instantly cooked up, the elevator made a horrible, banshee-like noise, then came to a lurching halt.
“Holy—!” she gasped, her gaze winging upward as her pulse rocketed in the same direction. “What the hell was that?”
Mallory’s smirk had disappeared as if it had never existed, his brow furrowed over his suddenly intense stare. “I don’t know,” he said, looking up, then pinning her into place with his next words.
“But I’m pretty sure we’re stuck.”
Chapter 2
Emmett Mallory’s first thought was that surely, he was being recorded by a hidden camera for some sort of evil online prank. His second, which arrived a few seconds later as he realized that he and Sofia were, in fact, temporarily trapped, was that fate must be in some kind of serious ha-ha, sucker mood to stick him in a busted elevator with the one woman who drove him crazy in both the bad way and the ohhhh-so-good way, all at once.
Sofia Vasquez was a study in extremes, and right now, she looked extremely unhappy.
“What do you mean, we’re stuck?” Her eyes had rounded like beautiful dark brown saucers, her smart, tart mouth falling open in some combination of denial and disbelief.
Quick to corral his wits—because, hey, he was an orthopedic surgeon with a specialty in trauma, and he’d definitely seen worse than a jammed-up elevator—Emmett slung on a smile and looked at the elevator panel, then the ceiling above them. “Well, we’re not moving, and the doors aren’t opening, so I’m guessing that means we can’t get out until someone fixes whatever’s wrong with this thing.”
“I got that part,” Vasquez bit out, and damn, even her frown was pretty. “What I meant was, we can’t be stuck.”
Do not mess with her, dude. She’s clearly rattled. Do not—“I’m pretty sure we can,” Emmett said, twirling a finger around the elevator’s not-large space, and okay, fine, so he was going to mess with her just a tiny bit. No one should be so serious all the time. “Because until further notice, it looks like neither one of us is leaving this elevator.”
Her shock morphed into something more akin to actual panic, and a thought occurred to him that hadn’t before. “You’re not claustrophobic, are you?”
“What? No,” she said, the worry that had crowded his chest receding as he watched her move to the panel, pressing the already illuminated button for the third floor once, then again. “Come on, come on.”