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CHAPTER 1
It was all Hal's fault.
Really, if he'd actually done his job and finished his reports before leaving for the weekend none of this would have happened. Ellie would have logged off at five, taken the early train home, and spent another uneventful weekend reading books and getting frustrated by her shitty internet connection.
But Hal hadn't finished his reports. He'd dropped them on her desk with those big puppy-dog eyes and told her about his kids, the camping trip they had planned, and We'll end up in traffic for hours if I don't leave now. Please, Ellie. And she'd fallen for it.
It took two hours to finish those reports, and an extra half hour to drop them into all the hard drives and inboxes they needed to be dropped into. By the time she finally logged off, grabbed her bag, and made a beeline for the elevator it was almost eight.
Hal. You owe me big-time, you arsehole.
The elevator arrived a little later that she would have liked but not so late that she bothered to take the stairs. The doors slid back with a cheerful ding and she stepped inside, hitting the ground-floor button.
Another week done. Another couple of bills paid.
She was just starting to think about those bills, and maybe if she should upgrade to the more expensive but probably not any better home-internet package, when a hand snaked out and stopped the elevator doors from closing.
Ellie sucked in a breath as she saw that hand. Long tanned fingers. Short painted nails. She didn't need to wait for the lift doors to slide back open to know who it belonged to.
Casey Miller.
Aka her boss.
Aka the person Ellie had somehow ended up fingering in a bathroom stall at last year's Christmas party.
Fuck fuck fuckity fuck ...
The doors slid back with a second ding and there, frowning down at her phone, was Casey. She looked like she always did. That is, fucking gorgeous. Eyebrows long and expressive, hair a mess of wild black curls, lips pursed in a tight Cupid's bow.
* * *
Ellie tried not to think too hard about those lips. Tried not to think about what they tasted like — salty and strong — against hers. But she'd spent months trying not to think about kissing Casey and was no better at it now than she had been before.
Casey looked up from her phone and paused, one foot in the elevator and one in the hallway.
For a terrifying moment Ellie thought she was going to say something. That she would have to say something back. That they would have to play their awkward game of don't-talk-about-the-Christmas-party.
But then the moment passed. Casey stepped into the elevator and turned back to her phone.
Ellie let out a small silent sigh of relief even as another part of her, a small repressed crazy part of her, rolled over in disappointment.
The elevator started moving. Ellie kept her gaze locked on the floor counter as it slowly ticked down. Fifth floor. Fourth floor. Third floor. Second floor ... And then it stopped.
Ellie waited for the doors to open. Waited for whoever was about to join them on their awkward little journey down to the ground to get on. But the doors didn't open. They didn't even ding. She frowned and hit the ground-floor button again. Nothing happened. She pressed to open the doors. Still nothing. She pressed to close them and then the button for the second floor just to see if that would do something.
It didn't.
Oh ... oh shit.
In the reflection of the polished elevator doors, she could see Casey still tapping away at her phone. She was frowning as if already dealing with someone she did not want to deal with.
It took Ellie exactly seven-point-three seconds to gather up the courage to say what she was thinking. "I think we're stuck." Casey looked up from her phone. "What?"
"The lift. It's stopped moving and the doors won't open."
For a moment Casey didn't say anything. Perhaps she was looking at the floor counter, frozen on two. Perhaps she was listening to the silence of the elevator shaft around them. Or perhaps she was just trying to figure out what horrible thing she'd done that karma decided to trap her in an elevator with what was probably the last person in the office she wanted to be trapped in an elevator with.
Ellie was trying to figure out the same thing herself.
"Have you pressed the button?"
"I've pressed the open-doors and the ground-floor button but —"
"Have you pressed the emergency button?"
Ellie blinked. "Oh. Um. No. Not yet."
"Perhaps you should do that."
"Yeah. That sounds like a good idea. I'll just ... do that." Ellie reached out and pressed the button before something even more embarrassing fell out of her mouth.
It buzzed. A moment later a static pop sounded from a small speaker beneath the elevator's control panel.
"Eh ... hello?" It was a man. His voice distorted and small over the speaker. "Is someone there?"
"Yes, hello," Ellie called out. "I think, well, I'm not sure how to say this but I think we — my boss and I that is — are, um, stuck just below the second floor on —"
"We're trapped in the elevator," Casey cut in.
"You're trapped?"
"Yes. Two of us. On the second floor. The elevator has stopped moving and the doors won't open."
"Have you tried pressing the button?"
Casey's brows arched. Ellie sucked in a breath. Oh man. Arching eyebrows scored an eight and a half out of ten on the "exactly how pissed off is Casey?" meter. Ellie usually saw it only when Casey was stuck on the phone with an abusive client.
Of course, Casey couldn't get angry at clients. This man wasn't as lucky.
"Of course we've pressed the damn button," she snapped. "It's not working. The elevator is stuck. Come and get us out."
"Oh I ... I don't know what to do. I just —"
"You don't know what to do?" Casey repeated into the speaker.
"No, I —"
"You're the person the elevator calls when we press the emergency button and you don't know what to do when there is an emergency in the elevator?"
"Well ..." The man on the other side of the speaker sounded like he would rather be sitting on a bed of nails than having this conversation. "It sounds bad when you say it like that."
"Go find someone who knows what to do when the elevator breaks."
"Ah. Sure. My supervisor comes back from break in twenty min —"
"Now," Casey said, in full-on boss mode.
"Okay, um, I'll just call him. Hold on." The line went dead.
And the elevator lapsed into silence.
Casey tapped at her phone a few more times and held it up to her ear, only to pull it back a few seconds later with a curse. Ellie could just hear the pre-recorded message cheerfully telling her that she had no reception at her current location.
Figured.
Ellie waited, praying to whatever cosmic being might be listening, that they wouldn't be stuck for more than a couple of minutes. Hopefully it was just a button this guy had to press. A "fix the broken elevator" button which he hadn't noticed sitting right in front of him but would in only a few seconds. Yeah. That sounded likely.
It couldn't have been more than a couple of minutes but it felt like hours before the speaker crackled to life again.
"Yes? Hello? Elevator ladies?"
"Yes?" Casey said through gritted teeth.
"My boss said to phone the fire department so ..." He trailed off as if expecting them to tell him that they weren't really stuck. He didn't need to phone the fire department. This was all just a big misunderstanding.
Except it wasn't and the prospect of being trapped in three square meters of space with the woman she had barely been able to speak to without imagining naked was becoming terrifyingly real.
"Then phone the fire department," Casey suggested.
"Oh. Right. Sure. What should I say?"
Casey's eyebrows were even higher now than before. "Tell them there are two people trapped in an elevator."
"Okay. I can do that." A pause. "Unless you want to do it. I mean you probably want to —"
"Just do it!"
"Yes. Okay. I'm doing it." The line went dead.
And that was when she realised. Really realised what was happening. She was trapped. Not for a few seconds. Not even a few minutes. Hours. She could spend hours alone in this lift with her boss. With Casey.
She looked at Casey.
Casey looked at her.
This was all Hal's fault.
* * *
Oysters.
That was what started it all. Oysters, cracked open, sprinkled with herbs, and laid out on beds of raw salt. It wasn't the only food served at their Christmas party, but it was the best. Ellie pulled up a bar stool, sat down beside one of the biggest trays, and tucked in. So what if she was eating more than her fair share? So what if oysters made her stomach hurt a bit? They were delicious and she'd earnt it. It had been a long hard year.
Ten shells in and the party was starting to heat up. The CEO was trying to give a speech, Greg from Marketing had arrived wearing a Superman costume despite the Arabian Nights theme, and there, walking along the bar towards her like a bird drifting effortlessly through a storm, was Casey.
"May I?"
Ellie knew she was staring. She couldn't help it. Casey looked beautiful. Eyes bright, cheeks flushed, and hair wild. She was also wearing a dress. Casey in a dress was freaky enough — she only ever wore menswear in the office — but this dress ... it was loose and thin. The kind of dress that looked shapeless on the rack but revealed everything when it moved.
And it was moving a lot.
Ellie was too busy staring at that dress and the there-and-then-not-there body beneath it to decode what Casey had just said.
"Huh?"
Casey gestured at the oyster platter. "Are you open to sharing?" "Oh." She felt a spike of heat surge to her cheeks. "Yes. I'm sorry. Here." She pushed the tray towards her. "I didn't mean to ... um ... I'm going to eat them all myself unless someone stops me."
"Well." Casey's eyes were on her. "This is me stopping you." She reached out, selected an oyster from the very middle of the tray, and brought it up to her mouth. She used her finger to guide it from the shell past her lips. A flicker of teeth, tongue, and then her throat moved as she swallowed.
Ellie had never realised how sexy watching another woman eat an oyster was. But it was. It was the sexist thing she'd ever seen.
Casey put down the shell and picked up another. "Is there something on my face?"
"What?"
"You're staring at me."
She looked away sharply. "Oh, no. I'm sorry. I didn't ..."
"It's okay. I don't mind."
"You don't?"
"No. It's nice to be looked at once in a while. As long as it's the right kind of look."
She turned her eyes back just in time to see Casey swallow the second oyster. The action slow and deliberate. She kept looking at Casey as she put the second shell down and then sucked some of the leftover salt off her fingers. And Casey, well, she looked right back. Eyes dark and focused on her.
Ellie didn't know what did it.
Perhaps it was the complimentary glass of wine working its way through her blood. Perhaps it was the heat of Australia's "hottest summer on record." Or perhaps it was just the way Casey looked at her. Hair wild, cheeks flushed, and eyes dark with a strange kind of expectation. So different from the well-presented boss Ellie was used to working under.
Whatever it was, it drove her to do the stupidest thing she'd ever done.
There, in the middle of the office Christmas party, in front of everyone, she reached over and touched her boss's face. Just a brush of fingers down her cheek. The motion gentle but unmistakable.
And in an instant that dark look in Casey's eyes flashed, both intense and dangerous.
Ellie tried to pull her hand back, tried to apologise. Before she could, another hand joined hers, fingers interlocking. Casey's hand. Holding her in place and looking at her with a fierceness she'd never seen before. A fierceness that had nothing to do with anger.
"I don't know —"
"What don't you know?" Casey asked.
Ellie didn't have an answer.
They stayed like that for a second. Then two.
Then five.
And in that time something passed between them. Something like permission.
Before Ellie could figure out what the fuck she was doing, Casey was kissing her. And she was kissing Casey right back. The fact that they were at the Christmas party and that Casey was her boss didn't seem to matter. All that mattered was the taste of salt and wine, the heat of her breath, and the press of a body against hers.
Hard in some places. Soft in others.
She wasn't drunk. She'd only had the one glass of complimentary wine. But somehow everything was warm, blurred, and buzzing despite that.
She didn't quite remember how they got to the bathroom, who led the way, or what was said. But when the cubicle door closed with a loud click everything was crystal clear.
She was about to have sex. With a woman.
That thought shouldn't have been as terrifying as it was.
Ellie had identified as bisexual for years. And why the hell shouldn't she? It was what she was. So what if she'd never actually had sex with a woman before? She didn't need to "prove" her sexuality to herself or anyone else. It was who she was, not who'd she'd banged. Except now she was standing in a bathroom stall with a goddamned goddess and she had no idea what the hell she was meant to do.
Ellie opened her mouth to tell Casey that. To say I am probably going to be the worst lay of your life. It took me years to figure out how my own vagina works. It's probably going to take me twice as long to figure out someone else's.
But before she could utter a sound, Casey grabbed her and pulled her in for another long kiss.
And maybe that whole lack of experience thing didn't matter that much after all because kissing Casey felt like the hottest most natural thing in the world. Holding her even more so. And when Casey pulled back and wriggled her dress up over her head, revealing two glorious and thankfully braless breasts, well ... Her hands sort of figured out what to do by themselves.
She touched those breasts. Felt the soft fullness of them, the weight, the rock-hard tips.
Casey tipped her head back and just breathed. No moaning, no groaning, not even any gasping. It was not the way Ellie was used to seeing women behave in porn. There was no exhibition in this, no performance. Everything she was seeing was real, was something she had wrung out of Casey, and that made it so much hotter.
She let her hands explore further, drifting from those magnificent breasts, down the firm shape of her torso, and then over a pair of simple but sexy black knickers. In a brief moment of panic Ellie tried to remember what underwear she had on. The grey boy-leg? The weird green ones? God, she hoped it wasn't the ratty pair with the faded butterfly on the front.
She pushed those thoughts aside and let her hands explore the full swell of Casey's arse and the soft skin of her thighs. When she had plucked up the courage, she moved her right hand around and pressed it between Casey's legs. When that didn't come with any protest, she slipped the hand into her underwear. She felt the silk of her skin, the softness of hair, and the — oh God — the wet heat of her sex. And still Casey just breathed, the sound strong and maybe a little shaky in Ellie's ear.
"Is this okay?" Ellie rasped, her own voice broken and rough as if she were the one being touched and not the one doing the touching. "Please tell me if it's okay?"
"It's okay," Casey whispered back. "Just ..."
The door to the bathroom opened and they both froze.
They were safe, walled off inside the cubicle. But that didn't mean whoever it was wouldn't be able to hear them if they made a noise. They waited, faces together, Ellie's hand in Casey's underwear, while the person ambled slow as they pleased into a stall.
Eventually whoever it was decided now was the time to file their tax return because after what felt like hours they still hadn't flushed. Ellie tried to pull her hand out but Casey stopped her and pushed a hard but eerily silent kiss onto her lips. No bodies shifting, no heavy breathing. Nothing.
It made her heart hammer in her ears and something clench tight and wet between her legs. Oh God, she was aroused. She was standing in a bathroom stall, kissing her boss, and she was aroused. More aroused than she had ever been in her whole life.
Ellie moved her hand forward instead, sliding one finger against the lips of Casey's — Casey's — vagina. Casey shivered and moved her hips forward.
More, that movement said. And so Ellie pushed her first finger forward. It sunk into Casey and the woman's eyes snapped closed, a frown flickering between her brows for a moment before every part of her body seemed to shiver then relax. Ellie shook, her own vagina throbbing as she felt the clench of Casey around her, hot, wet, and eager.
"Is this —?" She whispered.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Going Down"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Barbara Bell.
Excerpted by permission of Harlequin Enterprises Limited.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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