His Accidental Cure: The Runaway Contract Wife

The edges of her torn dress snagged on the elevator's brass handle. Jeanie Brooks stumbled in, her vision swimming, the world tilting on a sickening axis. The hallucinogen Denise had slipped into her champagne was a tidal wave, pulling her under.

Her finger jabbed at the 'door close' button, a frantic, repetitive motion. Through the narrowing gap, she saw the blurred figures of the Nash family's bodyguards rounding the corner.

The doors slid shut just as their hands reached for the opening. A soft chime echoed in the small space, a sound completely at odds with the frantic hammering of her own heart. The hotel's security system hadn't glitched on its own. Denise had paid a busboy handsomely to swipe a master keycard, intending to send Jeanie to the room of a sleazy, low-level executive on the fourth floor. But in his haste, the nervous busboy had swiped the card twice, activating the emergency override. The elevator bypassed all other floors, shooting her straight to the top-a level not open to the public.

Ding.

The doors opened to darkness. Jeanie lurched forward, her body a puppet with cut strings. Her foot caught on something large and ceramic, sending a towering vase crashing to the marble floor.

The explosive shatter ripped through the silence of the presidential suite, startling the man on the sofa. Devaughn Winters had been pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes, trying to withstand the migraine that was the prelude to his PTSD episode.

He smelled a foreign perfume-something floral and sweet, a stark contrast to the sterile emptiness of his suite. A wave of nausea, visceral and immediate, rolled through his stomach.

"Get out," he rasped, his voice a low growl in the pitch-black room.

Jeanie's mind, ravaged by the drug, couldn't process the threat. The deep, resonant sound was a lifeline in a swirling vortex of panic. She scrambled towards it, a drowning woman reaching for driftwood.

Her hot, trembling body collided with his, landing squarely in his lap. Her hands, desperate for an anchor, fisted the collar of his expensive dress shirt.

Devaughn's entire body went rigid. Every muscle tensed, bracing for the inevitable, soul-crushing panic attack that any human touch triggered.

One second.

Two.

The expected suffocation, the feeling of his throat closing, didn't come. Instead, a strange, profound calm settled over his frayed nerves. It was like a switch being flipped in his brain.

"So hot," Jeanie mumbled, her voice a pained whisper. Her fingers, acting on pure instinct, fumbled with the knot of his tie, pulling it loose.

Devaughn was frozen in a state of shock. He was not only tolerating this woman's touch, he was... craving more. The migraine that had been splitting his skull in two was receding.

He tentatively lifted a hand, his fingers brushing against the back of her head. The heat radiating from her skin was a grounding force, the first real sensation he'd felt in five years that wasn't pain or revulsion. It