Page 8 of First Comes Marriage
The bastard left me on read.
“Are there any other available rooms?” Sabrina asked the desk agent with a conciliatory smile.
“Yes, ma’am. I could put you in a junior suite for six hundred dollars per night.”
“Per night?” Sabrina squeaked. “That’s—”
“Too fucking expensive,” Baz grunted.
The kid winced. “There are several conferences in the hotel at the moment, sir. The only rooms I have left are suites. But the room reserved for you both does have a pull-out couch. You could—”
“That will be fine.” Sabrina shot a wary glance towards Baz.
Stop being an asshole. You let her sleep on your shoulder on the plane, but you can’t share a room with her in the hotel? Fucking hypocrite.
With any luck he’d meet someone in the hotel bar and need never find out exactly what kind of hell came folded up in a hotel pull-out couch.
He scrubbed his hand over his face, then thrust it out towards the desk agent. “Keys.”
Across the lobby, the elevator doors slid open with a ding and Baz strode across the ostentatious space, determined to put some distance between himself and Sabrina, even if only for a moment. But once he was inside the elevator, pressing his palm to the door to keep it open and watching her struggle to drag her luggage after him, he realized his mistake. Now there was nothing to do but watch her, and if he’d thought she wasa menace in her fancy silk blouse at the Bazaar, it was nothing compared to Sabrina Page in loungewear. He cleared his throat and looked away, determined not to focus on the way her chest moved each time she tugged on her bag.
You hate her. Stop looking at her tits.
No sooner had Sabrina joined him in the elevator, than a laughing, drunk couple pushed their way inside as well. They ricocheted off the gilt mirror-like walls of the elevator in their hurry to paw at each other, hardly coming up for air long enough for the man to slam his hand against the button for the twentieth floor. The woman giggled as her partner buried his head in her neck, his hands everywhere. It was like they consumed every bit of air in the elevator, taunting Baz and Sabrina, daring them to watch their ridiculous public display of affection.
Baz inadvertently caught Sabrina’s eye, a blush rising rapidly in her cheeks, and looked away quickly. He didn’t want to know what that blush was about—if she was embarrassed or scandalized or, even worse, turned on. He just wanted to get to their room and forget this day had ever happened.
Their room was on the seventeenth floor and overlooked the strip, the obnoxious neon flashing lights below bleeding in through the thin curtains. After the company in the elevator, their room felt enormous. Baz dropped his bag on the pull-out couch in the corner as Sabrina closed the door behind them.
“Sorry about this,” she said over the sound of her bag dragging across the carpet.
Baz rolled his eyes and snatched her bag from her grasp, lifting it easily and placing it on the luggage rack in the corner. “Did you make the reservation?”
“No.”
“Then don’t fucking apologize for things you didn’t do.”
She chuckled under her breath as she unzipped her bag, digging out a toiletry kit. “Some things never change.” He narrowed his eyes at her, but that only served to make her laugh more. “You always did have to be the grumpiest guy in the room.”
“Do not,” he muttered.
She pressed her lips together to suppress her laughter, but her eyes sparkled as if to say,told you so.
“I need a drink.” He stalked across the room to the mini bar, not caring that a single glass of Scotch was about to cost him the same as a steak dinner back home.
Before he could untwist the cap, Sabrina said, “Why don’t we go down to one of the bars? I wouldn’t say no to a margarita after that flight.”
This Sabrina, the one who smiled charmingly at desk agents and made fun of his attitude, was more familiar than the woman who’d gripped his hand on the plane like he was the only thing between her and certain doom. He’d never known Sabrina to be afraid of flying. All those vacations she’d talked about wanting to take, the trips to Egypt and Peru she’d planned in between unloading boxes of cereal at the food pantry, they all required lengthy flights. But this woman—both the version that panicked on the tarmac and the one who confidently spoke to customer service employees—was different from the girl he’d known all those years ago.
Different and yet unsettlingly familiar.
Baz frowned at the bottle in his hand before putting it back in the mini bar. The sight of her answering smile hit him squarely in the chest, knocking the wind out of him. There had been a time when she’d smiled at him constantly, when he’d gone out of his way to make her smile, when he’d known a thousand ways to paint that particular expression on her face. But it had been a decade since he’d last felt its warmth directed at him. A decade since he’d cared.
Liar.
“Give me five minutes to freshen up,” she said as she disappeared into the bathroom.
Freshen upwas apparently secret girl code for change out ofher cotton loungewear and pour herself into a little black dress that showed off her legs and cleavage in a display designed to drive men out of their minds. A gold chain around her neck disappeared down the front of her dress and he found himself wondering what was on the end of that chain.