“Bollocks,” she mutters and searches my eyes for a long moment. “What in the hell could I have possibly wanted with someone’s hat?”
I shrug. “You did sing a few lines from ‘Do You Want to Build A Snowman?’ Could be related.”
“That’s my go-to when I’m drunk? Frozen?”
I nod.
“Sounds like I had a bloody twisted childhood, doesn’t it…” She gasps and snaps her fingers suddenly. “Wait…why do I remember seeing you with a guy?”
Oh shit. Avoid, avoid…
I shrug off her question and put a glass of orange juice to my lips. “Sometimes, drunken memories don’t make any sense.”
“Lena,” she says my name, more suspicious now. “I remember a man. I remember you with a man. Stunning showing of genetic inheritance, too. Rugged jaw, toned arse, and a holy huge wanker.”
I nearly choke on my juice and have to wipe it from my chin with the back of my hand. “You did not see his wanker!”
She smiles. “Ah, so there was a man, then.”
“Okay, okay,” I admit with a beleaguered sigh. “There was a man, but there’s not much of a story. You were a bit of a cockblock last night.”
She cracks up. “I was?”
I nod, and I can’t hide my smile. “You were going for some sort of performance award, I swear.”
“Oh hell, sorry about that.”
I wave her off, squashing down any lingering vestiges of disappointment with a third piece of bacon. “It’s no big deal. I shouldn’t even have been in that situation anyway.”
“Why the hell not?” she argues. “It’s okay to have fun with someone, Lena. It doesn’t mean you’re going to throw your whole bloody life away.”
“He was… I don’t know… There was something about him that made me feel…”
She widens her eyes when I don’t finish the thought. “Made you feel what? Horny? Nauseous? I mean, at least give me a direction here.”
“Invested,” I supply. “He was too damn tempting.”
“And where is this guy now?”
I shrug. “I don’t know.”
She stares at me.
I throw up my hands. “Well, I know he’s staying at this resort and I know his first name, but that’s pretty much all I know. He left after he got us back here safely last night.”
“What’s his name?”
“Theo,” I remark. An unexpected butterfly takes flight in my belly as I say it.
“Theo.” She tests his name on her tongue like she’s sampling a fancy wine. “Yeah, I think you should try to track his sexy ass down and finish what you started.”
“How about you worry about finishing your breakfast so we can head down to the pool?” I say, trying like hell to change the subject. “Sophie already texted and said she and Frederick are heading down there early.”
Pippa snorts. “Yeah, okay. I’ll let this conversation slide for now, but don’t think I’m going to forget about it.”
“Just eat your fucking pancake.”
Pippa’s responding smile is the size of her Mary Poppins bag of theft.
And just like that, I’m thinking of him again.
Fucking hell. I need to get it together.
Sun, sangria, and friends—that’s what I need to focus on for the rest of the day.
Theo
I wake up to the awful sound of my phone ringing.
Son of a bitch. I reach out to slam my hand against the resort nightstand to find it, and I have to squint my eyes just to make out the name on the screen.
Incoming Call Wes.
Something must be wrong for Wes to be calling me this early. He’s level-headed and mature and totally capable of managing shit on his own, and there’s no way he’d call me just to bullshit at this hour.
I scramble to get the call answered by the third ring.
“Fuck, it’s early,” I mutter into the receiver and shut my eyes quickly.
“Theo?” Wes asks with a good-natured chuckle. “You okay, dude?”
“Yeah,” I say with a sigh. “I just…had a late night last night.”
“You must have. If my math is right, it’s gotta be like ten a.m. your time.”
“What?” I ask, panic making me jerk to sitting so I can get a good look at the clock.
Yep. Ten after ten. Shit.
I never sleep in this late. Hell, most days, no matter if I’m jet-lagged or not, I’m up before the damn sun. And I sure as fuck don’t sleep in when I have a new club to get up and running smoothly in an almost impossible ten-day timeline.
“Theo?” Wes’s voice pulls my attention back to the call. “You there, bud?”
“Yeah, I’m here.” I scrub my hands down over my face in an attempt to wake myself up quickly. “What’s up?”
“Jesus, what’s the bastard mute or something?” I hear Cap ask in the background. “Why do you keep asking if he’s there?”
“Shut up,” Wes says to Cap, which prompts Thatch’s rolling laugh.
“Why’s everyone there with you?” I ask and then take a drink from the bottle of water on my nightstand to soothe the scratch in my throat.
I’m used to being up late, but apparently, the thrill of last night was a little too much for my body to handle. Between Lena and her friend, the intense negotiation with the Italian police, and the resulting selective patron clearout, I didn’t slide into bed until well after five this morning.
I expect a lot of myself, all the time, but evidently, waking up before ten to conquer the day is a little more than my body was prepared to cooperate with.
“Just Cap and Thatch, and I promise, I wouldn’t have them here if they weren’t pertinent to the conversation.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Thatch complains.
“Are you trying to say something negative about us?” Cap inserts.
“Because I have to tell you, you’re lucky to be in our company, Whitney,” Thatch adds.
“I believe you,” I say quickly, hoping we can get this over with in some reasonable amount of time. With my unintentional delay in wake-up, I’m sure there’s all sorts of shit to sort out with Carey about my schedule for today. “What’s up?”
Wes, thank God, dives right into the meat of the call. “You remember that complaint we got from the apartments across the street?”
I ruffle a hand through my hair and stand to pace as I try to remember the details. For some reason, I always think better standing up. “Right, right. Late-night disturbance. They lodged a formal complaint with the city, hoping to change or reduce our hours.”
“Yes. Well, their lawyer has been chomping at the bit to take this thing all the way to a permit revocation, with the reasoning that we somehow didn’t disclose the full agenda of the establishment at the town meeting with sixty-days’ notice so the neighborhood could veto it ahead of time.”
“Don’t I remember us doing that?”
“Forty-five days,” Cap says dryly. “We did it forty-five days prior to construction starting. Technically, the sixty days is mandated as prior to opening, but the language in the whole bill is shit.”